Spitfire's Hurricane

Democrats & Humanitarians...In Name Only

2011-03-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

Consider the following names of these countries:

People's Democratic Republic of Algeria
People's Republic of Bangladesh
People's Republic of China
Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

I wanted to post these names to exhibit one commonality with all of them: none of these nations are for the "people", but rather for a ruling elite who hold onto power tightly and with significant firepower. None of them are "democratic", either. There is a simple, immutable point that I made whilst speaking with a friend a while back about such things: that any nation that has to inculcate "democratic" into its title is, without exception, undemocratic. More than likely, it is a brutal dictatorship. (Can anyone say that North Korea, aka "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is anything approaching? Additionally, it is barely a republic, but rather a monarchy of sorts, with Kim Jong Il grooming his son to take over after he passes, just as he took over from his father Kim Il Song.) Perhaps one of the more interesting choices of names was the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany or communist Germany. The contrast of this name with its western counterpart, the Federal Republic of Germany, and you get the idea. Kind of hard to justify one name against the other when the denizens of the German Democratic Republic were continually shot attempting to cross over into the Federal Republic of Germany; one would think the opposite would've occurred, one being a "democratic republic" and all. The truth of the matter was that East Germany was one of the most oppressive police states in history, certainly in European history. But the title certainly belied that, at least to the eye and the ear. Certainly Libya, given its terrorist history (Flight 103 in 1988, which I actually took six months prior) and current internecine butchery, doesn't qualify as for the "the people".

The wider implication behind this is simple: dictatorships know that they're truly illegitimate, ergo they go to great lengths both in spoken and written word. Orwell keyed in on this in 1984, with his labeling of the edifice dedicated to torture as the "Ministry of Love". In the real, non-fiction world, this would be the equivalent of "Arbeit macht frei" (translated, "Work will set you free", stated in sign at the entrance of several work/death camps by the Nazis, the implication of hope where none truly existed.) I recall during my college years a professor, who's name still stays with me but will not be published here, who said that the Soviet Union made a point of glorifying greater citizen participation in its elections simply because an overwhelming majority brought themselves to the polls, and as a result, bestowed upon themselves greater democratic credentials than the United States. Not lost in this was that there would be only one candidate per office, and that any unfortunate soul who failed to show to the voting location would be paid a visit or called to ensure their presence. Again, the show of democracy was more important than the reality of it, and considerably more importance, the show of humanitarianism was more important than an actual policy of it.

Men of power are fully aware of their wrongdoing. Titles and words matter to them, for in some respects, rhetorical cover for tyrannical murder serves as some semblance of spiritual emollient for them. But the conscience knows something that words can't gloss over.

At least I hope it does, if there is any justice in the world.

The Competing Visions of Alexander Hamilton & Thomas Jefferson

2011-02-27T05:25:00.000-08:00

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson could be the two most intellectually important figures in American history. (James Madison also deserves honorable mention.)

And they hated each other.

On the one side there was Hamilton. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a ne'er-do-well Scottish nobleman and a still married (she fled her first husband to escape an unhappy union) mother. His childhood got off to an unfortunate start, and it stayed that way. The chain events of his life read like a modern-day tale filled with dysfunction, abandonment, and alienation. His father abandoned his mother; his mother died of fever; her first husband successfully claimed her estate as his own, leaving the illegitimate Hamilton and his younger brother with nothing; subsequently adopted by a cousin who then committed suicide thereafter, he was permanently separated from his brother as a result. Hamilton's saving grace(s) were books. Denied legitimacy by the Church of England due to being born out of wedlock, he was excluded from Anglican financed religious and educational studies. As a result, Hamilton was occasionally tutored privately, and attended Jewish private schools on occasion. Working as a clerk for an import/export company as a young man in St. Croix, Hamilton penned an essay for a local newspaper that so impressed the publishers and the readers that a collection was taken to send Hamilton to America to get a proper education; he eventually landed at King's College (now Columbia University).

Thomas Jefferson's upbringing couldn't have been more different. One of ten children born into a prominent Virginia planter family, Jefferson was brought up in wealth and privilege. When his father passed, a 14-year-old Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres of land and dozens of slaves. He attended the best schools and was tutored by the best educators available, learning Latin, Greek, and French in his early teens. In short, an upbringing diametrically different than that of Alexander Hamilton's.

Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Thomas Jefferson

"I think our government will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural."-Thomas Jefferson

Like many of his day, Jefferson did not consider himself to be an American first; he was a Virginian. The perception of the day was that one hailed from their state, not from America as a whole. It was provincialism of the first order. (One could even say this about George Washington, though less so; Washington's policy preference whilst president clearly angled towards Hamilton. More on that later.) All forms of centrality of government were anathema to Jefferson. He had no interest in a strong, central core to the United States. His vision was of a nation of gentlemen-farmers, where local issues were decided on a local level, and that only in times of crisis would the other states form a union of sorts to fend off foreign threats. His distaste for central power can be thus summed up by an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to Abigail Adams in 1787: "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." [One can detect elements of Tea Party sentiment in that one. It is always best to refresh one's memory with a dose of history just to remember that these sentiments are hardly original.] A considerably more chilling sentiment was revealed in another letter to a compatriot: "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." This from the author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's vision for America can be succinctly summed up in the following passage from Paul Johnson's excellent "A History of the American People":

He believed that the new republic would flourish only if the balance of power within it was held by its farms and planters, men who owned and got their living from the soil. His reasoning was entirely emotional and sentimental, and had to do with the Roman republic, where Cicero had made the same point. Farmers, he believed, were somehow more virtuous than other people, more staunch in their defense of liberty, more suited to run a res publica.

In other words, Jefferson opposed any and all centralized, official institutions. That would include:

A standing army and navy
A national treasury
A central bank

A betrayal of simple, agrarian republican virtues as Jefferson saw it, these were. Banking was "in infinity of successive felonious larcenies", as he wrote in a letter to John Adams, who was only slightly less suspicious of such things. (Jefferson's aversion to a national standing army no doubt derived from his knowledge of the actions of Sulla Felix and Julius Caesar, the two most culpable for extinguishing the Roman Republic.)

Competing Visions For The Young Republic-Alexander Hamilton

" If banks, in spite of every precaution, are sometimes betrayed into giving a false credit to a person described, they more frequently enable honest and industrious men of small or perhaps no capital to undertake and prosecute business with advantage to themselves and to the community." -Alexander Hamilton

Perhaps as a result of his experiences working in the import/export firm Beekman & Cruger whilst an adolescent in the West Indies, Hamilton had a nose for business, money, finance, economics and what made an economy tick. Many historians (Paul Johnson, Ron Chernow, Richard Brookhiser) have rated Hamilton as the only real bonafide genius amongst the first great American statesmen. He commanded artillery effectively during the Revolutionary War without the benefit of military training, but rather through reading about artillery techniques and strategy in books. He acted as Washington's aide-de-camp throughout the war, and was instrumental in no small way in getting requisitioned materiel to the right places at the right times. He kept squabbling amongst the officer class to a minimum, ensuring Washington's travails didn't get any worse than they already were at certain points. As president, Washington lent his complete confidence to all of Hamilton's financial blueprints: establishing a treasury, forming a central bank, and developing an industrial base in the United States. Nothing could be more horrifying to Jefferson than these concepts realized.

There had been personality conflicts between Jefferson and Hamilton for some time. Prior to Hamilton's appointment as the first Secretary of Treasury, Hamilton was instrumental in effectively arguing for the need to replace the failing Articles of Confederation in the Federalist Papers and at subsequent constitutional conventions. Jefferson, away in France on diplomatic mission, had no hand in the Constitution other than correspondence with fellow Virginian and constitutional architect James Madison. He was not wholly in disagreement with it, but he was extraordinarily uncomfortable without a strongly enunciated list of inherent rights, thus the Bill of Rights was added to the document.

When both were in the Washington's first administration, Hamilton proposed that all state debts get rolled into government treasuries. Initially against this, Jefferson reluctantly accepted Hamilton's proposition in return for Hamilton's agreement to move the seat of government south.* (See fuller explanation of this below.) Jefferson rued the day that he made this deal, called "the Compromise of 1790", but even this wasn't what permanently ruptured any and all relations with Hamilton. That would come about when Hamilton took it a step to far: the proposition of a national central bank in the form of the Bank of the United States. Nothing could have horrified Jefferson more, nothing could have cut right to the core of everything he envisioned the United States NOT to have morphed into. This may not have been too much of a surprise to Hamilton to have Jefferson come out against it, but he was terribly shaken by the schism with James Madison, his partner in writing both the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Madison declared that, "In reviewing the Constitution, it was not possible to discover in it the power to incorporate a bank". Madison, no doubt in thrall of not only Jefferson but also his Virginian agrarian farming constituents tried to stop the central bank. Hamilton countered with a reading of the "necessary and proper clause" of the Constitution, driving the point home by reading an excerpt from the Federalist Papers (#44) in Congress, "No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included." Implicit in this reading of this excerpt of the Federalist is that the very person opposed to the central bank was the one that wrote that excerpt: Madison.

Jefferson, for his part, considered the formation of the central bank a capital offense. Clearly he didn't recognize that the Constitution had effectively trumped state law for federal law. But that didn't stop him from having sentiments that said, "The power of erecting banks and corporations was not given to the general government; it remains then with the state itself. Any person to recognize a foreign legislature [he's speaking of the US Congress, btw.] in a case belonging to the state itself is an act of treason against the state. And whoever shall do so...shall be adjudged guilt of high treason and suffer death accordingly by the judgment of the state courts." Harsh words for this forerunner, the Bank of the United States, to our present central bank, The Federal Reserve. Jefferson hated it that much, and the man wholly responsible for it was his bete noir, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton for his part saw no other way for the United States to compete and prosper. A student of Adam Smith (of "Wealth of Nations" fame and considered the father of modern economics), Hamilton saw the British economic model as worthy of duplication, to be expanded upon. It was industrialization, not agro-economics that would take the United States forward. Hamilton saw the United States for what it now is: an economic powerhouse. A sleepy agrarian economy of yeoman-farmers in the Jeffersonian mode was to be "scoffed [by Hamilton] as such puerile reasoning" (1). A few years later, Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress. Jefferson was apoplectic. It represented everything anathema to Jefferson's agro-utopian vision for America: industrial mills financed by speculation and loans from banks. It was shelved by Congress and was never translated into legislation, but it caused quite a ruckus. Jefferson "wondered somberly whether Americans still lived under a limited government....for Jefferson this [general welfare clause] 'permitted Congress to take everything under their management which they should deem for the public welfare'." (These sentiments echo through the ages right to our present day.) That said, the Report on Manufactures clearly had significant impact on the formation of industrialized America. Hamilton's vision won, as it should have.

Conclusion

This post probably came off overly negative towards Jefferson. It was not necessarily meant to do so. The importance of Thomas Jefferson with regards to enshrining the almost-libertarian mind-set into the American consciousness was and still is crucial. Jefferson was wrong about almost everything with regards to economics, but he was right about liberty and the vigilance required to maintain it. It is a vigilance bordering on paranoia, sometimes out of hand, but a necessary streak in the American. He, along with James Madison, were instrumental in getting a Bill of Rights inculcated into the American Constitution. (Even as he was in France on diplomatic mission.) He was wrong to some extent on insisting on the supremacy of state authority in comparison to federal authority, though not entirely: even to this day, some issues cannot be successfully decided and implemented in a "one size fits all" kind of way, taking into no account the differing peoples, cultures, and geographies of our states. He opposed a standing army, feeling that it was a threat to the nascent republic, yet founded the United States Military Academy at West Point. He hated the idea of a central treasury, yet found it very useful when he assumed the presidency. A mass of contradictions, that Jefferson.

Hamilton was right about finance, economics and a forward vision for the United States. He was wrong about many other things, not the least of which was his philosophy that the republic should be ruled by an intellectual elite. In this, Jefferson had the philosophical upper hand. One would think that the forerunner of the modern Republican Party would be Jefferson, given his "states rights" inclination, his distrust of banks (particularly a central bank) and his embrace of the agrarian ethos; that would be mistaken to do so. Jefferson is considered the godfather of the modern Democratic Party, mainly for his populist, anti-elitist sentiments. Conversely, Hamilton is considered to be the godfather of the Republican Party, as he was the advocate for the monied classes, the industrialists, the bankers, and the speculators. But he also favored a strong central government, one that was dominant over all state legislatures. This is a very Democratic sentiment. And so neither figure fits neatly into the ideological order of the modern American political parties.

Concerning the central bank, the Bank of the United States, it continued its charter with the federal government until Andrew Jackson, a Jeffersonian to the core, discontinued its charter. He subsequently moved all its assets into state-run banks; runaway inflation and the Panic of 1837 were the end result. Another panic, in 1907, led to the reformation of a central bank in 1913, this time under the name "Federal Reserve" . Like Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, and Andrew Jackson (all southerners, not coincidentally) before them, we have those attacking the Fed, like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Some things never change. The ghosts of Hamilton and Jefferson are still squabbling, two centuries later.

*Explanation: the State of New York had been decimated by the Revolutionary War both physically and economically. By comparison, Virginia had been only lightly affected and was financially solvent. Hamilton suggested that all states pool their debts into national debt, therefore enabling financially weak states to recover whilst stronger states shoulder more debt burden. "Assumption" as it is called, enabled the original United States (13 of 'em) to recover and prosper. Had Jefferson not agreed to this, certain northeast states that had been routed by the British would've gone under.

(1) Excerpt from "The History of the American People", by Paul Johnson

Other books consulted in the writing of this post:
a.) "John Adams" by David McCullough
b.) "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow
c.) "Alexander Hamilton-American" by Richard Brookhiser

Thoughts On Rome, Comparisons To The United States

2011-01-27T10:34:00.001-08:00

A few months back I picked up a book called "Are We Rome?", by a Vanity Fair writer named Cullen Murphy. Relatively well-written, Mr. Murphy delves into this oft-thought of question and essentially comes up with an over-arching thesis, simply put by an NPR reviewer as such,
"It's not so much America's tendency toward decadence and our astounding military might that make us like Rome. It's the dangerous blurring of public and private responsibilities, paired with an inflated sense of power that can blind us to what's happening beyond our borders." Some of this may be true, particularly the latter portion. As for the former, Mr. Murphy claims that massive public works and keeping necessary institutions run federally or municipally is the key to citizen cohesion. Case in point: Mr. Murphy claims that subcontracting things such as marital or business arbitrations to private entities, or worse, subcontracting prisons to private companies (like Wackenhut) are eroding our sense of shared mission. Perhaps true, but as someone with libertarian leanings that thinks that government should be the last, not first, solution to a problem that could be privately (and profitably) dealt with in an effective manner, I take issue with Mr. Murphy's thesis. The point of devolving certain municipal or federal powers to private entities (who are still subject to governmental oversight) is, simply put, done to lessen the burden of the taxpayer. Additionally, anything that can lessen the intrusiveness of government, even if it is for things like securities or real estate arbitration, is a good thing. Better that people who know better arbitrate on matters particular to a given industry have the ultimate say-so in it. They also serve to unclog the public legal system for cases that cannot be adjudicated any other way. Read the book if you wish. I learned a few things, despite my disagreements with it.

So...now that I got that out of the way, my true intent behind writing this post. A conversation that I had with a friend of mine a while back (who happens to have had a pretty impressive Jesuit education and a pretty good memory for what he was taught) turned to Roman history. I realized that I knew very little of it. (This is 2005, btw.) That, combined with the excellent HBO series Rome, sparked my interest. I consequently went on a six year bender of eating up everything on Rome that I could get my hands on. My father, schooled in this stuff more than I at the time (I subsequently passed him in this department) suggested that I start with Suetonius' "12 Caesars", written in 121 AD. Aside from the charge that I got from reading something nearly two-thousand years old, I found it eminently readable and translatable into real-world terms. From there I moved to Plutarch's "Lives", detailing prominent Romans and preceding Greek statesmen and making (sometimes) apt comparisons between them. Then onto contemporary historian Tom Holland's "Rubicon-The Last Days of the Roman Republic", an absolute stunner and the perfect guidebook if you were watching HBO's "Rome" series. (Better to track the personalities and the consistencies/inconsistencies of the show, you see...) Then onto Livy, an excellent book about Cicero ("The Life & Times of Rome's Greatest Politician"), and of course, the truncated (but still exceptionally dense) version of Edward Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire". (The first volume was published, interestingly, in 1776. Gibbon was a Member of Parliament who undoubtedly was involved in discussions and debates regarding that rebellious North American colony we now live in.) A few books on the Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, Alexander the Great, and some classical philosophy rounded out my reading list for the last six years. Proceeding all of this were bios on Adams, Hamilton, and Washington, as well as the excellent 1776 by David McCullough. Oh...and the comprehensive "History of the American People" by Paul Johnson....1000 pages of bliss, it was.

Pardon the self-indulgent listing of all and sundry that I've read for the last six years, but it brings me to a salient point: One cannot understand the linchpins of our republic if one doesn't have an understanding of Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon history, politics, and philosophy. (Particularly the latter.) One cannot "get" the thinking of the Founders (who signed the Declaration of Independence, as well as fought the war for it) or the Framers (those who devised, edited, debated, and ratified The Constitution) unless one knows the history that they knew. It cannot be accurately understood through any other lense.

The Constitution is a written document. This might seem like nothing, but consider that the British have a constitution, but it is NOT written one. The most successful and long-lasting republic in history, Rome also didn't not have a written constitution. These unwritten constitutions were based on customs and precedents, but could be revoked, twisted, perverted, and otherwise subjugated through sophistry and the ever-present reason used throughout the ages, national emergency. It is no small coincidence that the rhetoric coming from Washington DC these days always has a certain spin or urgency to it, and either is a war (war on poverty) or crisis (energy crisis, healthcare crisis, climate change crisis, etc.). Language like this has always been used to justify the seizure of the rights and/or property of private citizens....because to the ruling mandarins, it's all a matter of national security or public safety. To wit:

Lucius Cornelius Sulla (referred to going forward as Sulla) sought to "restore the republic" after being cheated (unconstitutionally) by a rival general/statesman/populist (Gaius Marius) out of a military command. Sulla turned his army on Rome instead of Pontus (where his revoked command mandated he go to finish off a rebellious King Mithridates), breaking the most sacred of covenants-that no Roman general can march his army through the city gates under arms. Sulla then reversed the revocation of his command via the senate, marched out to Pontus, defeated Mithridates, turned back to Rome, and marched through the city gates under arms again. In his absence, rival Marius rigged the senate to appoint himself consul (the highest position in Rome prior to the demise of the republic) in perpetuity, also an unconstitutional act. On Sulla's return, Marius fled and eventually died of natural causes (such as they were), his allies were promptly proscribed and/or executed, and Sulla forced a senatorial decree appointing himself dictator. This was all done under the need for a "restoration of public order" and "public security". From there, Sulla waged a war of terror on his enemies and their allies, eliminating 9000 of them, mostly noblemen. After a year, true to his word to "restore the Roman constitution" (despite perverting it), he resigned.

Julius Caesar was one of Marius' followers, a "populare" (a man of the people). Following the politics of Marius but the actions of Sulla, he too would march through the gates of Rome under arms and seize absolute power. His assassination would trigger a war between his followers (Caesarians) and the old guard seeking to preserve the last vestiges of the Roman constitution (Republicans). In the end and over several years, Caesar's nephew and posthumously adopted son, Octavian (Augustus), would also march through the gates of Rome under arms. Rome would never again be a republic, and its quasi-democratic government and constitution would be forever sundered.

From these two men one can glean several applicable and parallel things to our own republic, our constitution, and why there are certain amendments in it. For one, if it is written, they'll be no dispute about what it says and means. Of this there can be no dispute, as the main architects of the Constitution (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and to a lesser extent, John Jay) had an extraordinarily deep knowledge of Roman history, and knew full well what brought the republic down: the personal ambition of extraordinary men who's lust for power was lethally accompanied by legions dedicated to those men, not the republic itself. The fact that they could pervert and subvert a constitution that had no binding force, other than custom, proved too attractive to pass up. In the case of the United States, if someone of power breaks their constitutional vows, one can point to where in the Constitution it was broken. If you don't believe me, consider the pseudonym of the three authors of it whence publishing their thoughts vis-a-vis the Federalist Papers: Publius, as in Publius Valerius Publicola, one of the main conspirators that overthrew the last of the tyrannical kings, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and established the Roman republic.

To conclude, I disagree with Cullen Murphy on why Rome crumbled. It spent more time as a republic than it did as a dictatorship, and conquered the entire Mediterranean basin during republican, not principate rule. To my mind, what brought it down was a gradually withering indifference to its constitution and its institutions. If there is a comparison between Rome and our nation, it is that. Under-educated snots like Washington Post writer Ezra Klein are a primary example of this. Stating that the issue with the text is "confusing" because it is "over one hundred years old" (it's 223 years old, mind...), and that it differs "from person to person" and "depends on what they want to get done" is a good example of a mindset that is prevalent amongst many, particularly on the Left. The Constitution protects the individual's freedoms, their property, and their freedom to worship. The Framers understood that these rights have to be enshrined IN WRITING so that people like Klein (and they are legion, and unlike Klein, in positions of actual authority in our government), should they choose to break it, can't rhetorically manoeuvre their way around something that is stated plainly in its texts. And if the Constitution is considered "too old" by people such as Klein, perhaps he should pick up a book and read about where the Framers got all these ideas from. Of course, if he has a problem with the 223 year old texts of the Constitution, I would imagine that 2000 to 2500 year old writings from the likes of Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Cato, Sallust, Polybius, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and Suetonius would be way above his intellectual pay-grade. Fortunately, they weren't for Hamilton, Jay, and Madison.

My Summer Job Sucked Worse Than Yours (Part 1)

2010-07-23T17:12:00.001-07:00

From time to time, through turns of conversation, I get on the topic with an interlocutor about summers jobs. The debate ensues as to who had the worst summer job or jobs, the best summer job(s), the hardest summer jobs, et al. I feel, and of course this is a matter of my own opinion, that I've had the sh*ttiest summer job of anyone I've spoken to. The story went down as such...

Every summer break, whilst still in college, I'd come home. Happiness ensued in my family household, for another child was in residence, at least 'til the end of the summer. The joy diminished by week two, when my slumming ceased to be entertaining and started to become annoying to my parents, particularly my mother. Monday would start with her walking into my bedroom, and speaking to me (while I was in a dead sleep) about getting a summer job. Day Two started off similarly, but with a bit sharper tone to her voice. Day Three (Wednesday) began with her kicking the side of the bed and rapaciously telling me to "get a job, and don't come home until you have one". Words such as these to a slumming college student on summer break were similar to crucifix and garlic to a vampire. This might have gone on for a few more days until I could take it no more.

And so I grabbed The Pennysaver, a Long Island staple publication, filled with adverts, local news, stories of minor import...and Help Wanted ads. Scanning this paper for jobs that I could do, I came across a landscaping job opening that looked promising. And so I called the number. "Do you have any landscaping experience?" the voice asked on the other end of the phone. "Sure!" I said. "Like what?" the voice asked. "Well, I mow my parents lawn!" I lamely answered. I guess it was good enough. And so I went for my interview. Ted was his name. He was an older man, but might not have been older than I am at this moment. He LOOKED old, though, in a kind of weather-beaten but hearty way. "I'll start you off at $5 an hour; if you last, I might raise it to $6". This being 1987, that was pretty decent money. "Be here at 7:30 am tomorrow". Wow! At least my mother won't harass me tomorrow morning, I thought.

Up at 6:30 am, my mother dropped me off. The owner of the business, Ted, also had his son Ted Jr. (known as TJ) working for him, as well has his daughter, who's name escapes me. He also had some other schlub who looked approximately the same age as me, but had round glasses and full facial hair. (He didn't last.) We had a short meeting in the garage to strategize. And off we went, into the truck I went with TJ.

We arrived at a rather large cemetery. I didn't quite understand at first, but it dawned on me that this wasn't any ol' landscaping job. The title of the business said it all, "Ted's Lawn Service and Cemetery Maintenance". They weren't kidding about the cemetery, because here I was mowing in-between headstones within ten minutes. The surreal aspect of this scene was further enhanced by the fact that the cemetery grounds were littered with the carcasses of dead starlings, who were the collateral damage of a fumigation campaign against tree and leaf damaging insects. And off I went, hour after hour, kicking the carcasses of dead birds out of the blade of my lawnmower.

I made it through the day, and I'd never worked a harder day in my life than that one...up until that point in my life. (There were MANY more hard labor days in my future...) I came home at around 7 pm, at dusk. I remember it being a beautiful summer sunset, but it mattered nothing to me, for I was completely exhausted. Every muscle ached, my face was slightly sunburnt, and I recall being so wiped out that I didn't even eat dinner. (So wiped out, in fact, that I slept in the living room couch while my family ate dinner in the other room. )

This was the first day of my summer job in 1987: mowing cemetery lawns peppered with dead birds. An eleven hour day.

It would get evermore surreal as the summer ground on. And I was 19 years old.

(To Be Continued)

Quote, July 22, 2010

2010-07-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

“If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.

To all my friends...

2010-06-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

On Mortality...But Hopefully Not

2010-06-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

Several things have been going on in my life of late. I don't want to give them too much personal weight or make it appear that I am complaining in a selfish way about them, as I'm not really the one going through them directly. But I did want to make note of these things via this blog as a means of recording my feelings about them whilst still fresh.

Of late, the following things are happening, strangely to the female compatriot of a good friend, and direct female friend. Both are fighting cancer. I suppose it is a right of passage to adulthood or middle-age-hood, and I really shouldn't be too discombobulated about them, and frankly, I'm not. But they are a source of concern. Whereas one of them assured of recovery, the other is not. As for my health issues, I broke my foot approximately seven weeks ago, and it still bothers me even though I'm fully capable of walking on it and putting weight down on it. The psychological effect on me, however, was not what I thought it would be.

It is a strange feeling for me, particularly since I always thought of myself as an indestructible force of nature, to actually confront the fact that a.) I'm getting older, and b.) my body isn't recovering in the same way that it always has. I'm still feeling pretty well; I still have pretty good zip in my legs, but not what it used to me. Now it registers, that line from a Rush song "Dreamline": We're only immortal, but for a limited time. In a sense, it is true. The feeling of immortality, either consciously or unconsciously brandished, ebbs away. It might be several decades before I "shuffle off this mortal coil", as Shakespeare's Hamlet put it, but I no longer feel the need to test the limits of it all. Through my young adulthood, I have jumped out of airplanes, hand-glided over a rain forest in Brazil, rode several cables throughout the rain forests of Costa Rica, not to mention getting lured into one of the most dangerous areas of the Rio De Janeiro favela by an attractive female (came out unscathed, but with quite a story), found myself in Manhattan after-hours clubs at four or five in the morning with some of the more decadent denizens of Gotham, coached a hockey team in a predominantly black urban neighborhood for five years (without incident, for the most part), as well as a few other things that will go without mention that were considerably dangerous. Perhaps what Hemingway postulated was true: a man is never more alive than when he skirts the edges of death. I would say that was somewhat true for me, though it never really felt "death-defying" when I was doing it. But I don't feel the need to do these things further. Again, a nod towards mortality...or perhaps, I value my life now more than I have in the past.

The last few years I've delved into the philosophies of the Stoics: Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus in particular...both Romans: one an emperor, the other a freed slave. Their writings are dedicated to mitigating, through some intellectual conclusion or another, the physical and mental pains that we as humans will, with all certainty, endure. Per Epictetus, "We all must die, but must we die bawling?". Perhaps not; but hopefully not before we've gotten everything we could possibly get out of life before we're asked to leave by the biological gods that put us here.

All these existential thoughts brought on by a broken foot and subsequent curtailed mobility. I hope not to endure any like injury for some time, as being thoughtless, shallow, and devoid of introspection sounds pretty good at about this point. Plato said, "The unexamined life is not worth living". Perhaps true, but Kurt Vonnegut's rejoinder was pretty clever, too: "What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker? Then what?" Clever, clever.

This is all somewhat stream-of-consciousness drivel. Mild apologies to those that have the misfortune of reading this doggerel, but I needed to say it. May I post no existential crap for some time, even if another extremity is damaged.

D-Day, June 6, 1944

2010-06-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

There’s a book that my father gave my mother Christmas of 1975 called “Is Paris Burning?” Written in the mid-60s, this book chronicles life before the liberation of France in August of 1944 to the liberation itself. The title refers to something Hitler would say every time he called up the Wehrmacht general in charge of the defenses of Paris, von Choltitz. Fresh from an assassination attempt on his life, which (unfortunately) did not kill him but did leave him physically incapacitated, Hitler had already succumbed to the throes of complete insanity, courtesy of an overriding paranoia and copious amounts of painkillers. “Is Paris burning yet!?!” was the standard greeting von Choltitz would get as soon as he picked up the phone. The closer Allied forces got to this great city, the more Hitler wanted it scorched. Seems that if he couldn’t have it, no one would.

Today marks the 66th anniversary of the landings at Normandy, commonly known as D-Day. I don’t think much of Mother’s Day, perhaps because my “doubting Thomas” nature precludes me from thinking that it is something other than one of those holiday’s that Hallmark created. (They’ve been getting desperate lately. C’mon….Secretaries Day!?!) But I always think about my mother today, for it was the night drop the night before and the landings on the morning of June 6, 1944 that liberated her the following August of ’44.

They’re making a big deal about D-Day this year, as they do every ten years. In my mind, it’s a big day every year. The invasion of the Normandy coastline changed the entire course of history, and for the better. It spelled the end of the Nazi German domination of all of western Europe. It liberated millions of people who had been struggling and suffocating under the tyrannical rule of the Germans for four years. And it was not without its costs. The “butcher’s bill” on D-Day alone was approximately 9,000 young kids, 3,000 killed in action. Bear in mind that the majority of these numbers were kids that were in all likelihood not over the age of 22. The average age for a junior officer was 21-22. The average age for a GI was 19-20. The ferocity of the battle has been pretty well recreated in the first twenty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan”, only the charnel house that was Omaha Beach was not a twenty minute ordeal, but rather a six hour one. So bad was Omaha Beach that Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of First Army, seriously contemplated pulling American forces from it, so grievous was the situation. It was only through the grit and determination of the sergeants, captains, lieutenants, corporals and privates that they took the bluffs overlooking the beach. The generals, who planned it all out, had nothing to do with it. The plan failed the moment the first wave hitting Omaha Beach got wiped out with a 90% casualty rate. Hitler once postulated that American forces were soft, unwilling to take orders, and suffered from streaks of individuality that would make them terrible soldiers. On the morning of June 6, 1944, with a game-plan gone to hell and a situation getting ever so desperate by the minute, the spirit of individuality that Hitler so disparaged kicked in. Devoid of actionable orders, the kids on the beach made them up as they went along, and breached the Atlantic Wall, manned by Hitler’s best troops, who wouldn’t so much as sneeze unless ordered to. So much for the children of democracy being “soft”. The airborne drops the night before were similarly wrecked. Planes blew off course. Pilots panicked by anti-aircraft fire, dropped paratroopers either too low, too high, or too far off the designated drop zone. Again, improvisation and courage saved the day.

On two blank pages in her copy of “Is Paris Burning”, my mother pasted two pictures and a photocopy of a monument that sits in the town square of her hometown of St. Cloud. Her town was on the Seine River, directly across from Paris. Allied forces used the roadway through her town to get to Paris. The two pictures are of the first liberating personnel of Allied forces. One is of two or three guys on a tank, rolling down a street. The other is of French girls mobbing the tank, the joy of liberation palpable. In the margins of the pictures, written in thin magic marker, it says “First Tanks, St. Cloud, Liberation, August of 1944”. The photocopy of the monument sits on the opposite page. The inscription on the monument, in the town square of St. Cloud, says in English:

City of Saint Cloud

Square

This Square is Dedicated to the Staff Sgt. Lawrence R. Kelly from Altoona (Pennsylvania) Who Was Deadly Wounded on August 25th 1944

As He Entered Saint Cloud Preceding The Liberating Army of General Patton

For four years, my mother lived under Nazi occupation as a teenager. People vanished without a trace, food was scarce, and homework was done in the basement by candlelight on nights when Allied bombers roared overhead. The nightmare was over in August of 1944. A few years later, she made it to the United States, met my father a few years after that, and realized her little slice of the American dream. Today I’ll do three things. I’ll think about my mother, whose indominitable spirit allowed her to carve out a life after so much sadness, to Lawrence Kelly, who did not land at D-Day but was part of the liberating forces that came ashore thereafter, and I’ll think of what Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator of “60 Minutes” (who was a reporter for Stars and Stripes during the Second World War) said:“If the world ever seems cruel or selfish, go to the American cemetery at Coleville, overlooking Omaha Beach. Go see what one man did for another on June 6, 1944”.

Some Pearls of Wisdom From Lech Walesa

2010-04-30T05:44:00.001-07:00

Chat with Walesa [Jay Nordlinger]

I haven’t returned to my “journal-ing” — my writing of the Oslo Journal — but I wanted to stick a note here in the Corner today. I thought I’d say a little something about an interview I had with Lech Walesa this morning. I talked with him “on the sidelines” of the Oslo Freedom Forum, here in the Norwegian capital. He was in fine form: warm, expansive, funny, charismatic, earthy. In other words, he was the very picture of what he is: a trade-union leader who became an all-time hero of freedom.

I said to him I wanted to be fast with my questions, because I knew he didn’t have much time. He said, “Do I look unwell?” Did I think he was going to kick the bucket? No, no, I said. I just knew that his schedule was packed.

Among the subjects we discussed was his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. (The prize is administered here in Oslo.) What did it mean to him, Solidarity, and the defeat of Communism in Poland? A great deal, he said, in essence. I will paraphrase him:

Martial law had been imposed, and we were really getting weaker. There was no wind blowing into Poland’s sail. It’s hard to say what would have happened if I had not won the prize. The Nobel prize blew a strong wind into our sail. Without that prize, it would have been very difficult to continue struggling.

And what did Walesa think of the 1990 prize to Mikhail Gorbachev? “I think we can debate it,” he said, chuckling. Then he said (again, a paraphrase, but a very close one),

I’m certainly very fond of Gorbachev, and I respect him. But you should ask him the two questions I always ask him. First, I ask, “Did you betray Communism? Are you a traitor to Communist ideology?” And he always says, “No, of course not.” That leads to my second question. “Look,” I say, “you’re a bright guy. Did you really believe it was possible to reform the Communist system?” That really pisses him off. He gets all red-faced and angry at me. And he doesn’t answer. In fact, those two questions as a pair, he really doesn’t answer.

More:

Gorbachev tried to reform the Communist system, and failed. If he had succeeded, I’m the one who would have failed. So we were all very happy that he failed, and if they wanted to give him the Nobel prize for his failure? That was fine with us. He failed, he got the Nobel prize — everyone was happy.

On the other hand, there’s this to consider: He had the instruments of rape, and he did not use them. In other words, Gorbachev had the brute power to suppress rebellion, as his predecessors had, and refrained from using it. Every male has the instrument of rape — should we all be awarded Nobel prizes for not raping?

Walesa said to me, “I wonder how you’re going to phrase that for your article.” I said, “I’ll just repeat what you said — can’t be improved on.” Then he spoke of the peace prize to President Obama, last year:

The wise men of the committee gave the award to Obama for his potential merit, and in order to encourage him not to stray from a path of peace. Well, we could all get a Nobel prize for our potential merit — and in order to be encouraged. For example, every journalist could get the Nobel prize to be encouraged to write better . . .

Walesa was interesting, enjoyable, and unpredictable all through. I’ll have more from him — and from others, and about Oslo, etc. — later

Mark Steyn Dissects The New York Times Owners

2010-04-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

Sucker Punch [Mark Steyn]

This is a speech given by Punch Sulzberger back in 1994. Punch, father of Pinch, was at that time Chairman of The New York Times. He was in his sixties back then - not old, the age of many a vigorous chief executive around the planet. But he wasn't one of them. He warms up the crowd with a little light humor:

A number of years ago, in a speech at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I noted that a disproportionate number of this country’s fine newspapers were family owned. My conclusion was simple. Nepotism works.

I wonder if he still feels that way. And, if so, what precise relation to him that Mexican billionaire is. Then he turns his attention to the new technology:

I believe that for a long time to come this information superhighway, far from resembling a modern interstate, will more likely approach a roadway in India: chaotic, crowded and swarming with cows. Or, as one might say, udder confusion.

I'd be interested to know whether his gag writer is still on the Times payroll. Next, in a poignant moment, he brags about how much he over-paid for an even more somnolent monodaily:

We have renewed our faith in the written word by acquiring for more than a billion dollars in stock one of the country’s great newspapers – The Boston Globe.

Hmm. And what would you get for it today, assuming you could find a purchaser?

And finally:

Reader Jones might well have a deep interest in ice hockey, grain futures and foreign policy issues affecting China. A computer can easily assemble such information from many sources. But this compilation is a far cry from a newspaper.

When you buy a newspaper, you aren’t buying news – you’re buying judgment. Already in this low tech world of instant communications there is too much news. That’s the problem. Raw news will do just fine if you’re a computer buff and want to play editor. But I, for one, would rather let a professional take the first raw cut at history and spend my leisure time fishing...

Judgment, serendipity and something left over to wrap the fish, all neatly folded, in living color, and thrown at no extra cost into the bushes. All for just a few cents a day. It’s called a newspaper. And when you add a wee bit of ink for your hands and top it with a snappy editorial to exercise your blood pressure, who needs that elusive interactive information superhighway of communications.

Just point me to the fishing hole! Thank you.

His son has pointed the entire company to the entire company to the hole.

Partner for Pieces

2010-04-14T05:21:00.001-07:00

To my point regarding the last post. This comes courtesy of National Review's Mark Steyn:

Good news! Hezbollah can now hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem thanks to Bashir Assad, Syria's president and Obama's partner for peace, giving it long-range Scud missiles.

Assad may no longer be a practicing ophthalmologist but he can still read the writing on the wall when it comes to American credibility. This latest lively development to the Middle East "peace process" comes in the middle of Obama's summit to "save the planet" (in Katie Couric's expert analysis) and mere days after presidential emissary John Kerry, on April Fool's Day, arrived in Damascus and "raised long-running concerns" directly with Assad.

Not to worry. The Administration remains committed to sending a new ambassador to Assad's court who can "press the Syrian government in a firm and coordinated fashion", according to the White House. Firmly pressed coordinated fashion works great for Obama's next GQ shoot. Not sure it counts for much with the Teheran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis.

Quote

2010-04-04T06:05:00.001-07:00

Bill Bruford, answer a question on who some of his influences were:

"Anyone who crossed my record player, which was a lot of people. Sometimes terrible musicians were a strong negative influence, and often non-drummers were a strong positive influence. So Miles Davis for economy and style, David Bowie because he was always moving and would never quite let his audience catch up (very smart), and the Rolling Stones who just seemed awful."

"Transcendent" Presidents Can't Change National Interests Of Others

2010-02-28T08:48:00.000-08:00

When Barack Obama won the presidency in November of 2008, there was a wave of euphoria amongst his supporters and a sentiment that he was the man to reverse the bad relations the United States supposedly had with the rest of the world. The common theme was that the world hated us because Bush was such an obnoxious boob. With Obama in power, it was said that: Iran would shed its nuclear ambitions, Syria would leave Lebanon for good, the Russians would cease their belligerent behavior towards their former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia, Venezuelan Hugo Chavez would cease his saber rattling and relax his drive towards being a totalitarian dictator, and on and on it goes. One year plus in, nothing has changed, and if anything, the aforementioned have calcified their positions and behaviors. The Iranians are closer to a nuclear weapon than ever, Russia's Putin has become more authoritarian and wily than ever, Chavez still consolidating his power and now talking badly about Obama instead of Bush, and Syria has spat in the face of Obama's initiatives and tightened both its ties to Iran and its clutches on Lebanon. Oh....and the Europeans still don't like us, as exhibited by the Netherlands' inclination to withdraw troops (non-combat, I would assume) from Afghanistan, despite being a part of NATO.

It was always going to be. Now the meme is that Bush did so much damage to America's standing in the world that Obama can't undo the damage. Malarkey.

Nation-states will always do what is in their best interests, and they only have few courses of action to choose from. For example, one of Obama's foreign policy initiatives was to "flip" Syria and turn them into an ally, thus isolating Iran. Needless to say, Syria did just the opposite. Despite the Obama Administration's reinstatement of full diplomatic ties with Syria, the Syrians a.) increased their diplomatic and military ties with Iran, b.) wrapped their tentacles ever so tighter around Lebanon. It was always meant to be. Syria gets nothing of value from improving its diplomatic ties with the United States. From a geographic standpoint, Syria is bordered by Israel and Jordan to the south, Turkey to the north, and Iraq to the west. Israel is no friend to Syria, for good reason, but what does Syria get if it becomes a good neighbor to Israel? Increased trade? The Golan Heights? Syria is a totalitarian police state abutting a parliamentarian democracy (Israel); this in and of itself is a threat to Syria's dictatorship. In Jordan, there are diplomatic ties, but the Jordanians have played both ends against the middle for decades; again, no advantage. Iraq is currently under occupation from American and coalition forces, and hopefully will morph into a reliable democracy (a stretch, but there's hope). Turkey is also a democracy, albeit a precarious one that is currently in the clutches of an Islamist party led by Tayyip Erdogan. But remember one thing about Turkey: they're muslim, but they're not Arab. Additionally, they're still a part of NATO. There is good reason for Syria to feel threatened in their geographic position: they're surrounded by forces that are contrary to their ruling ethos. So why would they "flip" on Iran? Iran brings them boatloads of petro-dollars (Syria has no oil to speak of), essentially to buy their allegiance and to use their ports. Both Iran and Syria are military dictatorships, and more importantly, Shi'ite in character. (The Assads are Alawite, offshoots of Shia Islam.) Obama's people clearly were dreaming if they thought they flip them. Additionally, as Syria was implicated (by UN investigators, in fact) in the assassination of once (and in all probability, had he not been killed) future Prime Minister Rafik Harari, why reward them with the reinstatement of an American ambassador? Say what you want about Bush, but he understood the levers of American diplomatic power, in that bad behavior isn't rewarded by undiminished American diplomatic relations. Bush pulled out ambassador to Syria after the Harari assassination and demanded the Syrians leave Lebanon, which (at least in the form of the Syrian army, if not Hezbollah) did. With no concessions on the part of Syria, we have restored full diplomatic ties, and Syrian forces are back in Lebanon.

Same goes for Iran, but for different reasons. Iran is cornered geographically by Iraq, filled as it is with American-led coalition forces, and Afghanistan, with American-led NATO forces. They've been belligerent towards the United States and Israel since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. They are a religious/military dictatorship. They are also the locus of all international terrorism, and have been since 1979. Their memories are long and their history is deep. The Persians were, circa 500 BC, the world's most powerful empire, and though their powers waxed and waned under both the Achaemenid and Sassanid empires, they still fancy themselves as a superpower. There is no reason why they would discontinue their quest for a weaponized atomic bomb. It would mean that they are now a player in the big leagues, a position they feel is their birthright, based on their former, ancient glories. Obama's absurd "unclench your fist and we'll extend an open hand" offer was a joke from the moment it was uttered; it smacked of a naive, intellectual academic who has no experience or feel for how the world really works. And it is so.

Russia also gets nothing for changing its behaviors to suit Obama's liking. Despite a silly PR stunt by the likes of Hillary Clinton (see here), talking of "rebooting" relations with the Russians, they'll be no "reboot". Russia feels vulnerable on a number of fronts: the expansion of NATO into former Soviet bloc states like Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and even to former Soviet republics such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, makes the Russians extremely nervous. As George Friedman, CEO of independent intelligence agency STRATFOR wrote, the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc now puts NATO forces "1200 miles from St. Petersburg to 120 miles...from 1000 miles to Moscow to 100 miles". Russian incursion into former Soviet republic Georgia over South Ossetia was meant to send a message: this is OUR sphere of influence. Russian routinely shuts off its natural gas pipeline to Ukraine for days, or sometimes weeks, just to make a similar point. It sells plans and materials to the Iranians because it is a.) profitable, and b.) alters the balance of power in Asia/Middle East in their direction. Again...why would they change, and for what? Because Obama was nicer to them than Bush was?

Which brings us to Western Europe, or as Donald Rumsfeld correctly referred to them, "Old Europe".

I have little doubt that the Europeans like Obama more than they liked Bush. They hemmed and hawed about Bush endlessly and repeatedly. People like George Soros likened him to Hitler. And so with Obama in the White House, all will be well, right? Wrong. Once again, despite their rhetoric, the Europeans are behaving like, well, Europeans.

The first domino to fall was the Netherlands. The government of Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende fell this past week, particularly due to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan. Other European NATO forces are sure to follow suit. Western European countries in particular have large muslim minority populations that scare the heck out of their respective governments. Again, the soothing words of Obama can do nothing to stop nation-states from doing as they've always done: act in their own best interests.

It had nothing to do with Bush, and everything to do with this concept of self-interest. Always was, always will be. Obama claims he's "frustrated" with the Israeli/Palestinian impasse. Only a very arrogant, self-important man could think that he could fix that mess by the mere sound of his sonorous voice and agreeable personality. Only a man with a terminal case of hubris could think that he could re-shape the world in his own image. A visit from Nemesis is forthcoming.

Iran On The Brink....I Hope

2010-02-10T18:47:00.000-08:00

Amir Teheri breaks it down here. Worth a read. The Green Revolution is, perhaps, upon us.

No Sense Of History

2010-02-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

Whilst in the midst of the worst snowstorm in recent memory and confined to barracks as a result of, a couple of things have occurred to me. Today, while waiting for my train at Penn Station to arrive, I happened to have caught a snippet of a news story on CNN that was being played at one of the food/beverage shoppes that dot the station. In said news story, a delegation from the National Urban League, a predominantly black and Hispanic organization spoke outside the White House. Their concerns were that this "Great Recession" that we are currently undergoing is disproportionately affecting minority communities, and that the President needs a "stronger focus on employment counseling, job creation and direct aid to public employers." I'm always a bit suspicious, and rightly so, such entreaties; essentially, what these folks are speaking of is a greater expansion of the already over-bloated welfare state, but I digress. What I did find of interest was the continued use of this phrase:

The Jobless rate for black men last month, 17.6% and rising, is approaching the worst of the Great Depression.

Could be, but I'm not sure those numbers jive with the official government numbers. The unofficial government unemployment numbers have an overall unemployment number of about what the National Urban League, in their press release, said it was for just black men. I'm not writing this blog entry to either endorse or dispute these numbers, but rather to point out that this meme, that we are in the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression", is just a tad suspect to me. First off, statistically this is not true, and I'm not even sure that this is even remotely as bad as anything that occurred in the 1970's, or for that matter, the very deep recession of '81-'82. So....let's go to the numbers:

Maximum Rate of Inflation:
'80-'82 Recession-10.8%
Current Recession-2.7%

Maximum Unemployment:
10.8% (December, 1982)
9.7% , 10.2% maximum in November of 2009

Maximum Interest Rate (as measured by Federal Funds Rate):
20% (June, 1981)
.25% (Now)

Consider also, in the recession of the early '80's, mortgage rates approached 21%. Imagine that: paying 21% for a mortgage. (See sixth chart from the top here.) Sheesh.

Now, I'm not trying to mitigate what has just occurred with our financial system. One of my clients, who happens to be a personal injury attorney, referred to it as a "serious injury to the spinal column". (He said this before the Lehman/AIG/Citi meltdowns, but after the Bear Stearns implosion.) Of this, I cannot dispute. But I do find the constant and endless referral to this financial situation to that of the Great Depression a bit hard to swallow. I'm not even sure that this is as bad as '81-'82, and if one were to go by the numbers, it isn't as of now. That said, I think that Reagan had the better remedy than Obama currently does, but even with the obscene deficit spending going on courtesy of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama triumvirate (one, if not two of the three will be gone by next January), I'm quite hopeful that recovery is but a year or two away. Additionally, with Obama's mad government expansion schemes scuppered for now (and probably for all time), and a GOP congress (if not majority, than certainly strong minority) in the works, fiscal sanity will find its way back to our government policies. (Or, what counts for fiscal sanity in Washington.)

Conclusion? This is not the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It's not even worse than the Recession of '81-'82. Bad...but not that bad.

Quote

2010-02-10T03:52:00.001-08:00

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."-Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish Statesman (1729-1797)

Posted For Posterity's Sake

2010-01-28T09:30:00.001-08:00

[Print] [Email]

Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
January 27, 2010

(AP photo)

Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts' special Senate election was for Democratic leaders a moment that can be described in two words, of which I will only print the first here, which is "oh."

Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel Prize winner-turned polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill.

But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition to health care, but their life's work is not in peril.

Democratic officeholders know theirs is. Some are heading for the hills. Four well-regarded veteran congressmen announced their surprise retirements in December; two longtime Democratic senators folded in January. Family concerns have suddenly become very pressing.

Others are holding out against the bloggers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "unease would be the gentlest word" to describe House Democrats' refusal to pass the Senate health care bill. Her elegant ears must have burned in that caucus meeting.

Sens. Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, up for re-election in Indiana and Arkansas and facing by far the most negative poll numbers in their long political careers, let it be known that there was no way they would support the reconciliation process, requiring only 51 votes, to jam through a health care bill.

But more than health care legislation is in trouble. I have not seen a party's fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.

The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford's House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. Brown's victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.

Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment. Back in 1994 I wrote the first article in a nonpartisan publication suggesting that the Republicans had a serious chance to win the 40 seats necessary for a majority in the House. That article appeared in U.S. News & World Report in July 1994.

This year political handicapper Charlie Cook is writing in January, six months earlier in the cycle, that Republicans once again would capture the 40 seats they need for a majority if the House elections were held today. I concur. The generic vote question -- which party's candidates would you vote for in House elections -- is at least as favorable to Republicans as it was in the last month before the election in 1994.

Nothing is entirely static in politics, and opinions could change. Barack Obama could shift to the center, as Bill Clinton did after his party's thumping in 1994; the economy could visibly recover and start producing new jobs; a crisis like 9/11 and a good presidential response could boost the president and his party as 9/11 boosted George W. Bush and his party in 2001 and 2002.

But I sense that something more fundamental is at stake. Obama in his first year adopted the priorities of what pundit Joel Kotkin, a Democrat himself, calls the "gentry liberals." Obama called for addressing long-term issues like health care and supposed climate change. He and his economic advisers, like many analysts across the political spectrum, underestimated the rise in unemployment. Talk about "green jobs" has proved to be just talk.

Obama's conciliatory foreign policy and his attempts to mollify terrorists have produced no perceptible positive responses and run against the grain of most American voters. Questioning the Christmas bomber for just 50 minutes and then reading him his Miranda rights has left Obama open to charges that his policies fail to protect the American people.

The cacophony of conflicting advice from left-wing bloggers, pundits and elected officials is a sign of a party in disarray, its central premises undermined by events. Massachusetts may have been a wake-up call enabling the Democrats to recover. But right now they're tossing and turning.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

Echoes Of A Life Long Gone

2010-01-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

The only known film of Anne Frank. Haunting.

On Popularity

2010-01-24T20:16:00.001-08:00

"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only virtue when men have it whether they will to or no."-George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, 1633-1695

The Loss Of Album Artwork

2010-01-11T18:27:00.000-08:00

I caught the last gasp of the "Long Playing" (LP) album, with requisite fancy album cover, whilst coming of age in the late 70's-early 80's. It was quite an experience to buy music in those days. If you were lucky enough to be into a band that could put some bread into the artwork, the whole experience of listening to the music could be enhanced tremendously by the visuals. Yes/Crimson/Earthworks (among others) drummer Bill Bruford once opined that the album was your "mission statement"; indeed he was right. You could get a pretty good feel of the type of band you were about to listen to when you bought the album by the artwork employed by the band in question. Amongst my faves were Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, with its metallic presentation that represented the aggressive sophistication of the aforementioned recording quite well. A smart band with some artistic license could post a visual to its cover that could be tremendously arresting. A couple of additional cases in point: King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King, Yes Fragile and Close to the Edge, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (complete with real zipper), Jethro Tull Stand Up (which actually had pop-up characters when opening the gatefold), and of course, Sgt. Pepper's.

Great stuff, it was. Sadly, with the advent of the compact disc (CD), the artwork was shrunk to one quarter of the size of the LP's canvass. I never did get the same buzz from buying a CD as I did from opening up an LP for the first time. (Rarely did I buy cassette tape either, unless it was specifically to play on a boom box or play on a Sony Walkman.) Reading the liner notes, the lyrics, and peering at the artwork contributed tremendously to the experience. Even though too much care went into not scratching the LP, and inevitably one always did with repeated play, it was a rich experience that has been lost to the ages. Now, in the age of MP3s, one needn't even buy a CD, and so the artwork has become utterly disposable. A shame really, but then it is extraordinarily convenient to have the equivalent of twenty-four days worth of music at my disposal at the click of a keyboard. If an LP has approximately forty minutes of playing time, that equals 1.25 albums per hour in a 24 hour period, and I have 24 days worth of music (according to my iTunes indicator), I would have 720 LPs in my apartment. Sheesh.

Technological progress, for the most part, is a good thing. But there's always that is lost with the onset of said technology. I won't miss the cassette or the CD, but the loss of the album artwork made available by the LP is slightly bittersweet for me. However, I'm sure this won't be a lost piece of LP artwork, except to make fun of.

Invictus-By William Ernest Henley

2010-01-11T18:13:00.000-08:00

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years finds
And shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

When Industries Die

2009-12-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

I work approximately one block from the New York Stock Exchange. Once upon a time, one would see several dozen floor brokers, specialists, stock reporters and the like smoking outside the exchange on Broad Street. (The profession must've attracted the smoking type.) On CNBC, one would watch Maria Bartiromo reporting from the floor, getting jostled to-and-fro by floor personnel; indeed, the floor was jammed, activity frenetic. Around 2005, the floor became computerized, and trades that once took seven seconds to get executed by floor traders and specialists now took, via computers, one-third of a second. Spreads between bid and ask that once stood at 1/8th of a point now traded (due to "decimalization") at approximately three to two cents between bid and ask. With the merger between NYSE and Archipelago, floor personnel no longer were needed in the same way that they had been for the prior two-hundred and thirteen years. Two-dollar brokers were rendered obsolete, specialists were laid off en masse, "local" floor traders were edged out, and the floor became ghost town. Now, when Maria Bartiromo reports from the floor (or the new attractive CNBC correspondent, whoever she may be these days), you see nothing but wooden parquet floor. The floor is now, for the most part, obsolete.

Obviously, this is not the first time in the history of the free-market economy that this has occurred, and it surely will not be the last. Strange it must be to not only lose one's job, but to have trained in a profession which is no longer needed by our society is a whole different kettle of fish. Once upon a time, boot-making and buggy-makers were a necessary part of our economy; mass-production of foot-ware and automobiles rendered both unnecessary, save the odd-man who does such things as a historical re-enactor at places like Colonial Williamsburg. Try as some might (and in the case of boot-makers they did, vis-a-vis the Knights of St. Crispin), you can't fight progress, even if there is a human cost. Sometimes, indeed many times, whole professions get wiped out in the process of implementing new, efficient ways of doing things. The term for this phenomenon is "creative destruction", coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Roughly put, the term states that old ways will be destroyed by new efficient ways; indeed they must be destroyed.

The music and publishing industry are currently in a state of flux, but the issue here isn't that their business models are obsolete; clearly, they are. Newspapers make their money not from subscriptions or news-stand sales, but from advertising. (I know something about this, as my father was in the advertising sales end of the publishing industry.) The service known as Standard Rate & Data would give would-be advertisers some semblance of what type of market they would reach with each newspaper and/or magazine based on gender, age, income, etc., thus targeting said group to maximize product sales. This is where magazines, newspapers, periodicals, and published journals made their profits. (Political publications like the National Review, the New Republic, and the Nation, for example, operate at consistent losses; their ability to sustain themselves comes from donations from politically like-minded readers.) The problem now is the internet, and also, free services like Craig's List; the former gives one timely news, the latter gives one a wide range of classified ads. Ad in e-Bay and Amazon, and you've just sliced off a huge chunk of revenue from the newspaper/magazine industry. Wider readership and cheaper has spelled, what in all likelihood, will be the death knell for magazines and newspapers. There's one problem with all of this: what replaces them? What is the new business model? Alas, this is the question that hasn't been answered completely. True, news can be had by merely tapping into the Drudge Report or any other news website or news hub. A recent conversation with a friend yesterday focused on just this topic. His contention was that something will be lost, as newspapers like the New York Times, with a presence in all corners of the world, will no longer be able to keep reporters all over the world to report on things happening in places like, say, Nepal. Probably true, but then why keep an American reporter in south-east Asia when you could hire a local to report on the facts all the same? And given the inaccuracies of the American media, would anything necessarily be lost? I think not.

Ever more complex is the issue with the music business. I've slagged the music business pretty vociferously on this blog for years, and I stand by all of it, but I cannot see how this business model is even remotely sustainable. I recently got a shock of ice-cold water (metaphorically speaking) when I was in Union Square about a week ago and saw Virgin Megastore boarded up and shut-down. I did feel a pang of sadness over this, I must admit, specifically since I'd been coming and hanging out in Union Square for well over a decade. Virgin Megastore was a part of the backdrop for me, looking across the square facing south. Many days were passed weeding through the CD bins, the bookstore on the basement floor, and generally checking out what was new. All gone now, but not surprising so. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD, for it must be years now. Online downloading has completely taken whatever profit margin the record industry had and shrunk it down to the bare minimum, if that minimum is being met at all. (Doubtful that it is.) As for when I did buy CDs, I would buy one only to find one or two good songs and the rest filler. (Definition of filler: Substandard songs or jamming done specifically to eat up time on a CD or an LP.) Now, all one needs to do is download the song you like for .99 cents, and leave the rest. A gross sale of $15 per CD is now reduced to .99 cents, a 93% reduction. Additionally, if I don't have a CD and a friend does, I merely need to put that CD in my computer and voila-I have everything! It is no big mystery why the record companies have turned so strongly to producing rap albums: the overhead costs are minimal; all that is needed is a drum-machine, a sampler, and a street-tough incoherently rhyming about violence in some inscrutable ghetto patois. Things continue to go the direction that they're going in, there might not be a record industry in three years. One thing is for certain, it certainly isn't going to look like it has for the last thirty. As for newspapers, I'll cry very little for them. The informational hegemony they presided over has been shattered. No longer will there be people like Walter Duranty around to file bogus dispatches that paper over full-blown genocides...and we're all the better for that.

On Movies, Domestic And Foreign

2009-12-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

I attempt to, from time to time, fit in with the tastes of the average American. But in the end, I can't. I'm not into football, other than reading the back pages of the New York Post about how the Jets squandered yet another season. I'm not really into basketball, except in passing. I am into hockey, but that's not terribly American (unless you hail from Minnesota or northern Michigan), and either way, the Rangers suck yet again this year. I do like baseball, but with 162 some-odd games being played a season, I'd rather make other uses for my time. (I make a provision to watch the Yankees if/when they make the playoffs. I'd do the same for the Mets, if/when that occasion arises.) But in the end, I don't dig on sports too much.

Now, as for American movies, I just can't deal...at all.

Somewhere along the line, and I can't really gauge where, American movies became all about explosions, violence, sex and...that's pretty much it. Story-lines ceased being important; explosions, special effects, and a super-hot actress to get the whole thing moving in the right direction became imperative. And thus I made a decision, sometime during the mid-90's, to not bother seeing any more big budget Hollywood flicks. The decision was a arrived at after seeing "Terminator 3" (or something like it). I felt cheated, ripped-off, and patronized at that time, and the feeling has stayed with me ever since. Snobbish? Absolutely...and unapologetically so. And so I made the decision that there were only two types of movies I would see going forward: foreign and independent.

Of course this is hit and miss, this way of doing things. I've seen a few foreign movies that were entirely too arty and drawn-out to sit through. ("Far Away, So Close!" by Wim Wenders comes to mind.) But the majority of them were great: "Kontroll", "Run Lola Run", "Broken Embraces", to name a few, were well worth the price of admission, and were edifying and thought-provoking from the moment that I left the theatre. I can't remember the last American movie that I saw that was even remotely thought provoking; perhaps "The Godfather" or "Casino", but then, those were rarities. Independent movies work differently. Devoid of significant budget, they have no choice but to rely on dialogue, complexity, and intelligence. Once upon a time Quentin Tarantino fell into this category, but then he made it big with "Pulp Fiction"; now, puffed up full of a big budget and an even bigger commercial expectation, he's awful. In the inevitable conflict that is art versus commerce, as with modern music, commerce won and continues to win yet again. But not with the independents, and certainly not with the foreign movies.

Paul Fussell once stated that he abandoned H.L. Mencken as a literary mentor when he went to the front lines of Europe during the Second World War. To Fussell, Mencken's irony wasn't applicable anymore, as it was American in nature and was "deficient in the tragic sense". This could be what lies at the heart of American cinema. We all like a happy ending, us Americans. Sometimes, things end tragically, not happily. More times than not, things may have a positive conclusion, but are bittersweet. Not so with American cinema. Happy endings must be achieved, though life certainly doesn't work that way. And so, we get explosions, hot chicks, special effects, wild stunts, but inevitably, a triumphant ending. Complexity and multi-dimension is eschewed to ensure that the maximum amount of the aforementioned aspects are prominently displayed in said movie. Inevitably, what the American public gets are movies that are big, loud, and ultimately, utterly forgettable.

For me, I'll stick with the subtitles, the irony, the complexity, and no explosions. I want a story that I can dig into into. If I want explosions, I'll buy some illegal fireworks and set 'em off myself.

Beethoven's "Heiligenstädter Testament"

2009-12-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers, but perhaps to the world, asking for understanding with regards to his erratic behavior. He also professed his thoughts of suicide due to his miserable physical conditions, particularly his deafness. It is extraordinarily powerful reading, and it ends on a message of hope.

To wit:

For my brothers Carl and [Johann] Beethoven.

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on, my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was even inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or, perhaps, be impossible). Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to isolate myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, "Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf." Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed. - Oh I cannot do it; therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished; I can mix with society only as much as true necessity demands. If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed. Thus it has been during the last six months which I have spent in the country. By ordering me to spare my hearing as much as possible, my intelligent doctor almost fell in with my own present frame of mind, though sometimes I ran counter to it by yielding to my desire for companionship. But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended me life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me. So I endured this wretched existence - truly wretched for so susceptible a body, which can be thrown by a sudden change from the best condition to the very worst. - Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so - I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it pleases the inexorable Parcae to break the thread. Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready. - Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eighth year, - oh it is not easy, and for the artist much more difficult than for anyone else. - Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul thou knowest that therein dwells the love of mankind and the desire to do good. - Oh fellow men, when at some point you read this, consider then that you have done me an injustice; someone who has had misfortune man console himself to find a similar case to his, who despite all the limitations of Nature nevertheless did everything within his powers to become accepted among worthy artists and men. - You, my brothers Carl and [Johann], as soon as I am dead, if Dr. Schmid is still alive, ask him in my name to describe my malady, and attach this written documentation to his account of my illness so that so far as it possible at least the world may become reconciled to me after my death. - At the same time, I declare you two to be the heirs to my small fortune (if so it can be called); divide it fairly; bear with and help each other. What injury you have done me you know was long ago forgiven. To you, brother Carl, I give special thanks for the attachment you have shown me of late. It is my wish that you may have a better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery. Thanks to it and to my art, I did not end my life by suicide - Farewell and love each other - I thank all my friends, particularly Prince Lichnowsky and Professor Schmid - I would like the instruments from Prince L. to be preserved by one of you, but not to be the cause of strife between you, and as soon as they can serve you a better purpose, then sell them. How happy I shall be if can still be helpful to you in my grave - so be it. - With joy I hasten towards death. - If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will still be coming too soon despite my harsh fate, and I should probably wish it later - yet even so I should be happy, for would it not free me from a state of endless suffering? - Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely. - Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead; I deserve this from you, for during my lifetime I was thinking of you often and of ways to make you happy - be so -

Ludwig van Beethoven
Heiglnstadt,
October 6th, 1802

Caterwauling About The State Of Modern Music, Yet Again....

2009-12-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

Distressing thing, really....the state of pop music. Things have grown so depressing that I've taken up digging through music that was produced in the 60's, 70's, (some 80's) in a mad quest to find something remotely interesting that I might have missed the first time around. (Actually, I'm digging as far back as four hundred years ago.) That I have, but it doesn't rankle less to see the state of music is so substandard that I'm starting to question the whether Western Civilization as a whole is going to make it....but then, that's a topic for another post....

It is either a blessing or a curse to be extremely knowledgeable about music, its history, its forms and the like. Even more so, unlike the average music listener (and that isn't a dig on them, mind) I pick up on the trends, the recycled lyrical content, the retreaded guitar sounds, etc. The same keys, the same chord changes, the same sounds, the same format....endlessly and repeatedly regurgitated to an otherwise oblivious general public. Rock in particular has fallen into this horrible ditch; the last gasp of anything remotely creative from rock was in the late 80's/early 90's, and even then, it didn't even come close to matching its glory years between 1967-1975. Of all the bands from the aforementioned late 80's/early 90's, the only ones still standing are Pearl Jam, who are so cringe-worthy and torpid as to render them unlistenable.

Now...how DID this happen, one has to ask. Various theories abound, but the great Bill Bruford opined about this pretty extensively in his autobiography, and his theory is thus: The death of creativity in pop music can be traced back to when publicly traded companies, responsible to post quarterly earnings, started taking over record companies and adding them to their media conglomerate empires. In the beginnings of rock, the music existed before the record companies could dream it up. It was a permutation of black American blues: raucous, untamed, and free. The "suits", even in the 50's, did their level best to get their arms around it and exploit it for monetary gain. But even then, the creativity wasn't bled out of it. Then came the 60's: The Beatles, The Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle...all representing forms that were either wholly original or creatively stolen (probably closer to the latter), but sounded fresh and creative nonetheless. The power was with the artists, not the executives, yet both prospered. The early 70's, particularly the progressive rock movement, marked the apex of creativity in rock music (in my opinion). Emerson, Lake & Palmer liberally ripped off classical music in the most aggressive way, but who could possibly have the ability to do so in the first place? Keith Emerson was about as talented musician as rock would ever see. Yes got away with writing twenty minute opuses on three straight albums. Genesis did a whole album based on a surreal (and incomprehensible) story by Peter Gabriel written about a Puerto Rican street kid who finds himself in a kind of Salvador Dali world, desperately trying to get out...a musical journey spread out over two LPs. Pink Floyd might have produced (according to some critical opinions) the 70's equivalent of "Sgt. Pepper" with their "Dark Side of the Moon". Inevitably, the question that beggars to be asked is this: What are the chances that a record company would ever, EVER let any of these bands produce any of these works in this day and age. The answer is obvious; Q.E.D.

Everything is short term. In an earlier time, a band was given three albums to "get it together". The first two albums from Yes were interesting experiments, but they didn't hit their stride until "The Yes Album", which is where the material that made up their classic catalog began. Two albums later, "Close to the Edge" managed to bring it all together into one timeless album. Led Zeppelin hit their stride by their second album, but it was "IV" that produced songs like "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven". Now, bands have ONE album to come up with a hit. If they're lucky, they'll get two, but that's chancy. Record companies need hits; they need quarterly earnings to be positive, lest their stock prices tank and their investors grow disgruntled. In the conflict between art and commerce, art may have won a few battles, but it clearly lost the war. Now the best any of us rock fans can muster is Tool, a good (but not great) band that is entirely too harsh for these ears. Closer to it is Nickelback, who are the perfect distillation of blandness, regurgitated barre chords, stale riffs, and obvious key changes. The food equivalent would be eating three month old crackers: edible but stale.

Per this listener, I'm still hoping, still digging. I've postulated since college that there's ALWAYS something interesting to find out there, one need only dig a little deeper, look a little longer. I have found some interesting acts out there, but you'll never hear them on the radio. I frequent a bar in Greenwich Village called the 55 Bar; I've been there three times and have yet to hear an act that didn't impress me. If going to dank music clubs that are approximately 600 square feet to hear something good is what I've been reduced to doing, that is what I will do. If listening to Big Band composers like Bix Beiderbecke and Count Basie for inspiration is what I have to do, I'll do it. If scouring online radio sources like Pandora (as opposed to real radio, which is atrocious) is what need to be done, I'll do it. But one thing I'll never do is accept the status quo and learn to like it.

Looking "Community Organizing" In The Face...And It Ain't Pretty

2009-12-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

A few things that need to be cleared up right away:

I work for a very large financial institution in downtown Manhattan. I, needless to say, work in finance. I'll say no more on that, and only mention it to give the proper shading to the story I'm about to post. And so the story is this....

'Round about twelve o'clock today, a group of about 300 people appeared on the plaza of my building, chanting, yelling, and generally making a ruckus. Having lived and worked in Manhattan for the better part of my professional life (actually, ALL of my professional life), I've grown accustomed to this kind of unorthodoxy, as it is a daily part of being a part of this city. But this was no ordinary day, you see. The minions of ACORN, the scandal-ridden "community organization" descended up on my beloved financial institution, heaping scorn and ridicule on my CEO. (Note: They've changed their name to some other snappy acronym, but it's the same people.) One particularly amusing placard read that the CEO of my financial institution "hates puppies"; another amusing one stated that my financial institution should be "foreclosed" upon. Strangely, furniture was parked on the plaza. (Some of it was actually pretty nice.) The mob found their way into the lobby of my building, chanting, whistling, and generally disrupting an otherwise pleasant business day. They were summarily expelled from the indoors, but did manage to stick around the plaza for about another forty-five minutes.

Now, this is what really annoys me about this whole exercise. What we're talking about here are people who are demanding that my bank, which is a privately held institution, should be loosening its lending standards to accommodate low-income, high-risk borrowers. Their theory, and also President Obama's contention, is that these financial institutions should loosen their credit since they took money from the federal government to get themselves out of a jam. All fair, were it not for the fact that the reason these financial institutions got themselves into a jam is because they had loose lending standards, due in no small part to the federal government prevailing upon them through moral suasion and outright threats to do so vis-a-vis the Community Reinvestment Act. When Obama's economic advisors say things like "we need to get the banks to start lending like crazy" (attributed to Christine Romer), I'm rendered speechless. That was the very reason why financial institutions got themselves into this jam in the first place. The government forced them to make sub-prime loans, which caved the whole industry. The Fed and the Treasury subsequently bailed them out, but now they're BLAMING them for making bad loans, while at the same time admonishing them to make MORE bad loans, this time to small businesses, because unemployment is going up and Obama's "stimulus" package failed to stop unemployment from going up. (Unemployment was at 7.4% when it was passed; it is now at 10%.)

It is a mad, mad world.

For more on ACORN:

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/23/acorn-scandal-part-2-the-evidentiary-phase/

And Here We Are Again Once More....

2009-12-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted for about two years, for the very simple reason that:

a.) My work schedule at that time was punishing, and I was finding it increasingly hard to find the time, energy, or brainpower to come up with anything even remotely interesting to say.

b.) See entry a.)

All things being equal, I've decided to take another crack at the blogosphere for the very simple reason that, aside from being (somewhat) intellectually stimulating, it also serves as a pretty neat time capsule/journal. Additionally, it allows me to continue to hone my writing chops, to punctuate, spell, and form coherent sentences. There's been a fair amount of reading that has been done since my last blog entry, so there's a plethora of knowledge to draw from that is fresh and new. No more stale postings....for a while, hopefully.

And we'll have fun, fun, fun 'til our daddy takes the T-Bird away....

He's Still Dead

2007-07-15T08:06:00.002-07:00

A new bin Laden video has surfaced in the last day or so. There's no way to determine how recent the video is, but it seems to be rather dated....which once again plays into my theory that he's been dead for some time now. If Ayman al-Zawahiri can make a video every three months, and he's the "second" of al-Qaeda, how come the Big Kahuna can't? Short answer: Because he's dead.

Michael Ledeen agrees with me:

Seeing bin Laden [Michael Ledeen]
As mentioned, there's an Osama cameo floating around. It seems to be from a video shot in 2001 or 2002. If that is correct, then I would draw two conclusions: first, that it is additional confirmation that he is dead. (If he were alive, they could do a new one, right?) And second, that this is a sign of panic, a poorly manufactured pseudo-blockbuster appearance designed to rally the troops, who must be getting fairly discouraged these days. The war is not going well for them in Iraq or Afghanistan (where the big "spring offensive" didn't happen)or Lebanon or England or over here. The best thing they've got going for them at the moment is (are) the surrender monkeys.

Quote of the Day

2007-06-24T09:42:00.001-07:00

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."

- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

You Know That Environmentalism Has Hit A New Extreme....

2007-04-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

....when the EU is concerned about cows blowing farts.

Two Things That Will Survive A Nuclear Holocaust: Cockroaches....And Keith Richards

2007-04-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

Here's why:

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father."

Read all about the keys to Keith's longevity here.

He's an inspiration to us all.

Rue Britannia

2007-04-01T11:52:00.001-07:00

The end of Britain is upon us.

Why, you ask? For one thing, the very power with which Britain came to rule (at one point in history) 2/5ths of the world is being scrapped: its navy. My, how Lord Nelson and Winston Churchill must be turning over in their graves. Tony Blair, steadfast and courageous earlier in the decade in regards to his commitment to the war against the Islamo-fascist virus, is looking more and more "Carter-esque" by the day. Why he is so intent on pleasing the European Union folks in Brussels is beyond me. Secondly, he's looking more and more powerless in the face of the aggression Iran recently perpetrated against Great Britain in the form of the fifteen British sailors that were taken hostage by the Iranian Republican Guard whilst in international waters. Mark Steyn, sharp and accurate as always, writes about that here.Read it and weep. More here.

The Lives Of Others

2007-03-24T18:56:00.000-07:00

Rarely do I see a movie that makes a profound impact on me, but the movie The Lives Of Others will be one to remember and reflect on for a long time to come.

Set in East Germany in 1985, Stasi (the name of the secret police of East Germany) Captain Weisler is assigned to monitor the conversations and actions of playright Georg Dreyman. Weisler is the prototypical communist apparatchik: dry, boring, and gray. Through his undetected surveillances of Dreyman's conversations, Weisler begins to grow progressively more sympathetic to the internal conflicts of Dreyman. Dreyman, you see, is a loyal East German, which is so infuriating to his writer buddies (all of whom are subversives) that he's alienating them. Only after a good friend and brilliant stage director, who is blacklisted by the powers-that-be, kills himself does Dreyman secretly turn on the government. Weisler, through his perpetual listening, does as well. I'll not spoil the movie for those of you who plan on seeing it. (Please note, it's all in subtitles.) But I will say that it is a positive affirmation that the joys of thinking and saying are deeply rooting in all of us, and when they're denied, it is soul destroying.

I certainly hope that this movie gets more viewership than the digusting hagiography of Che Guevara, "The Motorcycle Diaries". If one wants to know what living in communism is really about, go see this movie if you can.

Lay Down With Dogs....Get Up With Fleas

2007-03-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

Bet Nancy Pelosi never thought this would happen........

A Post St. Patrick's Day Post

2007-03-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

I came across this article a few years back in the New York Press (a free publication here in NYC) written by a fellow by the name of William Bryk. Bryk focuses specifically on New York history, and this one piece particularly interested me. Dagger John Hughes was a fightin' Irish priest who came to New York, amongst the famine Irish. He also was responsible, in no small way, for preserving the religious freedoms of the Irish Catholics to worship here in the States, as well as being perhaps the first to raise the famine Irish up from the squalor, crime, and decadence they had fallen into here in the States, specifically in places like New York and Boston. His story is here.

May the road rise up to meet you, and may the wind be at your back.

Greetings, Mein Froinds!

2007-03-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

I've not been blogging much these days, due to myriad reasons, amongst them being that a.) haven't much to say, and b.) too damn tired after work to think, much less blog. Thirdly, I don't have an internet connection in my new apartment, as I'm in-between having an old Mac G4 that is still running OS9.2 and am waiting to get a fresh, new Mac....which I haven't purchased yet. So it goes. So in the interest of re-aquainting myself with this blogging phenomenon, I'll cover a few topics here and there for posterity's sake, add a few (hopefully) trenchant observations, and the world will unfold as it should. On with it.....

This hasn't exactly been front page news, but it hasn't exactly been relegated to the back pages either. However the story of Ali Reza Asghari's defection is a potentially seismic one. Mr. Asghari supposedly was high up in the Islamic Republic of Iran's government from the very beginning in '79, was the prime mover behind the creation and formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has an intimate knowledge of the inner workings and plans of the Ahmedinejad government. He knows of their intelligence workings, as well as their quest for atomic power. He is currently being held somewhere in northern Europe, but he might already be in the U.S. The amount of information Asghari could spill is really quite extraordinary. Keep an eye on this story and see how it plays out.

If anyone hasn't seen the Chris Simon two-handed smash across Ryan Hollweg's chin, you can see it here. Nasty, nasty. Simon is probably looking at suspension for the rest of the season (including playoffs), and well into next season. I'm all for "old time hockey", but Simon's actions were plain ol' assault. Tsk, tsk.

How uptight must Hillary Clinton be about Barack Obama's upsurge? She was thinking the nomination was hers for the the taking, and now this junior senator with all of two years of experience is kicking her ass and stealing her benefactors (like David Geffen)? The nerve! You know you're in trouble when even the writers of the National Review start complimenting your rival.

I don't think, at this point, that Obama is going to get the nomination. Hillary has been slated for the nomination since 2000. However, I do think that Obama could take a piece out of her, and if Hillary reacts as nastily as I think she inevitably will, it could alienate many Democratic voters, not the least of which are the African-American voting bloc.

Recently a movie was released called 300, based on the Battle of Thermopylae. For those unaware of what this event was, much less its significance, let me brief you: Thermopylae was a mountain pass in Greece that the Persians had to get past if they were to successfully conquer Greece. A few thousand Spartans, Thebans, and Thespians held off approximately 500,000 Persians, thus buying critical time for the Athenians to prepare their defenses, as well as to arm their navy for the eventual Battle of Salamis. Eventually, the Spartan king, Leonidas, sent everyone home, save 300 Spartans. For three days, the Persians were held off. All of the Spartans, including Leonidas, were eventually rubbed out. But Thermopylae is one of the great "last stand" historical events in history. More than that, its significance was and is huge, as it served to preserve a Greek democracy that inevitably would've been snuffed out by the totalitarian Persian king, Xerxes. This battle, which took place in 480 B.C., has tremendous significance, even 2500 years later. More than anything, it shows that free men would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. Time and again, whenever democratic societies, or even moderately free societies, have ever come into conflict with repressive ones, they win. One need only look at the Cold War, WWII, the Greco-Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, etc. Free peoples don't sell off their freedom cheaply and thus preserve their freedoms, whereas the armies of totalitarian states gain nothing by winning; they merely preserve the right of imperial rule for their masters.

Pete

2007-02-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

Cool stuff on Pete Townshend on YouTube. Check this one out.

"Ex-President for Sale"

2007-02-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

By Alan Dershowitz

I have known Jimmy Carter for more than thirty years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and justice. I had just published an article in The New York Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with some faculty members, me among them. I immediately liked Jimmy Carter and saw him as a man of integrity and principle. I signed on to his campaign and worked very hard for his election. When Newsweek magazine asked his campaign for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice, my name was among those given out. I continued to work for Carter over the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem a year ago, and we briefly discussed the Mid-East. Though I disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe that he was making them out of a deep commitment to principle and to human rights.

Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts < http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=348172>. They were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first century there were still foundations that espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-upa think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son hosted speakers < http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/zayed_center.asp> who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money. Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot.

In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad old Harvard of the nineteen thirties, which continued to honor Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler's government became clear. Harvard of the nineteen thirties was complicit in evil. I sadly concluded that Jimmy Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in evil.

The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's friend, Sheik Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president establish his center...[and] more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects." < http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20061220-092736-3365r.htm> Carter gladly accepted the money, though Abedi had called his bank ostensibly the source of his funding "the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists." BCCI isn't the only source: Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center "in 1993 alone...$7.6 million" <as" href="http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=26045%3E%ADas" printable.asp?id="26045>as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheik Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates.
as" href="http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=26045%3E%ADas" printable.asp?id="26045>as
It's worth noting that, despite the influx of Saudi money funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi Arabian government's myriad human rights abuses, the Carter Center's Human Rights program has no activity whatever in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have apparently bought his silence for a steep price. The bought quality of the Center's activities becomes even more clear, however, when reviewing the Center's human rights activities in other countries: essentially no human rights activities in China or in North Korea, or in Iran, Iraq, the Sudan, or Syria, but activity regarding Israel and its alleged abuses, according to the Center's website < http://www.cartercenter.org/countries/israel_and_the_palestinian_territories.html >. The Carter Center's mission statement claims that "The Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute resolution activities." How can that be, given that its coffers are full of Arab money, and that its focus is away from significant Arab abuses and on Israel's far less serious ones?

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money? Ask Carter. The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter not me who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter's own standards, it would be almost economically "suicidal" for Carter "to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."

By Carter's own standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be discounted. It is certainly possible that he now believes them. Money, particularly large amounts of money, has a way of persuading people to a particular position. It would not surprise me if Carter, having received so much Arab money, is now honestly committed to their cause. But his failure to disclose the extent of his financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of any self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has unduly influenced his views, is a form of deception bordering on corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke. These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does then Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His most recent book is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways

"Palestinians: We don't deserve a state"

2007-02-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

I agree. A few choice excerpts:

"Everyone here is disgusted by what's happening in the Gaza Strip," said Shireen Atiyeh, a 30-year-old mother of three working in one of the Palestinian Authority ministries. "We are telling the world that we don't deserve a state because we are murdering each other and destroying our universities, colleges, mosques and hospitals. Today I'm ashamed to say that I'm a Palestinian."

No argument here! Here's some more:

"The world is watching how the Palestinians are destroying their institutions and achievements with their own hands. They see how we are mercilessly slaughtering innocent people. We are losing the sympathy of the world. I'm afraid the world will now view us differently."

You can read the whole article here. A glimmer of hope, one would think. Perhaps these people are ready to grow up. Here's to hoping, however small that hope is.

Golly Gee....These People Deserve A State!

2007-01-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Yes sir, the "Palestinians" are in the midst of what appears to be a bonafide civil war. A good thing? Only bad if both sides wind up blowing each other up and exhausting so much of their virulent hatred for everything and everybody that they actually learn how to co-exist with the rest of humanity. Until then....keep shootin', folks!

I certainly hope that going foward, that these people receive less and less attention. They deserve no sympathy for their violent idiocy, and there are plenty other ethnic groups out there that are sans homeland that deserve a real chance at self-determination. (Like the Kurds, for example.)

Stop paying attention to them.

Bluffing?

2007-01-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

Israel and the United States will soon be destroyed, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday during a meeting with Syria's foreign minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website said in a report.

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… assured that the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives," the Iranian president was quoted as saying.

Jimmy Carter Legacy Takes Another (Perhaps Fatal) Hit

2007-01-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

Read this article, and then say to yourself with a straight face that "Jimmy Carter is a good man, but a lousy president". Only one part of that widely-held sentiment is correct: The part about being a crappy president. Carter isn't a good man, and he clearly has a problem with Jews stretching far, far back. To give you a quickie on what the link is about: Jimmy Carter interceded in a deportation proceedings of a Waffen SS officer (that's a concentration camp guard, in case you were wondering) in 1987. Supposedly he did this for "humanitarian" reasons.

Wha?!?

Read it and weep. Or laugh. Or both. And then thank God that Ronald Reagan won in 1980.

Quote

2007-01-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."

--William F. Buckley

(This quote, I can assure you, is wholly accurate. Try living in Manhattan and taking a conservative position and you'll understand the depth of Buckley's observation.)

Darkness Descends on Venezuela

2007-01-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

Venezuela won't recover for fifty years. Ugly.

Read here.

Quote

2007-01-09T16:29:00.000-08:00

Since we're on the subject of crumbling reputations (Associated Press, Sandy Berger), I figured I'd share this quote from Ben Franklin:

Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.

Jamil Hussein....

2007-01-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

....is still missing. Read about it here.

Sandy Berger

2007-01-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, the report on Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is out....and it is a doozy. It's awfully hard for Clintonistas to spin this one. Think about it: Can you envision the insane rage of the liberal media if it was Condoleeza Rice, and not Sandy Berger, who stole and destroyed highly classified documents regarding al Qaeda leading up to 9/11? Rest assured, things wouldn't be as quiet as they are now in the press regarding Berger's scandalous theft of these extremely important documents. Additionally, one has to wonder who put him up to this course of action. Of that, we'll never know, because the press won't pursue it.

Jamil Hussein Is Still Missing

2007-01-02T19:09:00.000-08:00

Update on the Jamil Hussein controversy here.

New Year's Wishes

2007-01-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

Be at war with your vices,
Peace with your neighbors,
And let every New Year
Find you a better man [and woman].

--Benjamin Franklin

Just For The Record

2006-12-30T20:11:00.000-08:00

Having watched the liberal take on the hanging of Saddam Hussein, I've noted that liberal pundits and pollsters who are on the news consistently harken back to the fact that Osama bin Laden hasn't been captured or killed. I guess they cite this because they're trying to denigrate the importance of Saddam's execution. It matters not. It is an important event, one that shows that sometimes justice does get served. As for Osama bin Laden, I'm stating once again that....he's dead. What is my proof? It's all circumstantial, I admit. But ask yourself: When was the last time you saw bin Laden on video? Sure, he releases an audiotape ever six or so months. But how come his spiritual leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is always making videos (every month or two, it seems), but bin Laden never does? The CIA claims that these OBL audiotapes are, in fact, bin Laden. But then, how much faith can you put into an intelligence agency that a.) Predicted in 1980 that the USSR had a GDP of 3%-4% a year, which was a greater economic expansion than the U.S. b.) That was wholly surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union in '91, as well as the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc in '89 c.) Failed to key into the 9/11 attacks, which were three years in the making? The CIA was gutted in the mid-70's, and it has never recovered. Maybe if a guy like James Jesus Angleton were still operating at CIA, I'd have some faith in their analysis. But....he's not.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Until I see his mug on a video, I'm assuming that I'm right. History will bear it out. And if I'm wrong, I'll admit it. Until then, I'm stickin' to my theory.

James Brown

2006-12-30T19:58:00.000-08:00

I'm a nominal fan of James Brown, having been introduced to his music in college in the late-80's. I played in a cover band that did "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" and "Sex Machine", though we were clearly stiff, white, and not particularly funky. (We tried...) That said, one thing that struck me about James Brown's music were the rhythmic off-beats and the hypnotic nature of his songs. It was good stuff musically, and to my mind, in the same way that Frank Sinatra isn't really talked about for his musical ability, ditto goes for James Brown. The image and the public persona overshadowed his innovation, though it shouldn't. He was a grounbreaking songwriter, using drums and horns in ways that nobody had ever used them before. Legend has it that if he had inspiration for his music, even in the middle of the night, he'd call his entire band into the studio on the spot to record. Sometimes he'd do the same while on the road. He'd stop the bus in some town on the way to a gig, find a studio in that town, and lay it down.

I never saw James Brown. I wish I had, and when I had the chance a few years back (he was playing at B.B. King's Club in NYC), the ticket price was pretty stiff ($80), so I passed. In the end, it was my loss.

Saddam Bites The Dust

2006-12-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

Not much more to add than what has already been reported widely regarding this event. I do think that David Pryce-Jones (National Review) correctly captures the sentiment well. (Read here.) I can't help but think that, in the same way that every communist apparatchik felt a shock of terror for their own fate as they got wind of Nicolae Ceaucescu's execution, that every Islamic dictator/terrorist in the Middle East feels at least a similar tinge of fright that their fate will be similar. Probably not, but it clearly is in the realm of possibilities for the likes of Ahmedinejad, Assad, or Khadafy. As Churchill so aptly put it, "Dictators ride astride the backs of tigers they dare not dismount, for the tigers are hungry..."

Merry Christmas To All....

2006-12-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

....and to all, a good night.

Associated Press Source, "Jamil Hussein" Still Missing

2006-12-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

Not reported very much in the mainstream media is the story of Jamil Hussein. As I've written about previously, Jamil Hussein was/is supposedly a Baghdad police officer who Associated Press has quoted in approximately forty published dispatches. He has been protrayed as a "primary source" in all of these stories. The latest dispatch, which claimed that Sunni extremists firebombed a Shiite mosque, burning to death six Shia, has been called into question, as neither CENTCOM nor the Iraqi government has verified that this event happened. Actually, they've said it didn't happen. The writer of the blog Flopping Aces first got suspicious about this story and implored Associated Press to verify the existence of Jamil Hussein and his credibility as a witness. To date, Associated Press has yet to present Jamil Hussein to the skeptics in the blogosphere. Michelle Malkin has joined in with the search. Still no Jamil Hussein.

This story is an even bigger story than the Dan Rather faked memos ("Memogate") story because Associated Press is the biggest news agency in the world. Check any paper in America, and you're sure to find more than a few stories that say "From AP" or "AP Dispatch" at the end of them. This is true of even the biggest newspapers in America, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. If all newspapers in America get their news from AP, at least partially, what does that say about the quality and veracity of American journalism if the largest news agency in the world is perpetuating a fraud? Dan Rather took down CBS News with his vicious prevarication. This Associated Press story, if Jamil Hussein cannot be produced, can potentially take down the entire American journalism industry.

Time Magazine's "Person of the Year"...

2006-12-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

....is you!

Feel honored? Next year, it might be this person.

Another Notable Passing

2006-12-18T17:57:00.000-08:00

“Kirkpatski! Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag.”

--Andrei Sakharov, Soviet Dissident

I filched that quote from Jay Nordlinger's latest NRO column, but it matters not. "Kirkpatski" was actually Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the former Ambassador to the United Nations who served under Reagan. Kirkpatrick passed away on December 7th of this year, aged 80. She was a tireless advocate for international human rights, having read out loud, on the floor of the United Nations, the names of actual Soviet dissidents then under arrest or imprisoned. She well understood the Soviet communist mind, as well as the sick left-wingers who sympathized with it and its nefarious machinations. Quoth Kirkpatrick, "When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame America first." True in the 80's...and true now. (Witness the present-day leftist love affair with Hugo Chavez.) She also understood the United Nations as it really was (and continues to be today): "As I watched the behavior of the nations of the U.N. (including our own), I found no reasonable ground to expect any one of those governments to transcend permanently their own national interests for those of another country."

Rest in peace, Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Noteable Passing

2006-12-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

Milton Friedman, free market economist, Nobel laureate, and pre-eminent scholar, passed about a week ago, aged 91. His book, Free To Choose, was proof of the power of the written word and how it can change the world. His free-market philosophies were instrumental in shaping the policies of Ronald Reagan, which subsequently led to an American economic renaissance. (Reference a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back ninety years, and you'll see what I mean. The Dow was unable to break 1000 for three-plus decades; after 1982, it broke 1000 and never looked back.) Additionally, nations that espoused his economic philosophies like Estonia, Chile, and Iceland have prospered accordingly, and have put themselves in a considerably more competitive position than their socialist counterparts.

All Americans owe him a debt of gratitude....even left-wing ones. (Although hell will freeze over before they do that!)

Still Nonplussed....

2006-12-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

...about this story regarding Princess Diana and the U.S. Secret Service bugging her.

Murder Inc.

2006-12-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

On the heels of the mushy, compromising Iraqi Study Group report, the great Victor Davis Hanson puts it all in perspective:

In this new realist push, amid constant reminders that we once talked to the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan is often evoked-but not the Ronald Reagan who in a high-stakes effort, fraught with risk, pushed the Soviet Union to the brink, or bombed Tripoli to remind Khadafi of the consequences of his terror, but apparently the Ronald Reagan who abruptly left Lebanon and allowed surrogates to talk with Iran to trade arms for hostages.

So the new revisionist image is perhaps that Reagan was a sort of realist who accepted the world as it was, and avoided the zealotry associated with the sweeping Axis of Evil rhetoric of George Bush. But I remember another "evil empire" Reagan who sought to address bluntly wrong as he saw it. And I was reminded of that when glancing at old news accounts such as the following 1985 New York Times piece that started, "President Reagan today characterized Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua as ''a confederation of terrorist states'' that had carried out ''outright acts of war'' against the United States. The President said the five nations were ''a new, international version of Murder Inc.''

"Murder Incorporated" then sounded a lot like "Axis of Evil" does now.

And re: Iraq. I remember as well the old conventional wisdom that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a terrorist haven. As far back as 1990, Congressman Broomfield, for example, inserted the following into the Congressional Record, " New reports reveal that in the past few months, the Iraqi leader has built a network of old and new terrorist allies who could be called upon to conduct terrorist operations against American interests. Among Saddam's new friends are notorious terrorists Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu Iyad—all star performers in the sordid world of international terrorism. As many as 1,400 terrorist operatives may now be living in Iraq as guests of Saddam Hussein. Iraqi involvement with terrorist groups is so extensive that the Department of State recently put Iraq back on the list of countries that support terrorism."

More Fakery In The Mainstream Media

2006-12-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

For those of you who read this blog, I feel it necessary to communicate or pass along stories that I come across through my internet reading. I'm fairly certain that the majority of you are not aware of this story, as it has only been percolating in the blogosphere and nowhere else. For the last few years, there's been an Associated Press source by the name of Jamil Hussein, who allegedly is a member of the Iraqi Police Force. Mr. Hussein has consistently handed over stories to AP regarding acts of terrorism, sectarian violence, and things of this nature. Recently, Mr. Hussein told AP (which AP communicated through its media tentacles) of six Sunnis were burned to death in a mosque by Shia terrorists. There's one problem with this story: the Iraqi police and U.S. forces in Iraq say it never happened. Worse than that, the Iraqi police claim that Mr. Hussein is not on the Iraqi Police Force (as AP claimed), and frankly, don't even know if this person exists. AP, of course, stands by their story. This comes on the heels of another AP scandal involving a source, named Bilal Hussein. This particular Mr. Hussein, a photographer and reporter, seemed to have a strange way of being in or around al Qaeda types. He was inevitably arrested in Fallujah in a bomb factory, with a known al Qaeda bomb-maker, and had traces of explosive material on his clothes and hands. Nice. You can read all about it here.

The conclusion? It is becoming readily apparent that the Islamo-terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere had a willing propaganda arm in the Associated Press. This is extraordinarily disturbing, as a major international news organization, perhaps the largest, is knowingly printing unverified stories of atrocities from shady (if not non-existent) sources, and also printing pictures taken by known terrorist sympathizers (as is the case of Bilal Hussein). What is really happening on the ground in Iraq? Hard to say, but the best I can advise to anyone reading this blog on a regular basis is to not trust anything printed by the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, or the BBC. All of the aforementioned have been found guilty of trafficking in leaked stories compromising U.S. war efforts, communicating terrorist propaganda, and knowingly printing fake and/or staged photos (as was the case during the brief Israeli/Hezbollah conflagration).

There was a time when I was in college (and green as a blade of grass) when I aspired to be a journalist, specifically one that would go to dangerous, far-away locations and dodge bullets in pursuit of a story. It sounded dashing and romantic at the time, and on some level, it still does. But given the real state of western journalism, I thank my lucky stars that I didn't. Western journalists aren't truth seekers. It is apparent now that they are haters of the West, specifically America and Israel, and feel a duty to communicate propaganda, publish photoshopped pics, print stories of dubious veracity, and splatter leaked government anti-terrorist actions onto their front pages....and compromise the safety of Americans in the process. Western journalists appear to want to save the world from American and Israeli hegemony, and will bed down with the worst bloodthirty gutterspines in the world to do it. (Kind of like Jimmy Carter...)

For shame.

More Woes For The New York Times

2006-12-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Whilst "Pinch" Sulzberger, the baby-boomer snot who lucked out by being born into the Times-owning family who's name he bears, runs the brand into the ground, the Wall Street wolves are gathering outside the house of the Old Grey Lady. This time, it's not just Morgan Stanley Asset Management that is agitating to knock off the boy-king, but now Hank Greenberg, the erstwhile CEO of AIG, is champing at the bit. Read about it here.

Proof Yet Again That Reagan Had Nothing To Do With The Collapse Of The USSR....

2006-11-28T18:14:00.000-08:00

Read all about how the American arms build-up had nothing to do with bankrupting the Soviets here. In related news, the U.S. Constitution would've been written pretty much the same without Alexander Hamilton, and Germany would've went Nazi even without Hitler. Also, the Yankees would've won the 1977 World Series without Reggie Jackson, and the Civil War would've been won for the Union without Abe Lincoln's stewardship.

The Last Words Of Alexander Litvinenko

2006-11-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

Murdered Russian Alexander Litvinenko, critic of Vladimir Putin and avowed democrat (note small 'd') made this signed statement shortly before he passed away:

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me; the British police who are pursuing my case with vigor and professionalism and are watching over me and my family. I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honored to be a British citizen.
I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.
I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.
But as I lie here, I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.
You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.
You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value.
You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.
You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

Fill In The Blanks

2006-11-24T08:50:00.001-08:00

A former Russian spy and sharp critic of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, gets poisoned to death in London. Mr. Litvinenko had an intense interest in revealing who murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was just the latest in a string of Russian journalists who've been murdered in the last half-decade in and outside of Russia. Additionally, Boris Khodorkovsky, a billionaire critic and political rival of Vladimir Putin's, received 20 years for essentially trumped-up charges. At the same time, while Russia (and China) consistently block any sanctions against the soon-to-be nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran on the U.N. Security Council, they sell anti-aircraft missles to said Iranians. Putin has also dispatched the head of Russia nuclear agency to Iran this past week.

Draw your own conclusions from this, but these are mine:

Putin is consolidating his power by slowly but surely eliminating all dissent in the press, in business, or by Russian defectors. Putin is former KGB; he is a formidible man intellectually, and was inculcated with a cold-blooded, Stalinist ethic through his KGB experiences. He is clearly seeking to destroy Russian democracy (fragile as it is) internally, while he is using the Iranians to do his dirty work (i.e. wage jihad on the West). It would not surprise me to find out that Russia has increased its military budget significantly in the last five years. Where this leads to, I don't know. But it is no place desireable.

Funny Stuff

2006-11-18T17:28:00.000-08:00

Parodies of those annoying Che Guevara t-shirts can be found here. Very entertaining.

Why We Won't Win (Until We Remember This....)

2006-11-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

"War is cruel, and there's no use in trying to refine it. The more cruel it is, the sooner it is over."

--General William Tecumseh Sherman

Ralph Peters on Iraq

2006-11-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

I take absolutely no stock in any left-wing op-ed writers at all when it comes to Bush, Iraq, terrorism, taxes, etc. So burdened are they with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) that they're incapable of saying anything cogent or truthful. Ralph Peters, ex-military and former intel operative, is a whole different kettle of fish. Much as it pains me to read his pieces, they're spot-on, honest, and at times, brutal. He is one of the few writers worth reading regarding the War on Terror, and he's worth the read if you really want to know what is going on in Iraq. Catch it here.

Retired Husband Syndrome....A Japanese Phenomenon

2006-11-15T18:15:00.000-08:00

I picked this up from John Derbyshire of the National Review. Seems that there's a bit of a crisis going on amongst retired Japanese men and their spouses. The Japanese, noted for their intense work ethic (twelve hour days are de rigeur), spend the better part of their adult lives at work; home is for sleeping...nothing more. As a result, man and wife develop separate lives under the same roof over the course of decades. When the man retires, he drives his wife crazy. Or so it goes in Japan. You can read all about it here.

Random Thoughts 11/10/06

2006-11-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

Ah....so much to talk about.....where to start?

Election:

Well, I guess it had to happen sometime. Consistently sloppy behavior from the numbskull members of the Congressional GOP for starters. Let's round it all up: Foley, Ney, DeLay, Cunningham, topped off with Jack Abramoff with a cherry on top. As for Bush, I don't blame him for Katrina per se (the governor and the mayor, who were largely responsible for the evacuation, rescue, and security of New Orleans revealed themselves to be empty suits), but he underreact in the aftermath, and clearly did not show leadership. Bush's appointment of this "Brownie" character to FEMA, obviously a sinecure granted as a favor to someone, paid bitter dividends. (Patronage NEVER works!) The nation isn't angry at Bush because of Iraq (in my opinion), they're angry because we're not playing to win. (We're quite clearly playing not to lose...which inevitably leads to losing.) Kudos to the Dems for finding right-of-center Democrats to run, which inevitably lead them to their majorities in both the House and Senate. (I do like Jim Webb of Virginia, btw.) In the end, a lack of competition in the war of ideas leads to sloth and corruption, and the GOP needs to get back to their core values: cuttings government spending, cutting taxes, vigorous defense. I'm also starting to gravitate towards Pat Buchanan's philosophy that perhaps its time for America to withdraw from the world and stop being everyone's nanny. Western Europe, with their sanctimonious tut-tutting, should take the leadership with this stuff. No more Americans in Germany, South Korea, or the former Yugoslavia. In the abstract, all of these people hate us. In the real world however, they quiver at the thought that the blanket of security that we provide the Europeans and the Asians (South Korea in particular) could possibly be removed. I also think it is high-time that America consider suspending its active participation in the United Nations. If the world hates us for all that we do for it, perhaps they should taste the bitter fruits of a world without the United States protecting it. That's my two-cents on that note.

Other Stuff:

I'm shocked, shocked at the news that Britney Spears and her "trash-tastic" (a New York Post phrase) hubby Kevin Federline are breaking up. I'm similarly shocked about the Ryan Philipe/Reese Witherspoon break-up. I'm also utterly amazed at the new shampoo I'm using...Pantene. I've never gotten more compliments about my hair. Awesome.

I pulled back from reading anymore ancient history stuff written by ancient historians. I recently got the urge to read Herodotus' The Histories, which documents the Greco-Persion wars. Written approximately 2700 years ago, this work is considered the first historical document in history. But after slogging through Thucydides' History of the Pelopennian Wars, I just couldn't bring myself to read another 500 to 700 page tome that is the textual equivalent of eating sand. So I settled on reading some relatively light stuff, like Lance Armstrong's biographical It's Not About The Bike, Andy Summers' (of The Police) One Train Later, and Neil Peart's journal on touring with band (and in-between gigs) on motorcycle, Roadshow. What I read after this welterweight fare, I do not know. But at this point, I'm not sure I can read anything political or martial for a while, so I might stay in this relatively light-hearted zone for the time being. Truth be told, I'm in a better mood when I'm reading the lighter stuff.

Very much looking forward to the Borat movie. Might catch it this weekend. Jeshamesh.

That's all for now, folks. May the road rise up to meet you, and may the wind be at your back.

Online Radio

2006-11-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

For those of you looking for some different music or stuff that you've never heard before, try Pandora. It's a free service, and I've heard some very good stuff on it. Just to give you an idea of how it works: You type in the band you want to hear, they find a station that plays that band, as well as other bands that are similar. Somehow after typing in "Emerson, Lake, and Palmer" I came across a band called Aphrodite's Child, featuring Vangelis. Never heard them before, and they turned out to be pretty good. As a result, I'm ordering one of their CDs from Amazon.

Current pop music is awful, but there's a wealth of stuff from the past that I've never heard. If discovering old music is my way of discovering new music....well, good enough.

Let Us Take A Moment This November 4th....

2006-11-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

To reflect upon the legacy of the Jimmy Carter era. Please note the person center-right in the photo: Current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been identified by five former hostages as having been a participant in the storming of and subsequent imprisonment of the American embassy personnel.

Thanks Jimmy! (You f*ckin' loser.)

Heard At A New York Rangers Game

2006-11-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

A lackadaisical hockey performance at the last game I attended at the Garden resulted in one of the more clever chants/screams I've heard at a hockey game: "Old time hockey!!!!" To which someone else screamed "Eddie f*ckin' Shore!!!"

It was more of a cry for help than anything else. Those of you who've seen Slapshot know what these chants mean.

If

2006-11-02T17:46:00.000-08:00

Recently was reminded of this work by Kipling. Worth the read.

Perhaps Kerry Can Try This Excuse....

2006-11-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is as good as any.....

And while we're still on the subject, read the great Victor Davis Hanson's take below:

Kerryism

Kerry surely must be one of the saddest Democratic liabilities around. Some afterthoughts about his latest gaffe, which is one of those rare glimpses into an entire troubled ideology:

(1) How could John Kerry, born into privilege, and then marrying and divorcing and marrying out of and back into greater inherited wealth, lecture anyone at a city college about the ingredients for success in America? If he were to give personal advice about making it, it would have to be to marry rich women. Nothing he has accomplished as a senator or candidate reveals either much natural intelligence or singular education. Today, Democrats must be wondering why they have embraced an overrated empty suit, and ostracized a real talent like Joe Lieberman.

(2) How could Kerry possibly claim that he was thinking of the uneducated in the context of George Bush, who, after all, went to Harvard and Yale?

(3) Some of the brightest and most educated Americans are not only in the military, but veterans of Iraq. Two of the best educated minds I have met-Col. Bill Hix and Lt. Col. Chris Gibson, both Hoover Security Fellows-were both Iraqi veterans. What is striking about visiting Iraq is the wealth of talent there, from privates to generals. Without being gratuitously cruel, the problem of mediocrity is not in the ranks of the military, but on our university campuses, where half-educated professors and non-serious students killing time are ubiquitous. Personally, I'd wager the intelligence of a Marine Corps private any day over the average D.C. journalist. Every naval officer I met at the USNA, without exception, seemed brighter than John Kerry, whose "brilliance", after all, has managed to offend millions of voters on the eve of a pivotal election. If the Democrats lose, it will be almost painful to watch the recriminations against Kerry fly.

(4) This is not the first, but third, time he has denigrated soldiers in the middle of a war-and there is a systematic theme: John Kerry's assumed superior morality allows him to pass judgment from on high about supposedly lesser folk who become tools of a suspect military: thus we go from limb-loppers and Genghis' hordes to terrorists to dead-beats. The only constant is that the haughtiness is always delivered in the same sanctimonious, self-righteous, and patronizing tone.

(5) The mea culpa that Democrats are blaming the war and not the warriors is laughable after Sens. Durbin, Kennedy, and Kerry have collectively compared American soldiers to Nazis, Pol Pot's killers, Stalinists, terrorists, and Baathists.

(6) The problem is that Kerry is not just a senator, but the most recent presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, and thus in some sense, especially given the diminution of Howard Dean, the megaphone of the entire party.

(7) His pathetic clarification, as he blamed everyone from Tony Snow to Rush Limbaugh, displayed the same Al Gore derangement syndrome, and thus raises a larger question: what is it about George Bush that seems to reduce once sober and experienced liberal pros to infantile ranting?

(8) And why is the supposedly lame Bush so careful in speech, and the self-acclaimed geniuses like a Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, or Howard Dean serially spouting ever more stupidities? For all the Democrats' criticism of George Bush, I can't think of a modern President who has so infrequently put his foot in his public mouth, and, by the same token, can't think of any opposition that on the eve of elections seems to have an almost pathological death wish.

The Democrats should use this occasion to have an autopsy of Kerryism, or this strange new tony liberalism, that has turned noblisse oblige on its head. It used to be that millionaire FDRs and JFKs felt sympathy for those of the lower classes and wished to ensure that the hoi polloi had some shot at the American dream. But today's elite liberals-a Howard Dean, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, George Soros, Ted Turner-love the high life and playact at being leftists simply because they are already insulated from the effects of their own nostrums that always come at someone poorer's expense while providing them some sort of psychological relief from guilt. Poor Harry Truman must be turning over in his grave-from bourbon, cigars, and poker to wind-surfing and L.L. Bean costume of the day says it all.

Supporting Our Troops

2006-11-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

by Mark Steyn

If you talk to Democrats of the middle-class and upper-middle-class and (in John Heinz Kerry’s case) the neo-Gulf-emir-class, you’ll have heard the same thing a thousand times: these poor fellows in Iraq, they’re only there because they’re too poverty-stricken and ill-educated so they couldn’t become Senators and New York Times reporters and tenured Queer Studies professors like normal Americans do. That is, in fact, what they mean by the claim that they “support our troops”: they want to bring them home and retrain them so they’re not forced into taking jobs as Bush’s torturers and thugs. It’s part of the same condescension as describing soldiers as “our children”. If a 22-year old intern wants to drop to the Oval Office broadloom, she’s a grown woman exercising her freedom of choice. But, if a 28-year old guy wants to serve in Iraq, he’s a poor wee misguided Grade Six drop-out who doesn’t know any better. John Kerry’s soundbite is interesting not because it’s the umpteenth self-inflicted wound by Mister Nuance but because it gets right to the heart of the Democrats’ “support” for the troops.

Cultural Churning

2006-10-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

The term "churning" in broker parlance means buying and selling stocks merely to generate a commission, and is an action undertaken by a broker for the express purpose of augmenting their paycheck. It is never in the best interests of the client, and it inevitably leads to unnecessary losses in the client's account.

Given this terminology, I've come to a certain realization about American culture: it is churning itself. Specifically amongst the creative industries from which America entertains itself. Having been in the theatre district on the west side of Manhattan last night (to see the great and still electric Alice Cooper), I passed by the following Broadway plays: The Color Purple, Jersey Boys, and The Times Are A' Changin'. To those of you not terribly informed on these three plays, let me sum up: The Color Purple was a book made into a movie, and now into a Broadway play. Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Times is a Broadway play based on the music of Bob Dylan. In recent years, Broadway has had long running hits in the form of The Producers (based on the 60's movie, starring Gene Wilder), The Odd Couple (starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in the movie version, Jack Klugman and Tony Randall in the television version), and Annie Get Your Gun (based off of an earlier Broadway play), Movin' Out (based on the music of Billy Joel). If you don't sense where I'm going with this, I'll clarify: Broadway producers have no interest in getting behind anything that doesn't already have automatic cultural recognition and already proven marketability. I certainly can understand this, as producing a Broadway play is one of the most speculative endeavors a venture capitalist can take up. But the end result is that, again, this is a form of churning. American culture has already discovered and enjoyed The Odd Couple, The Producers, and The Color Purple. What is the sense of turning a movie and/or a television show into a Broadway play when most people who are going to go see it have already seen it on the big/small screen several years before? The sense, clearly, is money. It certainly isn't creativity.

This hardly extends to Broadway. American cinema is littered with big budget movies, sprinkled with guaranteed marquee appeal via mediocre remakes of movies past. Of course, there's always the three or four sequels that come out from a successful movie (Saw I,II,III; Batman (five or six sequels), Superman, The Fantasic Four (sequel currently in production). Heck, they even remade The Manchurian Candidate (it was awful....the sequel, that is). Solomon once said there's nothing new under the sun. Ain't that the truth.

Then, of course, we have music....an absolute wasteland of retreaded riffs, lyrics, subject matter, guitars, amps, and poses. I can't even get into rap because to call it unlistenable is an insult to unlistenable music. Ornette Coleman was unlistenable, but at least he was original. Listening to sheet metal cut by a buzz-saw...that's unlistenable. All these are preferable to listening to, say, DMX or Ludacris. But...I digress.

This all crystallized in my mind the last 24 hours because I realized after seeing Alice Cooper last night that the man is still viable, still writes catchy, deviant heavy pop, and he puts on a wholly original, fun, rockin' show. Alice can't fill Madison Square Garden thirty-three years after his apex, but he still has enough appeal to fill Roseland Ballroom with two or three thousand sickos. (Like myself and my brother.) Alice was a groundbreaker in his day, both musically and theatrically. So was Bowie, and so was Peter Gabriel. All three were primary movers in turning a rock concert into rock theatre, and all three had groundbreaking music. The question I have, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is whether it is due to a lack of creativity on the part of the music business (and the theatre and movie businesses) that nothing pushes the boundaries anymore, or whether there are no more boundaries to be pushed. Has the soundscape of music been completely surveyed and accounted for? Are there no more original riffs to be had? Is there no more subject matter left to be explored? Are there no more voices, no more original chord progressions, to be put together? And on a wider scale, is there no more dramatic subject matter left to be explored?

Has music, theatre, and cinema finally confronted everything that can be confronted, written about, and played? Retread plays, music, and movies makes money for the suits, no doubt. But maybe, just maybe, they don't really have much of a choice in the matter; perhaps it is the "artists" who've let down the suits.

1956

2006-10-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

October 23rd marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet repression in 1956. This has particular resonance with me, as I've actually been to Budapest (in 2000) and felt and saw the long term ripple effect of this event. One cannot avoid it in Budapest, particularly on the Pest side of the Danube River. Building walls still bear the pock-marks of exploded artillary damage, as well as bullet holes from the fire-fights between Hungarian freedom-fighters* and the repressive Soviet Red Army sent there to crush them. It was a haunting city in that it was only emerging, even in 2000, from forty-five plus years of Soviet repression. This pictoral history tells the story of the Hungarian revolt of 1956.

*Just to clarify: one man's terrorist is not another man's freedom fighter. It's hard to say you're a freedom fighter when your ultimate goal is absolute power over the masses. Ergo, people like Che Guevara and/or Yassir Arafat were not "freedom fighters". They didn't fight for freedom; they fought for repression, power, and the ability to exploit the masses, not to give them a democratic, free life.

Sting Says "Rock Is Stale"; Spitfire Says "He's Right"

2006-10-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've been decrying the utter lack of creativity and originality in rock for some time. Sting obviously agrees with me. For me, the last gasp of anything remotely creative in the rock idiom was probably the Grunge movement in the early 90's. That said, I think that Nirvana were the single most overrated band of the day.

Who Owns The Middle East?

2006-10-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

Depends on who you ask. This map (very cool, by the way) tells the story of who controlled the Middle East dating back to 3000 B.C.

Back...Somewhat

2006-10-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

Between vacation, recovery from said vacation, work, moving into a new apartment, and having little-to-no access to a computer (outside of work, of course), blogging has somehow fallen through the cracks in terms of "stuff to do". I'll try to rectify that in the coming weeks, as I'm in the process of getting a brand new Apple computer, as well as alot of household items, like garbage cans, furniture, lights, etc. That said, a quick breakdown of news, sports, music, and other "earth-shaking minutiae":

Sometimes it is easy to forget how deeply Christian this nation is, but on my trip back from Cincinnati, I saw roadside billboards with Bible tracts at least five to six times per 200 miles. Living in NYC kind of gives one the impression that Christianity doesn't even exist, but it is encouraging that out in the "heartland" that there's still a strong faith in God. Five years ago I wouldn't have really paid it much mind, but 9/11 has changed my perspective on a number of things, not the least of which is our shared Judeo-Christian heritage here in America, and how important it is for us to remember who we are and how we got here. Bush has remarked that there is, perhaps, a "third Great Awakening" underway in this nation. Could be. And if there is, I'd say the Islamo-terrorist threat that is upon us is a primary reason why. If you care to find out about the history of "Great Awakenings" in the history of this nation, you can read about them here and here. Without these events, this nation would've never even materialized, much less seen the abolition of slavery, which was, for the most part, prompted by people the Left now scorns (i.e. evangelicals, as well as Christians of various other Protestant demonitions). Read about it here, here, and here.

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but former President Clinton's performance on Fox was quite an event. Many have speculated that his flip-out was contrived. I vehemently disagree. He may be quite an actor, but that was rage on his visage. He had to have known the question was coming, and he might've been champing at the bit to disgorge his pent-up rage, but I don't think his anger wasn't genuine; after all, the interview came about a week and a half after ABC's compelling Path to 9/11 docudrama, which didn't exactly paint Clinton's administration particularly well. The problem with Clinton is that, while I'm not a hater of the man, he's just plum full of sh*t. During his presidency, his prevarications didn't really bother me, because in the end, all politicians "gild the lilly" to some extent. But what Clinton fails to understand these days is that his canards can be easily disassembled through a mere click of a computer mouse. In the old days, one would have to go through a mountain of microfiche to check a politician's statements. But we're in the internet age, and Clinton's contentions don't stand up to scrutiny. Many bloggers and pundits have deconstructed Clinton's assertions for the last few weeks, so you can take it upon yourself to shop the internet for them; I'll not bore you with them given this circumstance. But Clinton's cowardice through the 90's, and his subsequenty efforts to re-write history has really made me reassess the man's presidency. I've written in the past that history unfolds years after the actual events. Things that seemed great at the time wind up looking awful years, or even decades later. Conversely, things that seemed awful at the time wind up looking much better through the prism of history. Lefties years back were fond of saying that Clinton left the White House with the highest approval rating of any exiting executive in history. Harry Truman left with perhaps the worst approval rating. In the end, who do you think history is going to favor?

One of the more annoying sayings that people express is that "religion is responsible for all the killing and war through history." This is one of those insipid comments that people with no historical perspective make to make themselves sound smart and sophisticated. Of course, what these people always fail to take into account is the eighty years of slaughter that occurred at the hands of communists, who were atheists. I've had discussions with defenders of communism about this, and their default position is always that atheism is only an ancillary principle to the ideology. Nonsense. It is central to their ideology. To wit: "Our ancestors left us with the two most essential heritages, which are atheism and great unity", and "If we let all Chinese people listen to God and follow God, who will obediently listen to us [i.e. the CCP] and follow us?" These quotes were uttered by Chi Haotian, Secretary of Defense for the Red Chinese, in 2003. If you need to get an idea of what atheism, vis-a-vis communism, has cost the world in terms of human carnage, look at this graph.

Recent concerts attended: Jeff Beck and (what's left of) The Who. To my mind, Jeff Beck smoked the venue, playing all of his greatest material (Led Boots, Star Cycle, Blue Wind, etc.) and brought out a band that absolutely rocked. My take on The Who is considerably less sanguine. Though I still love 'em (I saw them on the last tour with John Entwistle in 2000...a story in itself), I have to say that I didn't sense alot of energy coming off the stage. To me, the thrill is gone. I've resisted seeing them the last few tours since the passing of the great Entwistle on bass, and after having attended their show at Madison Square Garden, I have to say that I was probably right in resisting. Worth seeing, but only as a last hurrah.

Well, the Yanks are in the playoff, as are the Mets. We might get another Subway Series here in NYC. Not exciting for the rest of the nation, but we dig 'em. Here's to hopin'!

On Vacation

2006-09-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry 'bout the skint postings as of late. As usual, a combination of work schedule, drained energy, and moving into new digs as rendered me devoid of an original thought or idea. That said, I anticipate that I'll be posting with much more vigor and frequency in the coming weeks/months. Stay tuned for some fresh postings in the future in mid-September. I'll blog if I can, when I can. Cheers.

The Greatest Man of the 20th Century, On Islam

2006-08-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."
-Sir Winston Churchil l (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages
248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

Appeasement Begets...

2006-08-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

If it wasn't so sad it would be funny. But alas, it is sad. Germany, socialist appeaser to the muslims (along with the French), gets targeted for an act of terror and can't quite fathom why. After all, when you add it all up, there's no reason why they would be targeted, right? Let's go through the checklist:

a.) Criticized and obstructed United States and British efforts to combat world-wide Islamo-terrorism: check.
b.) Killed six million Jews sixty years ago: check.*
c.) Didn't participate in the Iraqi expedition, and if anything, was openly hostile to it: check.
d.) Routinely preaches tolerance of Islam, and faults the U.S. for creating more Islamo-terrorism: check.

I could probably come up with another twenty, but you get the point. All of these things, the Germans surmised, would grant them immunity from the Islamic rage with all things non-Mohammedan. Like all appeasers, they have been proven wrong. Winston Churchill once said that appeasement as a policy was the same as feeding your friends to the crocodiles in the hopes that you'll be eaten last. Not exactly a winning strategy, ol' Winston was trying to say. Read about Germany's terrorist plot below:

Train bombing plot surprises Germany
By DAVID RISING, Associated Press WriterTue Aug 22, 6:19 PM ET

A Lebanese student suspected of planting a train bomb that failed to explode had contacts in Hamburg, authorities said Tuesday, the latest link to the northern port city where three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots prepared for their attacks.

The planned attack here stunned Germans who thought the country's vehement opposition to the Iraq war would insulate it from becoming a terror target almost five years after the attacks on Washington and New York.

The main suspect, identified by authorities as 21-year-old Youssef Mohamad el Hajdib, was arrested Saturday in Kiel, about 30 miles north of Hamburg, on suspicion of placing one of two suitcase bombs in German trains on July 31.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors said they had identified a second key suspect, while police searched his Cologne apartment as well as addresses in Kiel and Oberhausen.

ZDF television showed police leading away one man in handcuffs after one of the raids, and said another person had also been detained.

However, prosecutors said a suspected bomber, whose name they did not release, remains at large.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper cited investigators as saying the men were suspected of having contact with the radical Islamic movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Authorities are investigating ties between the suspects and the Muslim community in Hamburg, where Sept. 11 suicide pilots Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah all lived undetected before moving to the United States to attend flight schools, said Manfred Murck, deputy head of the Hamburg state agency that tracks extremism.

"It seems like we do, once again, have some contacts to Hamburg, which is not really surprising," he said. "If somebody lives in Kiel and feels involved in the Islamist scene, it seems to be more or less plausible that he may have a friend or a mosque to visit in Hamburg."

Murck would not elaborate, saying only "we are working, of course, to find out what in our files can help us to identify possible contact persons."

German authorities were widely criticized for not picking up on the Sept. 11 plot, and stiffened counterterrorism laws in the wake of the attacks, though with police-state excesses of the country's Nazi past in mind, were wary of going too far.

While there have been other terrorism plots uncovered since Sept. 11, none has come so close to success.

"I have always said we are threatened by terrorism, and the threat has never been so near," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told ZDF television after el Hajdib's arrest, calling the case "unusually serious."

Where Germany before Sept. 11 was seen as a relatively comfortable base for terrorists to live and operate — but not a target — that is no longer the case, said Kai Hirschmann, deputy director of Essen's Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy.

"Intelligence agencies and police are now very much trying to arrest them ... and the scene is under constant surveillance," Hirschmann said.

Germany is also seen as being on the side of the U.S. and Britain, despite its opposition to the Iraq war, for helping train Iraqi police and military outside the country, taking a large role in operations in Afghanistan, and making other contributions to the so-called "war on terror," he said.

In the failed train bombings, the evidence points to poorly trained radicals not closely linked to terrorist networks, Hirschmann said.

The bombs were cobbled together from propane barbecue canisters to be triggered with gasoline and makeshift detonators that went off but failed to ignite the gas. They were found in suitcases on regional trains in Dortmund and Koblenz.

"It looked rather rushed or amateur. There might be some connection with the Islamist network, the jihad network, but not in the sense that we witnessed in Madrid or London," Hirschmann said, referring to the train bombings in Madrid and the London subway bombings.

Photojounalism In Crisis

2006-08-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both."

By David D. Perlmutter

(August 17, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks on the people who take news pictures and on the basic premise that nonfiction news photo- and videography is possible.

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

Perhaps it would be more reassuring if the enemy at the gates was a familiar one—politicians, or maybe radio talk show hosts. But the photojournalist standing on the crumbling ramparts of her once proud citadel now sees the vandal army charging for the sack led by “zombietime,” “The Jawa Report,” “Powerline,” “Little Green Footballs,” “confederateyankee,” and many others.

In each case, these bloggers have engaged in the kind of probing, contextual, fact-based (if occasionally speculative) media criticism I have always asked of my students. And the results have been devastating: news photos and video shown to be miscaptioned, radically altered, or staged (and worse, re-staged) for the camera. Surely “green helmet guy,” “double smoke,” “the missiles that were actually flares,” “the wedding mannequin from nowhere,” the “magical burning Koran,” the “little girl who actually fell off a swing” and “keep filming!” will now enter the pantheon of shame of photojournalism.

A few photo-illusions are probably due to the lust for the most sensational or striking-looking image—that is, more aesthetic bias than political prejudice. Also, many photographers know that war victims are money shots and some will break the rules of the profession to cash in. But true as well is that local stringers and visiting anchors alike seem to have succumbed either to lens-enabled Stockholm syndrome or accepted being the uncredited Hezbollah staff photographer so as to be able to file stories and images in militia-controlled areas.

It does not help that certain news organizations have acted like government officials or corporate officers trying to squash a scandal. The visual historian in me revolts when an ABC producer informs me that Reuters “deleted all 920 images” by the stringer who produced the “Beirut double smoke” image and is “less than willing to talk about it.” Can you say “18-minute gap,” anyone?

There is one great irony here. From a historical perspective, this is the golden age of photojournalistic ethics. In previous eras wild retouching, rearranging, cutting of images and even staging and restaging of events for the camera were commonly accepted in the trade. As someone who has written a history of images of war, I can testify there is more honesty in war photography today than ever in the past in any medium or any war--but there is, of course, much more scrutiny as well.

The main point is that we are now at a social, political and technological crossroads for media—amateur, industrial, and all points and persons in between. First, we live in Photoshop-CGI culture. People are accustomed to watching the amazing special effects of modern movies, where it seems any scene that can be imagined can be pixilated into appearing photorealistic. On our desktop, many of us are photoshopping our lives, manipulating family photos with ease.

In addition, in a digital-Internet-satellite age, any image on the Web can be altered by anyone into any new image and there is no “original,” as in a negative, to prove which was first. The icons are sacred no longer. Finally, there are the bloggers: the visual or word journalist is not only overseen by a familiar hierarchy of editors or producers but by many independents who will scan, query, trade observations, and blast what they think is an error or manipulation to the entire world.

News picture-making media organizations have two paths of possible response to this unnerving new situation. First, they can stonewall, deny, delete, dismiss, counter-slur, or ignore the problem. To some extent, this is what is happening now and, ethical consideration aside, such a strategy is the practical equivalent of taking extra photos of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The second, much more painful option, is to implement your ideals, the ones we still teach in journalism school. Admit mistakes right away. Correct them with as much fanfare and surface area as you devoted to the original image. Create task forces and investigating panels. Don’t delete archives but publish them along with detailed descriptions of what went wrong. Attend to your critics and diversify the sources of imagery, or better yet be brave enough to refuse to show any images of scenes in which you are being told what to show. I would even love to see special inserts or mini-documentaries on how to spot photo bias or photo fakery—in other words, be as transparent, unarrogant, and responsive as you expect those you cover to be.

The stakes are high. Democracy is based on the premise that it is acceptable for people to believe that some politicians or news media are lying to them; democracy collapses when the public believes that everybody in government and the press is lying to them.

And what of future victims of war? Will the public deny them their sorrows because we will dismiss all smoking rubble and dead children as mere digital propaganda?

Photojournalism must live, but not if its practitioners and owners are determined to jump into the abyss.

The Real War ...

2006-08-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

…one more time.

By Michael Ledeen

Watching the war in Lebanon and listening to the debate about it, is just like watching the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its attendant debate. Israelis are demanding the resignation of Olmert, just as Americans are demanding the head of Bush. Israeli military experts, real and self-proclaimed, are explaining how the Lebanon war could have been won, if only the ground campaign had started earlier, or had been more ambitious. American strategists of varying competence are explaining how the Iraq war could have been won, if only there were more boots on the ground, or if only a different strategy had been employed, or if only the Baathist army had been kept intact.
I think it’s nonsense. Both campaigns and both debates suffer from the same narrow focus, the same failure of strategic vision, the same obsession with a single campaign in a single place, when the war itself — the real war — is far wider. Our leaders and our pundits are fighting single battles, and, since their strategies are not designed to win the real war, they are doomed to fail. The failure of strategic vision is not unique to politicians, or pundits, or military strategists; it seems common to them all. It is extremely rare to hear an authoritative voice addressing the real war.

The terror masters in Syria and Iran are waging a regional war against us, running from Afghanistan and Iraq to, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon. Alongside the ground war in the Middle East, they are conducting fifth-column operations against us from Europe to India and on to Indonesia, Australia, and the United States; the plot just dismantled in Great Britain provides the latest evidence.

Israel cannot destroy Hezbollah by fighting in Lebanon alone, just as we cannot provide Iraq and Afghanistan with decent security by fighting only there. The destruction of Hezbollah requires regime change in Damascus. Security in Iraq and Afghanistan requires regime change in Damascus and Tehran. Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not separate conflicts. They are battlefields in a regional war.

Even if the Israelis had conducted a brilliant campaign that killed every single Hezbollah terrorist in Lebanon, it would only have bought time. The Syrians and Iranians would have restocked, rearmed and resupplied the Hezbollahis, and prepared for the next battle. But if the Assad regime were replaced with a government opposed to terrorism and committed to freedom, Hezbollah would die of logistical starvation, cut off from money, weapons, training facilities, and the crucial support of Syrian and Iranian military and intelligence organizations.

In like manner, even if we continue to win every battle in every region of Iraq and Afghanistan, we will only prolong the fighting. The Iranians and their various allies inside Iraq, from the Baathist remnant to the Sadrists to Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and other foreign terrorists, would continue to infiltrate the country, buy agents within Iraq, develop new generations of IEDs and smuggle ever more accurate rockets and missiles to use against us and the Iraqi forces of order. They will do the same in Afghanistan. But if the mullahcracy is replaced by a government empowered by the tens of millions of pro-American and pro-democracy people now oppressed by the evil terror masters in Tehran, the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan would be quickly transformed into a manageable operation with the balance of power overwhelmingly on the side of the governments.

The longer we wait, the larger the real war becomes. Iran has been at war with us for 27 years and we have yet to respond. As time passes, and our fecklessness is confirmed, the mullahs’ confidence grows. Surely they must believe that their moment has come, that we will never respond, that they can bloody us and force us to retreat. That is the clear lesson of Lebanon, and they are undoubtedly raising the stakes for the next round. The Iranian missiles used against Israeli warships off the coast of Lebanon are now pouring into Somalia, and will be used against our ships in one of the most strategically sensitive areas of the world economy. The clandestine network rolled up in London surely extends to this country, and it is only a matter of time until they get lucky. Just a few weeks ago, the Germans fortunately discovered powerful bombs on their railroads. The French found similar weapons a couple of years ago. The Italians have arrested 40 people, are expelling many others, and have more than a thousand under surveillance.

These are the outlines of future events in the real war. We have a president who, despite his many weaknesses, speaks as if he understands it. But we have a secretary of state who speaks and acts as if she did not, a secretary of defense who has manifestly failed to grasp the true strategic dimensions of our peril, and an intelligence community that is still obsessed with the failed theories of the recent past, notably the nonsense about the unbridgeable Sunni-Shiite conflict. The president has finally begun to speak the truth about Islamic fascists, but he has yet to level with the American people about the magnitude of the real war, and ask them to support a strategy for victory.

That strategy does not, even today, require greatly expanded military action against the terror masters. Our most potent weapon against them remains the rage and courage of their own peoples. We must support those people, we must openly call and work for regime change in Syria and Iran. Heartbreakingly and foolishly, our failure to support revolution makes military action more and more likely. If we do not do the logical and sensible things, if we do not deploy the massive political weapons at our disposal, we will end by doing terrible things. Or, shrinking from the consequences of such action, we will suffer defeat, and the world will be plunged into a darkness the likes of which any civilized person must dread.

Faster, please.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

Media Manipulators....and the Jew-Hating Media Who Love Them

2006-08-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

It has been an interesting couple of days regarding the Israel-Hezbollah war. Keeping track of the media's coverage, I've noted two things: the exaggerated display of Lebanese war dead, and the complete lack of coverage of Israeli civilian dead. Strange, no?

No. It isn't strange. The new alliance of the Left is with the Jew-hating muslim terrorist groups that seek to extinguish Israel as an entity. And their media enablers are doing their darndest to make sure that world opinion remains firmly against Israel. Remember the photo of the green-helmeted man carrying the child, which made the front pages of every newspaper from New York to Paris (and beyond)? Check this link out, and you'll realize that this man was displaying the corpses for show in one of the most disgusting, macabre displays of media manipulation I've ever personally seen.

Then, of course, there's Reuters, the left-wing media outlet that refuses to label Hezbollah or al Qaeda "terrorists". (They say they don't want to take sides....) Well, turns out that Reuters has been running "photoshopped" pics of Beirut in an attempt to make it look considerably more decimated that it actually is. Little Green Footballs, the folks who keyed in on Dan Rather's fraudulent Bush/National Guard documents, has the goods here.

I will end this post by once again praising God that the internet exists. The dissemination of information is no longer the domain of left-wing demogogues. We're on to you!

Hezbollah, And By Extension Iran and Syria, Are Responsible For EVERY Lebanese Death

2006-07-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

The abject cowardice with which the Mohammedan jihadists wage their terror campaign against the Israeli people is a sight to behold. Were it not for the internet, they in all likelihood would win, yet again, the propaganda war against Israel. But times have changed, and technology has caught up with them; stories a compliant, left-wing, anti-Israeli press would suppress can no longer be quashed. This link, complete with pictures, tells the story. The three pictures attached to this story see Hezbollah fighters, dressed not as combatants of any kind, but in casual civilian-wear, and carrying out their operations in residential neighborhoods. Being fully aware that the retribution from the IDF and the IAF will target their position, they seek to maximize the civilian casualty numbers, then play it off as if the Israelis are responsible and are deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. This couldn't be further from the truth. Additionally, Hezbollah is specifically targeting Israeli civilians with their indiscriminate shelling of Israeli cities. I eschew Nazi comparisons normally, but as someone who happens to know more about Nazis than most, I can tell you that these are Nazi tactics. During the London Blitz, Hitler pounded London for 57 straight nights, even though London had no strategic significance. The operation was strictly to maximize civilian casualty figures and break the morale of the English. However, I can find no trace of Hitler ever preventing German (or French, or Belgian, or any other) civilian populations from getting the hell out of a combat zone in areas that were under German control. The Mohammedans have no such principles.

As for Kofi Annan and his eruption of Jew hatred (claiming that the IDF deliberately killed four U.N. observers in Lebanon), I think it is high-time that Annan:

a.) Apologize to Israel for the slander, and
b.) Resign and retire on his oil-for-food kickbacks.

What Kofi Annan neglected to say was that the U.N. "observers" and Hezbollah have been chummy for a every long time and inhabit the same acreage in Lebanon. No doubt, Hezbollah had to have known that if they shelled Israel from these positions, there was an off chance that the IDF/IAF would strike back at that position. Thus, the best possible outcome occurred:
The Israelis killed four U.N. observers, thus ensuring a PR nightmare for Israel.

Of course, when you see a photo of Annan and Hezbollah leader Nasrallah getting cozy with each other, it all makes sense, doesn't it....

Then there is Iran, who are probably smiling from ear to ear over their proxy army's fight with Israel. This conflagration between Hezbollah and Israel has taken their nuke program off the front pages for the last two weeks. This is no coincidence.

Oh Well....

2006-07-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

"The truth is — let me say this clearly — we didn't even expect (this) response ... that (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," said deputy chief of the Hezbollah's political arm, Mahmoud Komati.

He said Hezbollah had expected "the usual, limited response" from Israel.

In the past, he said, Israeli responses to Hezbollah actions included sending commandos into Lebanon, seizing Hezbollah officials and briefly targeting specific Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon.

A Window of Opportunity

2006-07-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

The war against the terror masters redux.

By Michael Ledeen

9/11 happened when Osama bin Laden looked at us, and thought we were ready to be had. We were politically divided, and squabbling over everything. We clearly were not prepared to take casualties in direct combat. The newly elected president seemed unable to make a tough decision. And so Osama attacked, expecting to deliver a decisive blow to our national will, expecting we would turn tail and run, as we had in Somalia, and expecting he would then be free to concentrate his energies on the defeat of local apostates, the creation of his caliphate, and the organization of Muslim revenge for the catastrophes of past centuries.

Within a few months he was driven out of Afghanistan, his organization was shattered, the Arab street he had hoped to mobilize was silenced by the shock and awe of the total victory of the Americans, and he became an instrument of forces greater than himself. If he still lives, he is the servant of the Shiite mullahs, making propaganda movies and audiotapes to bolster the morale of the constantly shrinking number of his admirers, while the mullahs order his followers to martyr themselves against Iraqi civilians.

He had earned his humiliation by misunderestimating his enemy.

He would no doubt recognize the similarities between his own disastrously wrong analysis, and the Iranian blunders leading up to the sequence of events in Gaza and northern Israel. As on 9/11, we, along with our Israeli allies, were internally divided, indeed far more so than in 2001. As on 9/11, there was broad and deep public opposition to war, and both our and Israeli leaders had seemingly lost the will to fight, talking openly about exit strategies and negotiated settlements.

In Israel, the hated Sharon was on life support, gone forever from public life, and succeeded by a man of lesser charisma and limited military experience. The political class drifted from withdrawal to withdrawal. Hezbollah lobbed missiles into northern Israel, totally without response in kind, and Olmert proclaimed yet further withdrawals.

In America, the hated Bush was at record lows in public opinion, daily excoriated by the major media, and constantly criticized by European leaders buoyed by polls showing their electors’ utter contempt for America and the American president. Indeed, the Europeans had protected Iran from any possibility of American action against the regime in Tehran by playing along with a patently phony negotiating strategy.

Who could imagine a forceful response against most any escalation in the mullahs’ long war against the infidels and crusaders? There was not even a rhetorical response to the daily panegyrics from Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, Larijani and the others, calling for death to the Jews, death to the Americans, death to the Iraqi collaborationists, death to the apostate Muslims wherever they were.

The auguries — and the Persians are a superstitious people — were generally good. In some cases, spectacularly good. Fanatics with Iranian support, for example, had overrun Somalia,, and there was good reason to believe the new government would constitute a valuable staging base for terrorists and for Iranian military operations against the American fleet in the Gulf. Throughout the Muslim world, Ahmadinejad was like a rock star, drawing huge crowds wherever he went, even so far away as Indonesia. A demonstration of strength against the greater and lesser Satans in the Middle East would greatly enhance his appeal. And the legions of death now amounted to 23 terrorist groups, plus the obedience of their Syrian puppet, Bashir Assad.

Moreover, escalation was required to address some annoying problems. Demonstrations continued to break out across Iran itself, involving virtually all elements of the country’s diverse population. A show of strength, and above all of American impotence, would weaken the resolve of the mullahs’ enemies. Elsewhere, Hamas was having a tough time in Palestine, and the hasty migration of top leaders to Damascus — obviously concerned about their physical well-being — was not the sort of triumphal message one wanted sent to the Islamist masses. Then there was Iraq, where most of the people were openly hostile to Tehran, and where Ayatollah Sistani continued to exercise a substantial gravitational pull on millions of Iranians. Despite several efforts, the mullahs had been unable to have him assassinated. Nor had the thousands of intelligence agents and military officers sent from Iran to Iraq been able to catalyze a civil war, despite spreading around millions of dollars and hundreds of martyrs among all the ethnic and religious groups.

Finally, there was the Divine Message, the promise that the End of Days would soon be upon mankind, and the Hidden Imam would emerge from the bottom of his well, lead the believers to victory, and command the planet. The description of the moment of his return was well known: a time of chaos and suffering, that could be accelerated by the faithful if they were brave enough.

Not, then, the tactical thinking described by so many — distracting world attention from the nuclear standoff, now headed for the U.N. — but something of an entirely greater order of magnitude. Omar, the insightful blogger at “Iraq the Model,” sees it in the streets of Baghdad:

We are seeing some signs here that make us think that Iran and its tools in Iraq are trying to provoke the rise of the imam through forcing the signs they believe should be associated with that rise. One of the things that do not feel right is the sudden appearance of new banners and writings on the walls carrying religious messages talking specifically of imam Mehdi. These messages are getting abundant in Baghdad and in particular in the eastern part of the capital where Sadr militias are dominant and a special number can be seen in the area of the interior ministry complex.

The interesting part is that these banners appeared within less than 24 hours after Hizbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers. Coincidence? I don't think so.

And so they struck, first in Gaza, then in northern Israel, and, as always, in Iraq and Afghanistan and India. They imagined, just as Osama had prophesied five years earlier (almost to the Muslim day; according to their calendar Wednesday the 19th was the anniversary of our 9/11), that the regional assault would bring our allies and us to our knees. We would lose our will to fight, and abandon the battlefield to the army of Allah, and Hamas, and Moqtada, and the Badr brigades, and all the others.

It’s the same misunderestimation as before, for tyrants have always been unable to imagine the remarkable ability of free people to respond to challenge, and to organize quickly, voluntarily, and effectively to fight their enemies. Hwzbollah now risks rout, and Assad, sensing his peril, is whispering promises of betrayal in order to ensure his own survival. The Iranians still threaten Armageddon, but, so far at least, have been unable to demonstrate the capacity to provoke it.

A fine line separates charisma from buffoonery, and, instead of spreading revolutionary hegemony over the region, the mullahs risk being seen as unacceptably dangerous clowns. Never before have Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis spoken so forcefully against the terrorists (Hamas and Hezbollah, Sunni and Shiite) and their state sponsors in Tehran and Damascus. Instead of driving us from the battlefield, they now must contend with the very real danger that their former prey will unite against the mullahs and the Baathist remnant.

The terror masters risk the same terrible humiliation and defeat as befell Osama, and as things stand, only we can save them from the logical and moral consequences of their folly.

Stranger things have happened, and powerful forces within this peculiar administration are striving mightily to preserve the Iranian and Syrian regimes. To be sure, they do not exactly put it that way. They sing the chorus of crackpot realism: Preserve stability; focus on the immediate problem (Hezbollah); let the professionals do their diplomatic work. Then there are the brief stanzas set aside for the mellow voices of the CIA (joined on this occasion by Thomas Friedman, chanting yet another peace-initiative-for-the-innocents): Syria has always helped us; Assad is young; he will improve; we have friends in Damascus; if he falls the terrorists will take over; let us work with him.

It now lies to President Bush to decide. We must hope that he is not charmed. If he can now recall what he said after 9/11, that the world must make the stark choice of being with us or against us, and that those who support the terrorists will be treated as terrorists themselves, then the deadly logic of their failed attack will close around the throats of the terror masters. The battle against Hezbollah is part of the broader war, as the mullahs well understood when they unleashed Nasrallah and Mughniyah against the Israelis. Israel is now conducting that battle; it is up to us to prosecute the rest of the war.

Now is the time to tell our soldiers in Iraq that “hot pursuit” is okay, that the terrorist training camps on both sides of Iraq are legitimate targets, to be attacked in self-defense. Now is the time to tell the Iraqi government to come forward with the abundant evidence of Iranian evil-doing, and that we will support a fight against the mullahs’ foot soldiers in Iraq. These actions will signal the next stage of the war against the terror masters, which is the vigorous support of the pro-democracy forces in Syria and Iran.

It is a wondrous window of opportunity. As so often in our history, it was opened by our enemies. Let’s go for it.

Now, please. It may not open again for quite a while.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute

Unintentional Funny Quote of the Day

2006-07-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Howard Dean, the man who can rightly be called "the gift that just keeps on giving":

"If you think what's going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn't, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn't get where we are today. We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when he brought together the Northern Irish and the IRA, when he brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

Who Came First....Ron Burgundy Or Dan Rather?

2006-07-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

Dan Rather, obviously. But if you read this article, you get the idea that Will Ferell's Ron Bergundy character in Anchorman was inspired, in no small part, by the likes of Dan Rather. Here's a snippet to whet your whistle (too funny for words):

“Sometimes I’ve had people tell me, ‘Dan, this is not healthy for your career,’” he added. “Well, my answer to that is, to hell with the career. I didn’t get into journalism as a careerist. I’m not going to go out of journalism as a careerist. So yes, I’m biased about doing independent journalism. And you bet I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced toward reporters — and America is filled with reporters who want to do the right thing...News, real news, is a wake-up call, not a lullaby. And I’m not in the lullaby business.”

Oooh....Dan. You're so brave, sticking your neck out there all these years! Of course, Rather still claims that the Bush National Guard documents (which were a fraud) haven't been proven to be forgeries, so his hoary pronouncements about his independence and his crusading news style all dovetail nicely into his pompous character.

Read the article. 'Tis a hoot.

Since I Happen To Be Talking About Drummers....

2006-07-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

....I figured I'd share with you a funny anecdote.

My friend Evan, a great drummer in his own right, was living in Virginia for a time. He had several drum students. One of whom he had was a 13 yr. old kid who, though he was technically proficient and diligent in his drum studies, hit the drums "like a p**ssy". (His words.) Communicating this issue to me over the phone, I asked Evan if this kid eats red meat. He said he didn't know (how would he?), but he'd ask. I told him he could probably fix this problem with his student if he got him on a red meat diet. (Better to amp up male aggression, didn't you know?) Evan mentioned to this kid's father that he should get his kid to eat more red meat, as it would help him with his drumming.

Week or two later, the kid comes in for his lesson. He's beating the crap out of the drums. The difference in attack is palpable. Evan asks the kid what he's doing differently. The kid says nothing. Evan asks him about his diet. The kid says his father is making him eat steak and hamburger every night, and he doesn't understand why.

Still the best piece of advice I ever gave someone.

Drummers

2006-07-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

I attended a house party last night with a friend in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Featured at this party were two bands, one of whom I arrived too late to have seen (I heard they were awful). But I did catch the second band. Not terribly compelling, this second band did have some sense of melody and an ever-so-slight trace of imagination. But one thing they didn't have was a good drummer. The guy they had playing was awful. Later in the night I spoke to a fellow who was involved with the aforementioned band at one point, but no longer was. He said that he was actually a drummer himself, but was playing keyboards with them (for some reason). When their original drummer left, he wanted to switch to his natural instrument, but the band said they wanted to bring in their friend instead. Their friend, it so happens, had no training on the drums at all. As of last night, he'd only been playing for six months. Supposedly, he'd made "great progress" over the last six months. Not enough for me. He was awful in every way: behind the beat, unimaginitve, no feel. He was excrutiating to listen to.

I make no bones about the fact that I'm a music snob. I come from the school of thought that you should have some semblance of self-awareness regarding your capabilities before you go out in public and perform. I'm not condemning in totality the punk rock movement of the late 70's, but it did do something thoroughly detrimental to the musical ethos that said that you should master your instrument before venturing out into performance. The punk rock philosophy was essentially that the better you are, the more disgusting you are. The original bass player of the Sex Pistols, Glen Matlock, got himself kicked out of the band (despite being the author of all of their songs) because he was "too good....he knew all these fancy chords and he liked the Beatles". The long-term damage this attitude has done to live music is palpable, and it was on display last night at this party. I didn't need to talk to the band members in question to know that they probably had the attitude that their "art" was more important than having proficiency on their instruments. If they didn't think that, they wouldn't have brought their "friend" into the band to play drums. They would've gotten themselves a competent player instead.

A few years back it dawned on me that almost every band that I love has a highly competent, imaginitive drummer as their rhythmic lynchpin: The Who, The Police, Rush, Yes (both drummers, though I like Bruford better), ELP, Genesis, Kansas, to name a few. Even Ringo Starr of The Beatles, no Buddy Rich he, had tremendous imagination. (Listen to "Ticket to Ride" or "Tomorrow Never Knows" for examples of this; those beats are COOL, imaginitive, and highly original.) Another example of this would be the Smashing Pumpkins, who's drummer (Jimmy Chamberlain) was a steamroller of a drummer: technically proficient, energetic, strong, if not terribly innovative.

I hope I'm wrong about this, but it seems as if the day of the kick-ass drummer is over, or at least dormant. Between drum machines and this punk attitude pervading up-and-coming bands, I'm not hearing alot out there, either in the clubs or on the radio.

Where have you gone, Keith Moon? The rock and roll nation turns its lonely eyes to you....

Proof (Yet Again) That Supply-Side Economics Works

2006-07-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Times must've caused themselves a great deal of agita going to print with this headline:

Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit

Ouch! You mean you can actually take in more money by having lower taxes than higher ones?!? What a novel concept! Well....not to those of us who know the hows and whys of supply-side economics (also known as "trickle down economics"). Let me explain to those of you who aren't quite clear how this works:

Businessman A owns a Subchapter S corporation (which means that all the company's profits are counted as his personal, direct income) and makes $500,000 a year. Under the Clinton tax brackets, he got taxed federally at 39.5%, not counting state and local taxes. Then, in 2001, his income tax is lowered from 39.5% to 35%, meaning he gets to keep more of his income...$22,500 more, to be exact. What is businessman A going to do with this money, you ask? Well, he could do a few things. He could a.) invest it back into his company, meaning he'd have buy some more stuff, which creates revenues for another company that he does business with, since he's buying their merchandise, b.) hire a new employee, which would create more tax revenues for the federal government, since that employee will get taxed as well, c.) invest it personally, either into a CD (which creates taxable interest), or even a mutual fund (which also creates capital gains and interest income, all of which are taxed). The only place that Businessman A could put the money where it WOULDN'T create more tax revenues for the government is in a safe-deposit box or under his mattress.

That, my friends, is supply-side economics in a nutshell. The more money you keep, the more you spend. And the more you spend, the more somebody gets taxed.

However, the geniuses at the Times (note the underlying sarcasm) seemed genuinely amazed that such a concept actually works. To wit:

"An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief."

"Unexpected"? Not to this guy.

Someone should force Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Bill Keller, and their resident "economist" Paul Krugman to read Milton Friedman, because obviously, they still don't have even the slightest clue as to how economics work, particularly supply-side, Laffer Curve economics.

Duh.

Fun Fourth of July Facts

2006-07-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

Though the Fourth is generally regarded as the day the Declaration of Independence was ratified and signed, this is not the case. The motion for independence was ratified on July 2nd, whereas the final document was ratified on July 4th. All the necessary signatories didn't add their names to it until weeks after. John Adams, more responsible than any other colonial delegate for the ultimate vote to break away from Great Britain, wrote this in one of his letters to his wife, Abigail:

"The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more."

Thomas Jefferson's original draft was cut down and/or changed significantly by approximately 25%, according to author David McCullough. Sitting next to Benjamin Franklin on July 3 and 4 as Franklin removed or changed significant pieces of the document, Jefferson "is not known to have uttered a word in protest, or in defense of what he had written. Later he would decribe the opposition to his draft as being like 'the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day'."

Jefferson's original draft actually blamed George III for the slave trade, which was promptly extricated for any number of reasons, among them that a.) Jefferson himself owned a plethora of slaves, b.) a large amount of the Continental Congress owned slaves, and c.) George IIII didn't start slavery, and it was silly to say that he did, particularly in so important a document. That said, the slavery issue hung over the revolutionary delegates' heads. In the end, they punted on the issue. The roots of the abolition movement can be traced to before the Declaration of Independence, but the time for abolition had not come. Eighty years later, it would.

John Adams was also intimately involved in the editorial process of the Declaration. Gone from the document, vis-a-vis Adams, were Jeffersonian flights of bathos, such as: "These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren...we must endeavor to forget our former love for them. We might've been a free and great people together". But the one phrase, mostly Jeffersonian, but with small touches from Adams, was this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Happy Independence Day.

World Cup

2006-07-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

I made an effort, perhaps for the first time in my life, to watch a World Cup match end-to-end. I've never been much of a soccer fan, but I figured, as I've been compelled to do by various pro-soccer advocates, to give it a chance. I did....and the same gripes that I've had about the game since I was a kid (too slow, not enough scoring chances, etc.) all came back to me. But I also came another conclusion about soccer: the utter lack of sportsmanship exhibited amongst the players. Let me explain....

Having grown up watching mostly baseball and hockey, there is a certain etiquette that goes along with winning. There's also a certain behavior that should be observed when it comes to injuries, both minor and major. Soccer has none of them. For example, whilst watching the Portugal/England match, I noticed that almost every player that went down due to a legal or illegal trip writhed in agony as if having been shot. I consequently found myself screaming at the television, "Get the f**k up, you f**king p**y!!!" after a while. (My latent crudities come to the surface whilst watching sports; I otherwise attempt to keep them in check.) In hockey, this is called "diving", and it is looked down upon with contempt. Before the wave of Europeans invaded North American hockey, this type of behavior was rare, and a "diver" was an object of derision throughout the league, even on his own team. European players, perhaps schooled in the soccer ethos predicated on making the most minor of collisions appear as abject acts of evil (with excrutiating physical agony the end result), brought this ethos into the sport. Thirty years after Swedish defenseman Borje Salming entered into the NHL as the first European player in North American professional hockey, the NHL has instituted a two-minute minor penalty for diving. This would've never had to have been implemented during the Rocket Richard/Gordie Howe era, but there you go. I can't say that all European players are guilty of this type of behavior, as there are some genuinely tough ones that follow the North American hockey ethos of playing 'til you need to go to the hospital, but unfortunately there are too many Europeans that cry over minimal contact. In soccer, that's not only not penalized, it's rewarded. Ugh.

Churchill On Secrecy During Wartime

2006-07-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

"The truth is to be protected by a bodyguard of lies."

[How far we strayed, eh?]

An Excerpt From Stephen Ambrose's "D-Day"

2006-07-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

Ike had these leak problems, too. Difference then was that the Stateside press didn't paste it on the front page. (Think this would be the case today?):

In April [1944], Maj. Gen. Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the U.S. Ninth Air Force and a West Point classmate of Eisenhower's, went to a cocktail party at the Claridge Hotel [London, England]. He began talking freely, complaining about his difficulties in getting supplies but adding that his problems would end after D-Day, which he declared would be before June 15. When challenged on the date, he offered to take bets. General Eisenhower learned of the indiscretion the next morning and acted immediately. He ordered Miller reduced to his permanent rank of colonel and sent him back to the States-the untimate disgrace for a career soldier. Miller protested. Eisenhower insisted, and back he went.

There was another flap in May ['44] when a U.S. Navy officer got drunk at a party and revealed details of impending operations, including areas, lift, strenght, and dates....that officer too was sent back to the States.

More On The Seditious Ol' Gray Lady

2006-07-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

I pulled this excerpt from Pajamasmedia.com. I think it speaks volumes about the utter arrogance of the mainstream media and their blithe ignorance of the damage and death they facilitate:

KATHARINE GRAHAM, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 2001, backed her editors through tense battles during the Watergate era. But in a 1986 speech, she warned that the media sometimes made “tragic” mistakes.

Her example was the disclosure, after the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, that American intelligence was reading coded radio traffic between terrorist plotters in Syria and their overseers in Iran. The communications stopped, and five months later they struck again, destroying the Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 Americans.

“This kind of result, albeit unintentional, points up the necessity for full cooperation wherever possible between the media and the authorities,” Ms. Graham said.

But such cooperation can prove problematic, as her newspaper’s former editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, has recounted.

In 1986, after holding for weeks at government request a scoop about an N.S.A. tap on a Soviet undersea communications cable, The Post learned that the Russians knew all about it already from an N.S.A. turncoat named Ronald Pelton. NBC beat The Post on its own report.

Michelle Malkin boils down this attitude better than I could possibly. To wit:

"Nothing lays out their priorities better. The risk of them going ahead is our lives, and the risk to them for not going ahead is they may get scooped. The article clearly shows why the media should not be allowed to decide what classified programs to expose. It is an attempt to show how seriously they take their job. But what is shows me is how deadly their arrogant mistakes can be to others. The media now has a self documented history of getting people killed by exposing details they did not understand, or appreciate the implications surrounding these details. Their ignorance and arrogance is a deadly combination, as they have now reported in the NY Times."

The Battle of the Somme, 1916

2006-07-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, which was a five-month bloody slog during the First World War that ended with no clear victor. Not a big deal in the States (we hadn't entered WWI yet), it is one of the most solemn occasions in Great Britain, where on the first day alone (July 1, 1916), the British took 60,000 casualties, with 20,000 killed-in-action. By the end of the five month battle, the British, encompassing Aussies, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, South Africans, as well as English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish, lost a total of 400,000 men, 100,000 of which were KIA. The French lost 200,000, with 50,000 KIA. The Germans lost anywhere from 450,ooo to 600,000, with 160,000 KIA.

It is a source of lasting annoyance to me that the Europeans remain soft in their views regarding the impending takeover of the Islamists on their continent. But when one puts it into context, any time the Europeans used war as an instrument of change in the 20th century, it has had disasterous consequences. Sadly, the one time when they're needed to stand up for Western Civilization, they can't muster the courage anymore. If one needs to have some idea why, look up the story of the Somme.

Spitfire's Hurricane

Democrats & Humanitarians...In Name Only

The Competing Visions of Alexander Hamilton & Thomas Jefferson

Thoughts On Rome, Comparisons To The United States

My Summer Job Sucked Worse Than Yours (Part 1)

Quote, July 22, 2010

To all my friends...

On Mortality...But Hopefully Not

D-Day, June 6, 1944

Some Pearls of Wisdom From Lech Walesa

Mark Steyn Dissects The New York Times Owners

Partner for Pieces

Quote

"Transcendent" Presidents Can't Change National Interests Of Others

Iran On The Brink....I Hope

No Sense Of History

Quote

Posted For Posterity's Sake

Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974

By: Michael Barone Senior Political Analyst January 27, 2010

Echoes Of A Life Long Gone

On Popularity

The Loss Of Album Artwork

Invictus-By William Ernest Henley

When Industries Die

On Movies, Domestic And Foreign

Beethoven's "Heiligenstädter Testament"

Caterwauling About The State Of Modern Music, Yet Again....

Looking "Community Organizing" In The Face...And It Ain't Pretty

And Here We Are Again Once More....

He's Still Dead

Quote of the Day

You Know That Environmentalism Has Hit A New Extreme....

Two Things That Will Survive A Nuclear Holocaust: Cockroaches....And Keith Richards

Rue Britannia

The Lives Of Others

Lay Down With Dogs....Get Up With Fleas

A Post St. Patrick's Day Post

Greetings, Mein Froinds!

Pete

"Ex-President for Sale"

"Palestinians: We don't deserve a state"

Golly Gee....These People Deserve A State!

Bluffing?

Jimmy Carter Legacy Takes Another (Perhaps Fatal) Hit

Quote

Darkness Descends on Venezuela

Quote

Jamil Hussein....

Sandy Berger

Jamil Hussein Is Still Missing

New Year's Wishes

Just For The Record

James Brown

Saddam Bites The Dust

Merry Christmas To All....

Associated Press Source, "Jamil Hussein" Still Missing

Time Magazine's "Person of the Year"...

Another Notable Passing

Noteable Passing

Still Nonplussed....

Murder Inc.

More Fakery In The Mainstream Media

More Woes For The New York Times

Proof Yet Again That Reagan Had Nothing To Do With The Collapse Of The USSR....

The Last Words Of Alexander Litvinenko

Fill In The Blanks

Funny Stuff

Why We Won't Win (Until We Remember This....)

Ralph Peters on Iraq

Retired Husband Syndrome....A Japanese Phenomenon

Random Thoughts 11/10/06

Online Radio

Let Us Take A Moment This November 4th....

Heard At A New York Rangers Game

If

Perhaps Kerry Can Try This Excuse....

Supporting Our Troops

Cultural Churning

1956

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
January 27, 2010