Thursday, November 17. 2005
Cheney and RNC Push Back About time. New England Repub And Mehlman - the RNC's video here.
 Things brought home from Italy, Part 3
1. Don't judge a church by its cover. You could walk past San Lorenzo or Santo Spirito, (photo) for just two examples, with their original, undecorated mortar or stucco surfaces, and hardly give them a glance. Wrong, as Jim Cramer would say. Them oysters contain magnificent pearls. 2. Those Eyewitness Travel Guides, like this one, are absolutely the best. For depth, you need to read something else but they are handy-dandy, full of basic info and good ideas. (DK Publishing also produces the Eyewitness series for young people on a variety of subjects, which are hugely informative and enjoyable, with tons of great pictures and good detail. I've read every one in our house at least once: they are good for adults, too. To call them picture books does not do them justice.)
Wednesday, November 16. 2005
Pajamas Media has changed to OSM - Open Source Media. Synthstuff has details. Wonder whether we should join. We could not understand the contract when it first came out. Story of the UN's effort to take over the internet: Paxety Al Gore deeply, deeply concerned about warming. Reasoned Audacity
Limp Weenies and Phased Deployment Yankee Doodle, keep it up. Some Repubs and many Dems, for whatever reasons, want to run away from Iraq, at a point at which it is well on its way to becoming a functioning democracy in the center of the midde east. Except for a few thousand suicidal lunatics, we, with the millions of normal Iraquis, may be on the verge of an historic accomplishment which would serve the people of the medieval and benighted middle east, the interests of the US, and the security and stability of the world. I know the Dems mainly want to embarass the Repubs - sometimes at the cost of the US's best interest, it seems - but all these folks need to realize that some things are just plain difficult. That doesn't mean that they are not worth doing. It just means you dig down deep into your persistence and courage, and press on. It's not the American way to run away from tough things, especially when the tough things are just a bunch of raggedy, ignorant nutjobs. We're not exactly facing the German Army, which was truly scary and from which we never ran. And still I wonder whether the Dems are simply afraid of a Bush success in Iraq, and hope to subvert it. Shame on me for having such a suspicious thought. From Tony Blankley: "Monday, for the first time, the foul odor of the Vietnam War denouement wafted through the Senate Chamber during the debate on Iraq. The Democrats called for "estimated dates for the phased redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq … " Phased redeployment was the maneuver the French executed in June 1940, in the days preceding the German occupation of Paris. Phased redeployment is what the Vietnamese boat people did as they swam for their lives away from their homeland." Read entire.
Holding Hands When Bill and Hillary show up holding hands, you know a campaign is on. Sensible Mom
Some things brought home from Italy, Part 2 1. Savonarola was an interesting dude. Worth a piece when I get the chance, if only for my own education. One of the precursors of Luther, among many others, in retrospect: voices crying in the wilderness and vox clematis in deserto too. 2. Art Museums are Art Cemeteries. 3. Botticelli's 1489 Annunciation is the most compelling painting I have ever seen - and I've seen my share of them. Even though it is in the Uffizi Art Cemetery. Will post it today. 4. Cosimo Vecchio's family line contained the "good Medicis". Cosimo l's line were the "bad Medicis". History made simple. 5. I am not fascinated by High Renaissance art and architecture.
Tough Love at the Olin Foundation: Town Hall A quote: "Pound for pound, the largest left-leaning foundations outspent the top conservative foundations last year by more than 10 to 1 in a market where grants worth $32 billion were made by foundations managing combined assets of more than $475 billion. The Ford Foundation, for example, sits atop roughly $11 billion worth of assets, while the conservative John M. Olin Foundation - which just spent down its portfolio and closed its doors - never reached so much as $120 million worth of assets under management in a given year. And yet, John J. Miller recently published a book entitled A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America . " Animal Farm at Dartmouth: Powerline Greatest threat to our kids: Pens. FMFT "Repub Nervous Nellies" on Iraq: RWNH A blogger we have just discovered, or who just discovered Maggie's: Musafir's Musings. Mostly moderate-sounding rational politics (if "rational politics" is not an oxymoron), but I can see that his interests go beyond politics. Krauthammer on France: "As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite. And the angry alien young were already hungry." Read entire. Pension Crisis: A dull subject, but one of critical importance to millions of people. AOL News. PBS distorts history of Crusades. Big surprise there. View from 1776
Interview with Murdoch, via Drudge: "The Internet is certainly ... you know, it's ... I was operating -- we've all been operating -- during a changing model of communications: television, moving pictures and so on. But the Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said, "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing." With the technology that goes with it, the fact is that everybody now is empowered: Anyone can buy what they want, shop where they want, talk to anybody in the world that they want (and) state their own opinions. There's no mystery to a blog: Put up your thoughts (and) find friends. And the younger people are, the more time they're spending on it -- it's extraordinary. We bought (MySpace.com) a few weeks ago and just closed the deal last night, legally. There are 32 million people already registered on that, and there are 125,000 a day being added to it. They're finding common interests: When they're 17 or 18, they go on looking for dates; if they're 25, there are 3 (million) or 4 million young mothers out there talking about things. Within that, there are lots and lots of communities, and they can all blog -- they can all write in a personal diary every week, or whatever they want." Read entire interview.
"Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" - Dalrymple: "Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is disputable: there are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975—and at least 5 million of them are Muslims. Demographic projections (though projections are not predictions) suggest that their descendants will number 35 million before this century is out, more than a third of the likely total population of France. Indisputably, however, France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order." Read entire at City Journal.
To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible. William Least Heat Moon, as quoted last week here, from Blue Highways.
Tuesday, November 15. 2005
Medieval Alley  Just one of
hundreds of these dark, narrow alleys in central Firenze. Most have colorful laundry hanging from windows, but this one unfortunately did not have much in the way of interesting laundry.
GWYNNIE’S MEDIA INNUENDO AWARD – CATEGORY: HEADLINE We have awarded November’s Media Innuendo Award to London’s Metro newspaper (the free paper distributed by London’s public transportation system, www.metro.co.uk) for this classically (and probably intentionally) misleading headline, which perfectly illustrates the media’s ability to imply conclusions not warranted by the facts: Blair told: War has fuelled terrorism On our return from England, we showed this newspaper to an educated group of New England Yankees and asked a simple, professorial question: “What is the Fact revealed here?” Shame on them – they were suckered in and talked about the war and its effect on terrorism. NO, children, the Fact here is that Blair was told something! In the Metro’s paragraph one, we learn that this came from “his own advisors”. In paragraph two, we learn it came from “a group of Islamic experts appointed in the wake of the July 7 bombings in London”. In paragraph six, we are told that “the experts ranged from Inayat Bungawala, of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, to outspoken ‘curry king’ Sir Gulam Noon.” We had to turn to the Daily Telegraph to learn that the entire panel was composed of Muslims opposed to any attempt to outlaw radical groups such as Hizb-ut-tahrir and Muhajiroun, saying such an attempt “risked alienating law-abiding Muslims and driving fanatics underground.” The Muslim report concluded that the Government’s Terrorism Bill “could lead to a significant chill factor in the Muslim community in expressing legitimate support for self-determination struggles around the world.” Like al-Qaeda, of course. Knowing, then, from where the report came and its biases, go back to the headline: the Fact is that Blair received biased opinion from a special interest group attempting to influence legislation; the headline phrases it in such a clever way that it appears that the group’s conclusion is the Fact the Metro is reporting. The Metro clearly deserves this month’s Media Innuendo Award.
Some things brought home from Italy, Part 1 Hadn't been there in four years, and it is always a stimulating visit for us Yankees with our cold, northern European blood. 1. Art does not progress, or improve, or even evolve...it just changes, like fashion. 2. "Duomo" doesn't really translate as "dome" - it generally refers to the seat of the Bishop, as does cattedrale. Other large cities have their duomos. 3. The year a building was built means little: over hundreds of years, they are changed, so that any old building contains the accretions, remodelings and re-decoratings of history. Witness the "modern" facade of the endlessly-photographed Firenze Duomo, which I refuse to photograph: it's faux antique and over-done. 4. In 1400, Firenze was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world. Making fabric from English wool, leather, but especially banking. It was a seaport: the Arno was navigable up to Firenze until the "bad" Medicis dammed and blocked it for military purposes. 5. I need to find time to learn Italian.
Roberts on Business Responsibility An excerpt from Russell Roberts: "...She wanted to know if I thought the soft values should count, meaning, the virtue of keeping 100 families happy and intact or should you just go for the jugular and maximize profits. I gave her a few answers. One of them was one that I give in my book, The Invisible Heart. It's OK to be charitable with your own money. It's not so virtuous to be generous with other people's money. A publicly traded business should maximize profits and let shareholders be charitable with those returns if they so choose. I also gave the other answer I gave in the book—that there is no such thing as "enough" profit. The world is highly uncertain and sacrificing profits in the name of "soft values" may end up destroying the company and putting everyone out of work." Read entire at Cafe Hayek.
Heartwarming From AOL news: "He looked dirt poor," said his friend Jim McDermand. But the frugal old bachelor had an estate upward of $3 million when he died in 1997 at 88. And it turned out that the curmudgeon secretly had a benevolent side. The Great Falls farmer directed in his will that his money be used to buy up land and donate it to the state for use by hunters." Bless your heart, LeRoy.
Newdow Marches Onward His next goal is to remove "In God We Trust" from currency. We used to call irritable and intolerant people like this "cranks." (See today's reference to the guy who pulled his daughter out of the school choir because of "Pick a Bale of Cotton.") Nowadays, cranks are taken seriously. Is this "progress"? Or is it letting the lunatics run the asylum?
France Atlas wonders how France will deal with their multicultural nightmare. Dinocrat notes that the EU will provide France with 58 jobs to help solve the crisis. No Oil asks "Who done it?" in an excellent wide-ranging review of the subject of Moslem immigration, and quotes Steyn thus: "The trouble with the social democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. At the very least, European citizens should recognise that the governing class has failed, that the conventional wisdom has run its course, and that it is highly unlikely that those culturally confident Muslims will wish to assimilate with anything as shrivelled and barren as contemporary European identity."
Embedded blogger Michael Yon continues to deliver qualitative information on the war in Iraq through his blog: http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/ And if you haven’t checked out Yon, here’s a good interview with him this past summer http://www.techcentralstation.com/072705D.html Finally, below is a Rita Cosby interview with Yon and Bruce Willis about Iraq that you might find interesting, proving that all of Hollywood isn’t wrong:
Continue reading "Yon and Willis"
The Quarter Million Dollar "Duh" Justin takes on Dr. Kass on the general subject of what women want, which Dr. Kass profoundly and perceptively concluded was a relationship with a man! What is really needed is an article by a woman on what men really want. Guess we can ask Dr. Bliss to do that one, but it won't be pretty.
The Baptistery of San Giovanni The ceiling of this 9th Century octagonal chapel, which stands as you know on the piazza in front of the wedding-cake-looking 19th Century facade of Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Firenze's Duomo), is Byzantine in style. Those medieval Byzantine artistic conventions had staying power and remained influential through the early and mid-Renaissance and, to my mind, they remain powerful. (In his later years, even Botticelli returned to them, as I learned last week, due at least in part to the influence of the evangelical friar Girolamo Savonarola.) 
Preventing Apophis from colliding with earth: CSM. Please don't let it fall on my house - it was just painted. Humorless, fun-deficient person acts offended by "Pick a bale of cotton"- Newsmax Moonbats galore, via LGF European Riot update: Gateway Edwardian standards for youth: Miriam GOP's improving hopes: RWN Ezmerai speaks: Cao Affirmative Action in France? CSM How Sen. Lieberman is harming CT: Daily News
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Robert Heinlein (in his book, "Logic of Empire")
Monday, November 14. 2005
Dr. Sanity on BDS Dr. Sanity drew quite a bit of attention with her piece on BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), with comments and links that I have seen to Powerline and neoneocon, and perhaps more. But I'd say that this is nothing new: there were equivalent Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. Derangement Syndromes which were comparable in their vitriol, distortion, and apparent hatred. Remember? I just call it the hateful, smug, dark, paranoid, intolerant and fascistic side of Liberalism. But I want to point out another piece by the good shrink on Jimmy Carter. One quote: Jimmy Carter is a very very dangerous human being. He is the very worse sort of pacifist; the kind that gives people who truly desire peace an extremely bad taste in their mouth. Because the foundation of his pacifism is a determined and incalculably cruel passivity and tolerance toward genuine evil in all its manifestations.
Read entire.
Second Class Minds Samizdata with some P. J. O'Rourke on David Cameron: The guy obviously doesn't understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the "worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it". Just once, I'd love to hear a politician say: "We're going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this." The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much.
Read entire.
La Passegiata Every evening, the whole town comes out for la passegiata - the evening stroll - and puts on la bella figura, followed by a late supper. My theory is that the ladies lead the men down the shopping streets, where the shops remain open until 7 or 8. The main problem with the Italian economy, in my opinion, is not so much the lack of work ethic - although there is that minor issue - it's that everyone spends all of their money on cigarettes, wine, and fashion. How many shoes does a lady need? This photo in Firenze, this past Friday evening. Che bella vita.
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