Tuesday, April 27. 2010
Guitarist and harmonica player Reed was really the first cross-over bluesman. Whether he was marketed as blues, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll, he was really a bluesman all the way. His music feels familiar even to those who have never heard him because so much of his style was borrowed by rockers in the 60s.
He drank too much, died at 51.
Excellent, from Daniel Pipes: In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism. He nails it. One quote:
... it is Europe’s very readiness to acknowledge its faults that prompts self-hatred, for societies that do not engage in such introspection do not lacerate themselves. Europe’s strength is thus its weakness. Although the continent has “more or less vanquished its monsters,” such as slavery, colonialism, and fascism, it chooses to dwell on the worst of its record. Thus his book’s title, The Tyranny of Guilt. The past, with its violence and aggression, is frozen in time, a burden Europeans expect never to throw off.
Related, Sowell's Misusing History: Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.
We saw this play in NYC a year or two ago, but now it's back in town at the Westside Theater: The Screwtape Letters.
It is straight from CS Lewis' book. Mrs. BD's lady's Alpha group is going to see it together.
From a piece on dinosaur extinction - my bolds. (h/t, SDA):
''We believe dinosaurs were most likely to be cold-blooded creatures and would have needed the warmth to keep them alive,” he said.
“If they were unable to migrate south they could have been wiped out. Climate change is now very much on the agenda in trying to determine how the dinosaurs became extinct.
“We now believe that they died out gradually and it is very possible that this could have been caused by a series of climatic changes.''
The drop in temperature is thought to have occurred because high levels of CO2 were in the atmosphere which caused global temperatures to rise and polar ice to melt – a phenomenon currently predicted for Earth.
"After a century of épater le bourgeois, why on earth can’t le bourgeois épater l’artiste primitif? And why is the bourgeois and reactionary management of the Museum of Modern Art stifling the artistic creativity of its customers?"
More on the Stanford education prof's failed charter school at Pajamas. A quote:
EPA Academy students are graded on a five-dimensional rubric, based on (1) Personal Responsibility; (2) Social Responsibility; (3) Communication Skills; (4) Application of Knowledge; and (5) Critical and Creative Thinking.
Only 20 percent of the grade is based on knowledge, notes Michele Kerr, who taught an ACT prep course for disadvantaged students at a nonprofit from 2007-09. Compared to district high school students, East Palo Academy tutees had “the lowest skills and the highest grades,” Kerr recalls. Students with high A averages turned out to have very poor reading and math skills, though their writing was relatively strong.
The psychoanalyst Alice Miller has died. She was not an MD. I blame her popular writings - all on the one theme of the evil of parents - for fueling the "victimization" and "trauma" crazes in pop psychology of the late 20th Century.
You can term people who take one idea to explain everything as monomaniacs but, to try to be charitable to the recently dead, I would term it hopelessly if not crazily reductionistic.
In the human soul, easy answers and simple explanations of things never do any good. Her sorts of explanations got their traction by absolving people of their own decisions and choices by blaming others, thus further denigrating the powers and potentials of the human soul.
Blues is not about sadness. Blues is about releasing the energy of true feelings. Blues is about sharing your soul. Nina Simone was one of the best.
Last night's Chuck ending scene melded Nina Simone's Feeling Good with the feelings shared by Chuck and Sarah (IMHO, the hottest, realest woman in any TV series).
You can catch it after the 41st minute:
http://www.nbc.com/chuck/video/chuck-versus-the-honeymooners/1222679/
For the whole Feeling Good, try this YouTube:
The Cigar Bars and Cigar Lounges of NYC.
Plus a reminder: in NYC, despite Nanny Bloomberg, you can still abuse tobacco like an Indian a Native American in the outdoor sections of restaurants and pubs.
Col. Frederick Gustavus Burnaby. What a guy.
A newspaper war: Wall Street Journal revs up New York Times rivalry
Why GM is paying money back
What should be done for these poor souls? There are lots of people out there who want to help them, but they are difficult to help.
Scapegoating Goldman: Best short version at Legal Ins. The bubble was obvious to everybody. If you were long mortgages, it was only rational and responsible to hedge that bet.
Americans seem to prefer legal immigation: 60% of Americans Agree With Arizona Bill… Only 31% Agree With Radicals & Obama
The Dodd Bill is a bailout bill
The real Tea Party agenda isn't particularly radical. Sounds like what ordinary Americans want: Leave us alone and quit doing us "favors." We aren't as dumb as you think.
Name the bird, from this site.
Monday, April 26. 2010
Dr. Merc likes Lady Gaga, and our pal and sometime poster Tom Francis likes Ladytron. Well, Jimmy Reed (1925-1976) is one of my favorites. We'll begin the week with Bright Lights, Big City:
Driscoll: Modern art comes full circle
Green corruption in the White House
What tradition knows: Overcoming Bias
Andy Revkin going after the children
City Journal: The Banality of Race - David Remnick’s life of Obama exemplifies the moral laziness of today’s liberalism.
The normally tepid Douthat on the South Park subject:
This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that bravely trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.
Far be it for me to be a profound social critic but the brouhaha over the censoring of Southpark’s depiction of Mohammed reminds me of the musical Cabaret.
A central progression in Cabaret is the audience transforming from enjoying the subversive cultural progressivism to its jolly enjoying the triumph of Nazism.
Southpark has led in revealing the inanities and contradictions of almost everything. Yet, it became too much for Comedy Central to allow Southpark to depict Mohammed and Comedy Central also censored Southpark's defiance of self-censorship to avoid the wrath of ideologic gangsters.
Comedy Central features the funniest and the most vile forms of comedy, never before to my knowledge censoring itself in targeting or revealing cultural inanities and contradictions or denigrating cultural pieties.
Yet, now Comedy Central reveals itself in allowing the takeover of its Cabaret by thugs, becoming itself complicit.
Comedy Central reveals itself as enjoying the profits of decadence until its lack of spine collapses upon itself. Comedy Central transforms from the presenter of any irreverence to become the channel of self-imposed cultural decadence that refuses to resist and indeed joins in capitulation to thugs.
Are we to be that Cabaret audience?
Other takes, from Memeorandum:
Ross Douthat / New York Times:
Not Even in South Park? — Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of “South Park” entitled “Super Best Friends,” in which the cartoon show's foul-mouthed urchins sought assistance from an unusual team of superheroes. These particular superfriends were all religious figures …
My internet discovery of the day: The Internet Bird Collection. Videos and photos, worldwide, by category. They are up to 40,000 videos thus far.
Ed. note: This is a wonderful resource. I just perused their videos of the Parulidae (New World Warblers). Fantastic. Identifying many of the female warblers remains just as tough for me as ever, I am sorry to say. When they are flitting through the treetops, I am lucky to get a glimpse. For example, below, female Tennessee Warbler, via CLO:
I mumbled briefly about Positivism last week, alluding to its potential as a fuel for hubris. No philosophy is the "cause" of human evil and destructiveness, but Human Nature is. Pure rationalism (if there is any such thing) is a frightening way to run the world, or to run anything.
This weekend, in timely fashion, I stumbled on a review of Grayling's latest screed against irrationalism by the esteemable John Gray. One quote from the thoughtful review:
Reading Grayling, it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Absurd as it is, there is nothing new in such a claim. It is one of the most venerable clichés of Enlightenment thinking, and Ideas that Matter is a compendium of such dated prejudices. When Grayling condemns religion on the grounds that “a theory that explains everything, and can be falsified by nothing, is empty,” he takes for granted that religions are primitive theories, now rendered obsolete by science.
 Prothero in The Globe: Separate truths. It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom
American Self-immolation. Pravda
Steyn: Don’t worry about Iran’s nuclear program, but if you meet a tea partier waving some placard about the national debt, try not to catch his eye.
Kling: What I think about financial reform
Climate scientist sues newspaper for 'poisoning' global warming debate. So he admits that there is a debate?
The Five myths about green energy
The White House wants churches to advance its climate change agenda.
Just when you thought puff peces couldn't get more ridiculous: Obama loves pie
Q and O: Immigration and the welfare state
Jonah: What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama? h/t, Never Yet Melted
Republicans Threatening Congressional Seats Long Held by Democrats
John at Powerline: The Paranoid Style of American Liberalism
Just One Minute on The NYT:
For heaven's sake - is it asking too much of Times editors to reflect for two seconds before they reflexively blurt out their current PC response? OK, we all understand that when the next case comes the Times will insist that it is completely different and that the living, breathing Constitution can solve the next problem on the exhale.
Most Risks Hide in Plain Sight - WSJ.com
Benjamin Graham, perhaps the most astute analyst Wall Street has ever produced, was once asked whether he thought disclosure was adequate. Graham replied that the quantity of disclosure "makes me ill." He added, "I don't know if there is any solution … I suppose [a prospectus] would have to say in big red-letter words, THIS [SECURITY] IS NOT WORTH WHAT IT IS SELLING FOR. I don't know if that would make any difference either … somebody [would just say], 'What the hell, it is going up anyway.'"
You can lead an investor to disclosure, but you can't make him think.
Sunday, April 25. 2010
 I posted this early Sunday morning:
Farm chores for my aging parents regularly pull me away from church, but this morning we trek down to NYC to meet the pup at Gascogne for a cheap brunch (I'll have the mussels - I always do when they are on a menu - and a healthy and organic Bloody Mary) before treating her to Paul Taylor ll's final day at the Joyce.
Mrs. BD is a big Taylor fan. Our blog pal Neoneo loves Taylor too. Despite being married to a dancer/choreographer for about 100 years, I remain a bit of a dance agnostic. I always did like Merce Cunningham, though, and Meredith Monk. Very quirky.
Follow-up:
It was a wonderful program from the Paul Taylor ll (the 80 year-old Taylor's 6-person touring company), but I would have been fine just seeing Esplanade. In fact, just one dance is really all my brain can process in one day. Powerful stuff, Esplanade. Substantial. Recklessly physical and driven by physical momentum, romance, and gravity and, as I sometimes say about some dances, a poem without words - or like a dream. Mrs. BD could discuss it endlessly; how his Graham background evolved and how ballet training is essential to modern dance, etc., but I lack the skill, the words, and the knowledge. The dance is in my head, though, along with the Bach.
Brunch was good, too. Free Bloody Marys. And it is always a treat to spend some time with the Bird Dog pupette Wall Streeter who returned to work after the performance. Those folks work on weekends, keeping the engines of capitalism humming so that people have money to support Paul Taylor.
I have never seen the TV show South Park, but I have heard that it is clever in a goofy, sophomoric and irreverent sort of way.
You have probably heard that fanatics have threatened Comedy Central about South Park's irreverence towards Mohammed (pbuh). Comedy Central folded like a cheap camera. Hence South Park now has the Prophet appearing in a bear costume, and as Santa Claus. Kinda funny, if you can take a joke. Doubt they can.
As Kate observes:
The "extremist" is the one with the death threat.
The "moderate" is the one who explains what you've done to deserve it.
If you want to have religion in the world today, you have to be big enough to take some teasing and/or annoyance from those who don't get it. If you have a religion with vocal murderous and hateful people in it today, teasing is the least one should expect.
But Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is just teasing.
I stumbled onto Myron Magnet's fine 2003 essay of the above title. Magnet says that good writing is about higher and deeper truths than "knowledge," "information," or "data" can provide, and I agree of course.
One quote:
What’s wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things. This is the kind of knowledge that Plato describes so poetically in that most literary of all philosophical passages, the allegory of the cave: the knowledge that sees through the world of appearances to the Truth, of which the appearances are but an emanation—a knowledge that requires a lifetime of reason and study to attain but that comes finally in a flash of intuition, because the Truth is in us, in an inner nature we can glimpse by introspection and intuition, as well as in the world. And this is the knowledge—a knowledge, one might say, that resides in our souls as well as in our minds—that great literature embodies.
He includes a smack-down of the one-dimensional pomo critics, but that's far from his main point.
And since Magnet mentions Cosi Fan Tutte so often in his piece, here's the truly ridiculous and lovely Act 1 Finale, in which the cheating suitors fake committing suicide to re-engage their girlfriends:
Hot-button issues like immigration, ObamaCare, bailouts, taxation, national security, faith divide us mostly along what has been labeled conservative-liberal.
At root, however, the differing views are more rooted in who gives and who takes.
Our “betters” are largely insulated from the consequences of their views, catering to themselves and our “lessers.” Then, there’s the “rest of us.”
The primary divide is between the rest of us who struggled, strived and gave versus those whose advantages parachuted them into powerful positions they abuse for their own wealth and to then take away the more meager advantages earned by others to give to the lessers who haven’t.
The rest of us favor immigration by those willing to work, but not to those who aren’t able or who just demand benefits.
The rest of us favor aiding the truly poor or disabled to adequate health care, but not to those who waste their money on frills and then demand providers to impoverish themselves and us not be allowed to make our own life decisions.
The rest of us favor business creating jobs and opportunities, but not lazy management and crazy schemes then feeding at the taxpayer trough.
The rest of us voluntarily pay our more than fair share, but not basic services being cut to enrich politicians and government workers who create more ways to tax in order to feather their own nests by creating more dependent lessers.
The rest of us support and serve in danger to preserve our freedoms and protect others’, but not to be frittered away through lack of priorities or will.
The rest of us thank G-d for our being and opportunities, but not to tolerate those who would deny us or others theirs.
The rest of us may become polarized but at root are not. The rest of us just feel caught between those who consider themselves our betters, who perpetuate themselves by allying with the lessers without due claim upon us, whether at home or abroad. These betters denigrate the legitimate concerns of the rest of us, but their scorn is hollow, ludicrous, and, indeed, energizing.
Our parents and grandparents were great generations whom we identify with because they were the inspiration for the rest of us. My baby-boomer peers have largely been the selfish punk generation of wastrels. Coming again, the generation of the “rest of us.” Those who want to lead, who deserve leadership, are recognized as authentic in being of, by and for the rest of us.
Our Editor recently described himself, and Maggie's Farm, as "resolutely middlebrow." I cannot disagree, but with the caveat that we repeatedy take adventurous forays into the lowbrow.
As confirmation of the above. I have been thinking about Positivism lately and found myself needing to refer to Wiki for a refresher on the late Enlightenment thinker Auguste Comte, known as "The Pope of Positivism," and the inventor of Sociology.
Comte, interestingly and paradoxically, wanted to use a science of society in order to create a new religion for humanity. His grandiose dream lives on.
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