Maggie's Farm

Reposted from August, 2005

The Search for Alec Guiness

What are your favorite roles? The Horse's Mouth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and of course, George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor is the best made for TV movie ever made, bar none - a masterpiece), are mine. Oh, also, Bridge Over the River Kwai. But who was he?

Piers Paul Reid's authorized biography is out, and it doesn't seem to answer the question. From the Boston Globe's review:

Piers Paul Read, a friend of Guinness's, was asked by the actor's widow to write this book, which is, in part, an assiduous record of the signal events and experiences in Guinness's life and career. There is the drunken, mendacious, cadging mother -- the great scourge of his life; the putative, though not positive, father paying for his support and education; the cruel stepfather; acting lessons with a stage legend who believed him to be one of the real Guinnesses; his debt to John Gielgud as a patron; courtship and marriage; wartime in the Royal Navy; and a recounting of his subsequent stage, movie, and TV career. All this is embedded in a stifling quantity of routine business on the lines of guest lists and restaurant expenses. Here we feel the authorized biographer's weary duty to comprehensiveness and his reluctance or inability to apply a shaping hand.

Read entire.

Reposted from 2005

A dog's view: It's seared - seared in my cultural-bio-psycho-social memory, just like Jung meant. Remember the George Papoon campaign? As I lie here on the kitchen floor, hoping some cherrries will fall off the plate, I am remembering that glorious "One Organism - One Vote"  campaign.

"Papoon for President - Not Insane"

We animals and other organisms lost that election, but it was a wonderful time back in 1970. The voting machines were designed to exclude and to discourage one-celled animals from voting. Gosh, Uncle Steve Post and those guys on WBAI....great stuff. A Revolution that failed. You human gods would be lying on the kitchen floor, being fed dry cardboard kibbles for supper, and we dogs would be going to work all dressed-up like dandies - wow - I mean bow-wow - and running the country. We figured that Papoon would get the massive bacteria and amoeba votes and that would turn the whole country into Greenish-Brown-Pond-Scum-colored states. Plus, if we were short a few votes, they could all just divide, and double their vote.

It's all from The Firesign Theater.

(By the way, can you name that breed in the photo?)

Luke 9, 18-27

18And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?

 19They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again.

 20He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God.

 21And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing;

 22Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day.

 23And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

 24For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.

 25For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?

 26For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father's, and of the holy angels.

 27But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.

A re-post from 2005

We have enjoyed him since the 60s - some memories there -  but just stumbled into this perfect, but too short, CD - oh yeah, it has John Coltrane too, plus Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and Tommy Flanagan. Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane. Look at Round Midnight, too. Can I compare Burrell with Wes Montgomery? No, too ignorant to do so.

More on Pakistan's war against Waziristan, at Rick's Place. This could be good. I guess you could call it a "civil war."  I don't think there will be anything civil about it, now that they have Ms. Bhutto on board. The Pakistanis are good folks, and should not be "misunderestimated".

Celebrate Diversity Sameness.

"Classical" music does not exist as an entity. Montiverdi and Ravel are not in the same category - it's just a dumb convenient category for lousy record shops that make their money selling pop schlock to teens. Nevertheless, it sells online. Do real "record shops" even exist anymore? I used to enjoy them very much.

Half a billion of the UN's tsumami money went to fraud. In my opinion, the UN is just another virtuous-sounding, feel-good fraud, and Betsy agrees. Heck, if countries want to talk to eachother nowadays, they can just pick up the phone and give them a jingle. I think all those people just like a nice excuse to get out of their shitholes and spend time in wonderful NYC and America, on their country's nickel.

No News Here. None.

MLK had a house full of guns. Classical Values. Who knew? Good for him. I did not agree with much of his politics, but he was a good-hearted, flawed Christian fellow with a highly worthy mission. I am sorry he wasn't carrying the day he was shot, because he might have been able to save himself if he was quick.

The real Ann Coulter. TigerHawk. She has always enjoyed being provocative. People should not get upset with her - she's just a typical cantankerous Yankee character, but female, blond, photogenic, and on the TV. (We have tons of folks who think like her up here, but not ready for TV.) More on Ann, and Bad Advice, at Dr. Bob (I left a comment).

Was going to link a piece at Blue Crab, but he has so many good ones up that I'll just send you over there to nose around.

I missed this great, little story from Iraq. One more murderous bad guy killed, by a 72 year-old.

Photo: Robert Frost's New Hampshire farmhouse.

Tuitions rise while endowments swell. 

As we have noted in the past, higher education institutions are now investment organizations with annoyingly high overhead (faculty, students, buildings, sports facilities, etc). If they could just dump that overhead, they might be pretty good businesses. It might not hurt to just keep the football and basketball teams, though, for fresh cash flow.

The situation reminds me of the time, about 20 years ago, when ski areas woke up and realized that they were actually real estate businesses.

Edward Feser, author of Locke, asks the above question in a dense, meaty, scholarly piece at TCS which takes more than a couple of minutes to absorb. His conclusion:

Those who seek to appropriate Locke's legacy today must decide which part of it they value most, for they cannot coherently have it all. One must either endorse Locke's revisionist metaphysics - his rejection of objective essences and final causes in nature, his reductionistic account of the nature of persons, and so forth - and abandon the traditional moral and religious elements of his philosophy; or, if one wants to maintain these conservative elements, one must reject the revisionist metaphysics, and return to something like the Scholastic worldview it replaced. One must be either a radical or a reactionary. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to be a Lockean.

It is indeed difficult to discuss subjects when assumptions and premises are not shared. It is difficult to be a nation under those same conditions.

I think it is always necessary to clarify assumptions before discussing any issue.

Steyn: "The common space required for civil debate has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground." -  The 'cold civil war' in the US. (thanks, H)

From Malanga in City Journal, a quote:

The new Religious Left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration from the Christian social-justice movement that formed in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the emerging industrial economy, which many religious leaders viewed—with some justification—as brutal and unfair to workers. In America, the movement gained traction thanks largely to the efforts of Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who served New York City’s poor. Unlike nineteenth-century reformers who sought to help the poor by teaching them the bourgeois virtues of hard work, thrift, and diligence, Rauschenbusch believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute society’s wealth and forge an egalitarian society. In Christ’s name, capitalism had to fall. “The Kingdom of God is a collective conception,” Rauschenbusch wrote in Christianity and the Social Crisis, politicizing the Gospel’s message. “It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”

Sounds like Obama. The whole thing, The Religious Left, is here. 

I suspect this is a vocal, but not sizeable, group of people who will be given good media access despite their "theocratic" inclinations. The "Social Gospel," it seems to me, has very little to do with Christianity, which concerns itself with matters of the spirit and saving souls, and thus largely rejects earthly concerns about things like power as vain  distractions and temptations. I would steer clear of churches that do politics, and I believe that Dr. Dobson (who is truly wise on the subject of Christian child-rearing) is similarly foolish to get involved in political matters. It should be beneath their dignity.

Ingrid Fliter plays Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2. (h/t, Classical Virtuoso)

Buddy made me think about David Gelernter's book, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. A stunning, serious, soulful book by the Yale computer science prof, which made a big impression on me when it came out.

On the lighter side, I am reading Greenspan's best-selling memoir, Age of Turbulence. A fine read without a dull moment. I didn't know he had gone to Julliard, and wanted to be a jazz sax player. The guy was always the smartest guy in the room. You realize that being a central banker means learning as you go.

Bloomberg reports that it was Morgan Stanley who dumped the NYT stock today, in a block trade. Who else will dump?

And, speaking of Morgan Stanley, Tyler Cowen on Morgan Stanley in the 70s, vs. now.

About Benjamin Disraeli, by Gelernter in the Weekly Standard (2005). A quote:

Like nearly all successful politicians, he was a fine actor and first-rate manipulator, accustomed to saying things he didn't necessarily (wholly) believe. Like nearly all brilliant men, he could be hard to read. Like all celebrated wits and superstar parliamentarians, he was a champion improviser, superb at making things up as he went along. For all these reasons, historians tend to forget his passionate sincerity on the topics he cared about most: Britain, the Jews, the Tories, the government of England. No man ever left behind so many pregnant thoughts for his followers, admirers, and professional interpreters to ignore.

Read the whole thing.

The Republicans, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, failed to lead when they controlled the power. They failed at politics. They proved they are an opposition party, not a leadership party.

A Maggie's Farm reader and a disheartened Conservative, in comments here

Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist before he wrote kid's books. From a Dr. Seuss/Harry Reid piece at Gateway:

It's not that some people need more sleep than others - it's that some people sleep faster than others.

Peter DeVries

Quoted in this piece at Protein Wisdom by his reader Tomas:

This SCHIP argument is not about who does or doesn’t care about children. Christ. It’s about the proper role of government. That’s why the retorts from the Olbermanns of the world are so clueless at best, downright dishonest at worst.

If the left would at least acknowledge when its proposed programs do not fit in the intended government framework — that they go above and beyond, but are necessary because of such-and-such — the ensuing debates would be a lot less infuriating. But the left reliably skips that part every time. They proceed from the get-go as if everyone is operating in the same terrain, and pretend it’s thus merely a debate about the actual merits of various proposals.

It’s a rhetorical approach that has gummed up the gears of our political discourse for more than four decades now. It has caused us all to waste a depressing amount of breath, time and energy, sitting here constantly arguing past each other, all because the left is sloppy/dishonest with the debate’s most basic premise.

If only from the perspective of efficiency, it’s maddening.

Read the whole piece. Link above.

From an excellent, pleasantly rambling essay by Fjordman which begins with a discussion of Diana West's The Death of the Grown Up. A quote: 

She (West) believes that "Where womanhood stands today is deeply affected by the death of grown-up. I would say the sexualized female is part of the phenomenon I'm talking about, so I don't think they're immune to the death of the grown-up. Women are still emulating young fashion. Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process."

Is she right? Have we become a civilization of Peter Pans refusing to grow up? Have we been cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded? I know blogger Conservative Swede, who likes Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks we suffer from "slave morality," but I sometimes wonder whether we suffer from child morality rather than slave morality. However, there are other forces at work here as well.

The welfare state encourages an infantilization of society where people return to childhood by being provided for by others. This creates not just a culture obsessed with youth but with adolescent irresponsibility. Many people live in a constant state of rebellion against not just their parents but their nation, their culture and their civilization.

These are themes which have been frequently discussed at Maggie's. Read the whole thing at Brussels Journal.

Exactly right. A quote:

The Democrats just don’t get it. They didn’t get it when questions arose about the Frosts. They don’t get it now. And it is likely they will never get it because they refuse to ask the right questions.

It’s not about income. It’s about choices. It’s about the kind of government we should have. It’s about freedom versus dependence, liberty versus slavery, self-reliance versus serfdom.

And it’s about fairness. In the Frost's case, the consequences of one family’s choices being foisted upon their fellow Americans who may be less well off but are nevertheless asked to pony up to support them.

No one should begrudge the Wilkerson’s their participation in S-CHIP. They are barely above the poverty level and have little in the way of assets. But the Wilkersons and those like them are not the problem and the Democrats know it. Borderline cases like the Wilkerson’s who regularly fall through the cracks of coverage in other government programs are not part of the central criticism against the expansion of S-CHIP. It is subsidizing coverage for those up to 400% above the poverty level that is the basis of conservative opposition to the Democrat’s bill.