The notion that art has a political function is a hold-over from the Hitler and Stalin years, when overt, unsubtle propagandizing was at its height. The notion that art is meant to unsettle the comfortable bourgeoisie is mainly a product of the juvenile and narcissistic 60s.

Indeed, the notion that art is a "personal statement" is a modern and, I feel, vain concept. However, it does fit well with the desire for instant celebrity and fame: "It's all about me."

In support of Free Speech, I post two infamous, blasphemous and hideous examples of recent "art." What do you think? I think they are high-school level attention-seeking and tasteless examples of adolescent rebellion against the grown-ups. But Free Speech protects jerks - as it should. Riots? No. Sadness? Yes. And hey - the "controversy" fills the galleries. Mind you, the American newspapers have no problem with these forms of "personal expression" - because they know the Christians won't behead them. There happens to be a little item that says "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us..."

The first is "Piss Christ."

This one is The Holy Virgin with Elephant Dung:

Dr. Weinberg: Ms. Thomas, I'd like to begin by asking you a few questions.
Helen Thomas: I ask the questions here. I am the Deanette of the Washington Press Corps!
Dr. W: Well, please just indulge me for a minute. What city are we in now?
Helen Thomas: Washington DC. Where else would anybody be?
Dr. W: Excellent. And what year is this?
Helen Thomas: 1974. Everyone knows that.
Dr. W: And who is the President?
Helen Thomas: Richard Nixon, the lousy rat bum warmonger fascist pig - that's who!
Dr. W: You seem a bit upset...
Helen Thomas: I am gonna get that Republican wiretapping SOB.
Dr. W: Nixon did wiretapping?...Not that I recall...maybe J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Kennedy...oh, never mind. Let's move on...
Helen Thomas: Exactly right, Professor. Move On - that's the ticket. But don't you dare criticize my Bobby.

(the tape mercifully but mysteriously cut at this point)

We have all figured it out by now, but Henniger articulates it best. It's the Japanese water torture - you drip drip drip on everything until people just get "tired of the Republican experience." Meanwhile, the Repubs tie themselves in knots trying to respond - but that's not the point! Quote from his WSJ op piece (H/T, Soxblog):

Absent any fresh or positive message for voters, why not try winning by turning politics under the Republicans into an experience of unrelenting discomfort? The substance of any given issue falls in importance. Connecting Jack Abramoff to George Bush personally was always a stretch. So what?

The most telling evidence of a strategy of discomfiting the body politic was the January bonfire over terrorist wiretaps. Here the opposition shrieked for days about a "constitutional crisis" even as polls were indicating public support for the Bush program, including 28% who would OK tapping anyone's phone "on a regular basis" to catch terrorists.

Read the entire piece. He gets it, like totally.

Improbable things happen frequently because there are lots of opportunities for them to occur.  

Dr. Charles Bennett, NASA

Best, most sober, and thoughtful piece I have seen lately about Islam's clash - not so much with Western Civilization, but with modernity. Covers everything from the cartoons to Moslem men's relationships to women to war. Gerecht in The Weekly Standard:

This is all about internal Muslim evolution, about coming to terms with the centuries-long absorption of both good and bad Western ideas. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the Israeli-Palestinian peace process can somehow soon resume. When al Qaeda's princes--bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi--rail against the intrusion of Western democracy into the Muslim world, they know what they are talking about. If it succeeds, democracy will eventually kill them off. It will pull fundamentalist believers--the pool that bin Ladenism must draw from to survive--into the great ethical and spiritual debates that can best happen when free people fight it out in elections. Only Muslims--only fundamentalist Muslims--have the power to kill off bin Ladenism. Historically, there is no reason to believe this will happen under the dictatorships that gave birth to Islamic extremism in the first place.

Like Christendom before it, the Muslim Middle East will have to work out its relation to modernity. The faster democracy arrives, the sooner the debates about God and man can begin in earnest. It will probably be for both Muslims and Westerners a nerve-racking experience. But we have no choice, since continuing autocracy will only make the militants' message stronger and judgment day, as in Iran, a possibly bloody revolutionary event. The electoral victory of Hamas should not give us pause. It should give us hope and encourage us to push for real elections where our national interest stands to gain the most--in Egypt and Iran. We should also not neglect to defend vigorously Christian, Muslim, or Jewish satirists, be they clever, banal, or ugly, wherever they may be found. Both elections and satire are basic to the evolution of the Muslim world.

Read the whole thing.

Q: How do I protect my cockatoo or canary from bird flu?
A: If you keep a cockatoo or canary as a pet, slaughter it immediately. The proper way to do this is to grab its body in your fist, walk it into the kitchen, place it on the cutting board, and lop its head off with a knife. Pretty much any knife will do. Bird necks are about as tough as celery.

Read the rest here.

From a piece by McClay at First Things, on Columbia's Religion and Liberalism Conference (H/T, MassRight):

We often fail to remember what a socially conservative coalition, by our standards today, the New Deal era Democratic Party was, with its essential contingents of Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants. In today’s Democratic Party, white Southern Protestants are largely gone, and the Catholic vote has split, and is trending more and more toward the Republicans. Much of the latter change can be attributed to rank-and-file Catholic disaffection with the Democratic party’s decision to give issues of cultural “values”—and most particularly issues that relate to the individualistic concerns of sexuality and expressive freedom, and abortion rights in particular—a prominence and energy that they felt it was no longer given to larger economic and political issues, and that offended them deeply. This emphasis has not yet cost the Democrats their entire Catholic constituency, but it has cost them a very large part of it, and perhaps the most commitedly Catholic part of it. The trend shows no sign of reversing in any decisive way. Many Catholics who now routinely vote Republican clearly still do not feel at ease about it. But with each passing election, they are less reluctant.

The loss of its morally and socially conservative but politically progressive Catholics has been a calamity, then, for the Democratic Party, and has seriously undermined its claim to be the vehicle of an effective and humane progressive politics.

Read entire.

I have read about 100 articles about climate over the past year, from the scientific to the pop science. That doesn't make me an expert. But it's enough to throw out a few facts and opinions.

Facts:

Climate changes over time, with or without humans.

Since the beginnings of agriculture, humans have impacted climate.

We live in an interglacial, during a time of retreating ice sheets - but still in what is technically an ice-age - meaning polar ice caps. During most of the planet's history, there have been none. We are in a cold spell.

Short-term variations and swings of climate mean no more that short-term swings in the stock market.

Carbon material in the air probably does contribute to net warming.

In the past week, YARGB has done a post on the hockey stick graph - often used to inspire climate terror. And yesterday, Libertarian Leanings posted Sound the Alarm...Again, in response to the newspaper's hysteria about Greenland ice sheets. Michaels, who has been a real scholar in this area, points out that the articles on the glaciers fail to mention that ice is accumulating in Greenland faster than the glaciers are melting.

Opinion:

Climate and climate-modeling are incredibly complex, and if carbon material in the atmosphere plays a role in the current interglacial warming, so be it. It won't be enough to prevent the return of the next glaciation. It hardly matters what we do in the US anyway - that hybrid car might make you feel virtuous but it does nothing...the manufacture of the batteries spills tons of CO2. And countries like Russia, China, India and developing countries are dying for the chance to burn oil the way the US and Europe do - and they will. Thus nothing meaningful will be or can be done, except maybe some very expensive, feel-good cosmetics. Eventually, nuclear power will replace carbon sources, but climate is not the main reason to do that. Energy independence, and economy, is the reason to do that. At some point, oil power will look the way horse power looks to us today. I refuse to worry pointlessly about it, nor will I worry about an asteroid hitting the earth. As long as there are billions of people on earth, we will effect climate, and everything else, somehow.

(Image: Wooly Mammoth in New Jersey, summertime, a few thousand years ago, by paleo-artist Moravec.)

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Niccolo Machiavelli

I hate to say it, but, when it comes to Gonzo writing, Mark Steyn has it all over the late-lamented Hunter Thompson. I still swear that I will renew my New York Times subscription if they hire Steyn:

Meanwhile, from Malaysia to Jordan to Scandinavia, it was a bad week for journalists increasingly constrained -- not to mention fired and otherwise humiliated -- in their ability to cover the big story of our time. If I had to pick a single moment to contrast with the hilariously parochial narcissist buffoons of the Washington press, it would be another press conference in another government building, this time in Oslo, called by Norway's minister of labor. Surrounded by cabinet ministers and a phalanx of imams, Velbjorn Selbekk, the editor of an obscure Christian publication called Magazinet, issued an abject public apology for reprinting the Danish Muhammed cartoons. He had initially stood firm in the face of Muslim death threats and the usual lack of support from Europe's political class, but in the end Mr. Selbekk was prevailed upon to recant and the head of Norway's Islamic Council, Mohammed Hamdan, graciously accepted the apology and assured the prostrate editor that he was now under his personal protection. As the American author Bruce Bawer commented, "It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom."

In Canada, by contrast, the Western Standard (for which I also write) stood firm in its decision to publish the cartoons, and as a result is suffering legal harassment from Muslim lobby groups and has been banned from both Air Canada and two of the country's leading bookstore chains, Indigo-Chapters and McNally Robinson. Paul McNally of the latter defended his action this way: "We feel there is nothing to gain on the side of freedom of expression and much to lose on the side of hurting feelings." Not exactly Voltaire, is it? "I disagree strongly with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it as long as it doesn't hurt anybody's feelings." Maybe it could be Canada's new national motto.

Read the entire, pointed, hilarious piece: Cheering Tidbits

A versatile sporting breed, the Pudelpointer is a mix of Poodle (aka Water Spaniel) and English Pointer.

I have a buddy who has two of them. Good family dogs, strong retrievers and pointers. Unlike Poodles, they like water retrieving. Unlike workaholic Pointers, they are family pets.

There are not many of them, so the gene pool is thin.

The less rare German Wirehaired Pointer (the Drahthaar) is a mix of Pudelpointer with several other German sporting breeds.

This site gives a good run-down on some of the German sporting breeds.

How soon we forget history... Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

George Washington

(Cool trivia, re his name. Wassa - a Saxon name. "Ing" Saxon for tribe. "Tun" - Saxon for a fortified village. Thus Wassa's family's fortified town. In England. The Saxons...then the Normans...then the Moslems? Good Grief! "The soul of the nation is under the knife" - Dylan)

By way of follow-up on our piece yesterday on flooding and flood insurance, a piece came out yesterday by the AP's Bridges noting the increase of development in flood zones:

Concentrated development in flood-prone parts of Missouri, California and other states has significantly raised the risk of New Orleans-style flooding as people snap up new homes even in areas recently deluged, researchers said Saturday.

Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi River lapped at the steps of the Gateway Arch during the 1993 flood, more than 14,000 acres of flood plain have been developed since then. That has reduced the region's ability to store water during future floods and potentially put more people in harm's way, said Adolphus Busch IV, a scion of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family who is chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance.

Similar development has occurred around Dallas, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Omaha, Neb., and Sacramento, Calif., said Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.

Read the whole thing in the Houston Chronicle. Wish we could get some congressmen interested. Who wouldn't have a chat over a free Bud with Adolphus?

How often do you see a new Congregational Church going up?

The National Flood Insurance Program is bankrupt. Not recently. That means that taxpayers are subsidizing building in flood zones, flood plains, and areas with high risk of natural water disasters - and thus encouraging, rather than discouraging, stupid behavior by making it economically risk-free to the individual.

For reasons of principle, conservation, and common sense, this subsidy should end. If you chose to live in such a high-risk place, you should carry the risk, not me.  Flood Insurance should be a purely commercial enterprise, the same as any other aspect of homeowner's insurance. Not retroactively, but in the future. Somehow, I doubt anyone in DC cares about this every much, but the Katrina costs should be a chance to reconfigure this insurance/subsidy scam.

From Burnett at TCS:

When people own property and are fully responsible for losses due to their poor land use or development decisions, they are less likely to build or rebuild in areas regularly prone to flooding or erosion. This link -- between a person's property ownership and responsibility for their land use decisions -- disciplines people who use their property badly.

Unfortunately, a host of government programs break this link by subsidizing unwise development. All too often the result is lost lives, destroyed property and diminished livelihoods. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) flood control program and federal flood insurance subsidize construction in flood-prone areas and encourage high-risk development by shifting the cost of insurance and physical protection against floods from property owners to taxpayers. The result: more construction in high risk areas. Its economics 101 -- if you subsidize something you get more of it.

I guess politics trumps logic, every time. Read entire. (Image from New Orleans)

Shooting one lawyer is an accident.
Shooting them all is a movement!

Link via Confed. Yank. (What's a Perazzi? Here.)

It could turn out that Loftus over-hyped his tapes for publicity reasons. Rick Moran has it right in his piece in which he quotes Lori Byrd thus:

If the tapes are authentic, the discussion of efforts to deceive the inspectors and to be ready to quickly resume WMD production is huge news, but it obviously will not be reported that way. As I said yesterday, it is going to take a heck of a lot to convince the media, and those on the left, that Bush didn’t lie about Saddam’s WMD. Scratch that. They already know he didn’t lie about it. It will take a heck of a lot to convince them to admit that Bush didn’t lie about it.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. 

Niels Bohr

Very funny. My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has the video. She says it's the Islamic Numa Numa, and offers that old video too, just for fun - if you missed it.

(And yes, Maggie's Farm will make fun of anyone and anything we want, including our own religion and our own world view. Whenever we feel like it - and even if it's juvenile. We will not even try to compete with Powerline for brains. We are simple God-fearin' New England Country Folk.)

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them. 

George Bernard Shaw  

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

John Ciardi