Thursday, April 29. 2010
 Neither an imminent 10-meter ocean level rise nor the prospect of a flooded basement deters the Fearless Al from this waterfront purchase.
So does anybody still think he really believes his nonsense? Yes, he is making ark-loads of $ from it but, even so, he is so on board that it would be too late for him to change his mind regardless of facts.
Like Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley.
But "facts" and "evidence" are just patriarchal and racist tools of oppression anyway, aren't they? In this brave new world, we all get to pick our own facts, depending on how we feel or on which side our bread is buttered, and reality is a politico-socio-emotional construct. Isn't it?
Remind me to post my bit on "Psycho-utopianism" some time soon.
 This feature back by popular demand. I will post the info later today, although our readers will figure it out first.
We seem to have some knowledgeable birders here. What a world!
Wednesday, April 28. 2010
"You ain't so big, you're just tall that's all."
Probably Reed's best-known song, and it's about work, not love. Everybody can relate. Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" echoes this classic in another way, does it not?
As in many of his recordings, you can hear his wife "Mama" chiming in sometimes.
 City Journal: Preservation Follies - Excessive landmarking threatens to make Manhattan a refuge for the rich.
NASA doubts climate model certainty
BBC: Climate party is winding down
Competition for The Teaching Company: Free Yale intro courses on DVD
Yale bans student-faculty gay sex. (I assume gay sex is included in this.) What about platonic romance?
Why women wear make-up. Villainous
Just what we need: A new mental diagnosis. Computer Stress Syndrome.
Americans, if not Obama, know Israel's strategic value
There is little new in the Arizona law. When I enter a foreign country, I carry a passport. Whether you agree with the law or not, "illegal" means illegal. Americans understand that. Our friend Never Yet Melted sees it differently.
More People Figuring Out that Law School's a Bad Value
Stay away from Mexico
Big biz considering dumping their insurance. Quote:
I’d like to write this off to the law of unintended consequences, but that would be pure nonsense. Not only was this known as a probable outcome, but Democrats lied through their teeth when they denied it. It was and is completely intended. It is the companies, however, that will be demonized for doing precisely what Democrats hoped they’d do (or, one assumes, the penalty for not supplying health care would have been much higher and any tax on Cadillac plans much lower). Single payer, here we come.
From John's Demonizing Goldman Sachs:
I'm not a particular fan of either Goldman Sachs or Congress, but today's hearing confirms that, given a choice, I'd rather have Goldman Sachs regulating Congress than Congress regulating Goldman Sachs. Goldman's employees are much smarter, considerably more honest, and far more likely to have my interests at heart.
Palin:
“I’m sick and tired of Obama and the White House coming out with yet another new crisis that has to be fixed by government sticking it to the people and taking more of what we earn and produce. Instead of allowing our small businesses especially to keep what we earn… But see, to many in the White House including our own president, I don’t know when they’ve run a business. I don’t know when they’ve been a CEO where they had to look out for the bottom line and they had to make payroll and live within their own means with a budget. They’re from government. They’re community organizers. They’ve been spending other people’s money for so long that the free enterprise principles that all of us believe in, it’s all foreign to them.“
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?"
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.
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:
I have always thought that Cape Dory made fine boats.This pretty 33' Cape Dory is for sale.
Psalm 23
1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Saturday, April 24. 2010
A reader minded us that the Polka and the button box came to North America via eastern European immigrants, and became Tex-Mex in a happy if unlikely union with the Mexican sound. Always was fond of the Texas Tornados, with the late greats Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender, plus Flaco Jiminez, Augie Meyers, et al. A motley crew, and good fun.
Got your Camaro?
I know The Barrister has fond memories of the old Bar Cars on The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad (now Metro-North). I have some such memories, also.
People smoking and drinking Scotch, and the bow-tied, white-jacketed bartender who knew everybody's choice. A cozy cheerful place on the 6:14 from Grand Central. A smoke-filled decompression chamber between work and home.
The famously alcohol-fueled and adultery-fueled bar car on the branch line from Stamford up to New Canaan and Ridgefield, CT used to have their own web site, but I can't find it now.
Photo below from the NYT photo essay. I never saw a bar car like that one, though. In my time, usually more packed with people (including chic gals and MILFs on their way home from shopping and hair-dos at Kenneth's) and so full of fragrant and wholesome tobacco smoke that you couldn't see from one end to the other.
Addendum: A reader has kindly sent us a Bar Car site
 Dr. Roy Spencer's new book. Related: Global warming scare industry suppresses benefits of CO2
Unbelievable: CNN promotes AGW-volcano nonsense. And Newsweek: The 100 places doomed by global warming.
Carpe Diem: Environmentalism as religion. Yes, it is a primitive paganism.
The New Coke in Bolivia. Of course, the original American Coke "tonic" had some coke in it too.
Paul Ryan: Obama Leading America on ‘Dangerous Path’ to Welfare State. Yup.
Theory: South Korean ship sunk by crack squad of 'human torpedoes'
Sissy says it's about "Fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets" . Related, It's the year for GOP Reformers
Related, Kudlow: It's America's Constitutionalist Revolt
From Goldstein's “The next Obamacare target: Your bacon sandwich”
The argument that an increased federal involvement in the health care industry will over time lead to ever more intrusive regulations on our bodies “for our own good” is one I’ve been making for years now. For my troubles, I’ve been called “paranoid” and “foaming” — and been accused of backing the kind of dogmatic libertarianism that would allow businesses to poison customers while the market sorted things out.
Of course, such a complaint is ludicrous. My point has always been that giving the government such a vested financial interest is dangerous precisely because the feds wield the kind of regulatory power that can take away our freedoms, all the while justifying such decisions based on a combination of what they’d call sound fiscal responsibility and improving “public health.” The result? Liberal fascism.
Fannie & Freddie Reform Excluded from Finance Bill Warmth causes CO2. From Item #21 here:
Global warmings result in an increase in atmospheric CO2 as warmed oceans emit their dissolved CO2. Global coolings result in a decrease in atmospheric CO2 as cooling oceans absorb atmospheric CO2. Temperature variations precede those CO2 variations by several hundred to a thousand years, thus indicating that it is the temperature variations that cause atmospheric CO2 changes and not the reverse. The human contribution to the cycle is trivial and furthermore the so-called “greenhouse effect”, touted as the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 controls weather, has long been known to be devoid of physical reality. Accordingly, proposed measures of “carbon control” will have no effect on the weather but instead will seriously damage the Nation’s economy and the reliability of its electric generating capacity: a system that is currently working quite satisfactorily and is entirely independent of foreign sources of energy. Clearly, that system for supplying the Nation with its essential need for reliable electricity “ain’t broke”…and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
The World is Too Much With Us (1807)
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
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“We could have an ice age any time.”