Wednesday, June 24. 2009
 From Smithsonian:
The first wheels were not used for transportation.
Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter’s wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia—300 years before someone figured out to use them for chariots.
The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy…and the wheelbarrow.
Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor savings.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.
One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)
In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.
Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:
Friday, June 19. 2009
My grandmother, advocate of the turn of the century (that’s early 1900’s) democratic socialism based in defense of the little guy from rampant big business, taught me that the biggest myth in America is the efficiency of big business. So, government grew in regulations and programs, and so did unions, to counter big business and favor the little guy. ‘Till now it’s a truism that big government is inefficient and too little the friend of the little guy, and big unions are money founts for their leaders at the expense of labor having jobs. Meanwhile, big business has more and more become an ally of big government and unions to divide the spoils, and stifle competition and innovation. All that leaves to maneuver for the little guy against the increasing encroachments of the biggies is small business and individuals.
It’s time for more small businesspeople and individuals to defy the biggies with a chant of I am Spartacus, or I am an American.
(No, I didn’t purposely ignore big academia. It has made itself largely irrelevant via meaningless coursework enriching self-serving pedants.)
Consider a few datapoints:
Investigative journalist Tim Carney reminds us that in 1993 the biggest insurers supported Hillarycare, to shift liability risk onto taxpayers and profit from claims-processing contracts. Small insurers, brokers who work with small companies, and individuals revolted. Today, the big insurers are again cooperating with the government-dictated health care advocates, as long as the big insurers can profit from more premium payers steered their way.
The Canadian medical societies remind us not to go north for a model of government-dictated health care, as the waits are excessive by even long-wait standards approved by the government.
The former Chief Economist of the US Chamber of Commerce reminds us (sorry, a subscription only column) that when government as umpire controls a team, bad and self-serving calls are to be expected.
Michelle Malkin reminds us that Mrs. Obama and President Obama’s chief political operative worked to reduce care for the poor, to enrich her employer (and her compensation).
Mickey Kaus reminds us that unions are to be exempted from Obamacare, and further benefit from attracting members through higher benefits than the rest of us.
The CEO of the consumer highest-rated insurer in the US reminds us that he doesn’t so much fear government-plan competition but, “more about the federal government’s ability to do this at all, much less do it well. Merely coordinating basic demographic information between Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - three big federal programs that millions of Americans belong to - can be a chore for beneficiaries, their children, and their health plans.”
Be Spartacus. Say "I am American. I refuse to be pushed around by the biggies, or under their thumb."
Write or call your congressional representatives to represent your views.
Ask your employer and your doctors to do so too.
Wednesday, June 10. 2009
Dr X labels this photo:
Caruthersville, Missouri (Russell Lee).
Farm Security Administration client who will become a farm owner-operator under the tenant purchase program.
Monday, June 8. 2009
 A Connecticut moral crusader and the YMCA.
I guess the Y has seen some changes over the years. A quote from the essay:
He might be grimly amused to see twenty-first-century social conservatives making their last stand over the odd issue of “same-sex marriage.”
And he would certainly conclude that he now stood in a very different country.
Saturday, June 6. 2009
 From S.L.A. Marshall's First Wave at Omaha Beach, in the November,1960 Atlantic:
Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Thursday, June 4. 2009
From the Oxford Libertarian Society, the remarkable Prof. Terence Kealey - author of Sex, Science, and Politics (h/t, Samiz). A wide-ranging and fascinating talk, with wonderful Q&A. The guy is a genius. Please watch:
Terence Kealey - 'The Myth of Science as a Public Good' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.
Monday, June 1. 2009
The reporters of this series were never allowed back into Cuba. This is Part 1 of 6, in Spanish:
Sunday, May 31. 2009
 Via Aurelia: The Roman Empire's Lost Highway. A bit more interesting than Route 66.
Photo from the article.
Wednesday, May 27. 2009
 Andrew Jackson: American Lion by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.
An imperfect but absorbing book about the Presidency of an interesting American during interesting times.
The Tennessean Andrew Jackson was a tough guy, but a loving, emotionally sensitive and volatile guy. A General and a hard-nosed pol - not a philosopher.
Saturday, May 23. 2009
Via RCP, a superb essay by Carl Schramm Up From Poverty. How economic growth occurs remains a mystery to economists - or at least a subject of endless debate.
An enduring truth often forgotten (or ignored) by proponents of state-led development: economic growth owes more to the forbearance of the state than to its intervention. Governments do not, indeed cannot, make wealth-only their citizens can. And when government protects their freedom, the world's growing population of entrepreneurs, in the bargain, expands human dignity and establishes the foundation of ongoing growth on which civil society ultimately depends.
One quote from the essay:
In the touchstone year of 1820, 84% of the world's population lived in what would today be judged "extreme poverty." Today, only 16% do. That is such an astounding achievement that it is difficult even to comprehend. According to the World Bank, in the last 30 years alone-a time of rapid globalization-the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by 25%, or 500 million people. The outbreak of entrepreneurial capitalism within the Communist political system of the People's Republic of China accounts for most of this achievement, but almost every region of the world has seen a decline in the share of its population living in extreme poverty. Bright spots such as Israel and Mauritius, moreover, have proven that growth can occur in regions previously thought allergic to it.
Tuesday, May 19. 2009
 You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell. Maureen Dowd got caught plagiarizing a blogger in her New York Times column the other day. But calling the lockstep mindset she's channeling "plagiarism" is superfluous. She's cribbing the homework of someone who writes something called Talking Points Memo, after all. They can all finish one another's sentences, or start them to get the ball rolling. Makes no never mind. They never have an original thought, just endless permutations of the same drivel about George W. Bush. They all think if they rearrange the words a little one more time, George Bush will be guilty and Karl Rove will be arrested or Alberto Gonzales won't be able to rent movies from Netflix or... something. Or maybe they'll all be tried in absentia in some weird traffic court based in a European country whose GDP is less than Al Gore's electric bill, and George will be forever unable to travel to some frosty HMO masquerading as a country to pick up the Nobel prize they'll never award him anyway. It seems like trying to invest heavily in tulip bulb futures at this point to any sane observer. George wasn't running in the last election; he's very, very unlikely to stand in the next one. But still they persist. If you are a monomaniac, you try to convert others to your mania. Smart people give you the cold shoulder immediately. If you listen a little, you're going to have to listen a lot. It's the reason you don't make eye contact with people yelling at traffic in the street. It doesn't pay to seem interested and polite.
Continue reading "George W. Cromwell"
Sunday, May 17. 2009
All readers should listen to this piece of history, in which a disappointing "proletariat" - which refused revolution - was replaced by a Gramscian program for an intellectual elite-driven neo-Marxism designed to bring down Western civilization to replace it with...whatever...run by them.
(For Marcuse, it seems to have been all about random sex with interesting strangers rather than anything economic, which is fine with me but Mrs. B., who I am quite fond of and to whom I am quite attached and comfortable, would never go along with that idea. Therefore I comply with her wishes and am not a sexual revolutionary despite my many and almost continuous adventurous and curious thoughts about all of the charming females one encounters in life. That was the deal I made with her, and keeping my word is important to me. I guess that makes me a reactionary.)
A big wave of an old Montecristo and a glass of single malt to Thompson for finding this excellent 20-minute piece:
Saturday, May 16. 2009
Negro Barber Shop, 1936, Atlanta, GA. Walker Evans. (h/t Dr X, who likes the kind of photos I like.) In 60 years, a photo of your barber shop will be just as interesting.
Sunday, May 10. 2009
Reposted -
The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, MA. 1636. Those are the bones of the basic center-hall Colonial. The slope of that roof is great for either snow or rain.
Multiculturally-sensitive though he may be, Sippican Cottage is omitting pueblos and phony old houses in St. Augustine from his thorough research on the topic. He means real wood-framed houses.
It's easy to detect the core of the farmhouse, before all of the additions and extensions.
What a young nation we are.
Thursday, April 23. 2009
Monotonic music mainly, with lyre, drum, trumpet and flute, with different "modes" to evoke different states of mind. The ancient Greeks considered their music and lyrics to be central to who they were as a civilization, and, of course, to be a gift from the gods. As best I can tell, poetry (the lyrics) was never offered without accompanying music.
The group Melpomen recreates the ancient sounds from surviving fragments. (Samples of the music at the Amazon site.)
Wiki has a fine summary of ancient Greek music. Interesting to read that Plato (c 400 BC) complained about the modern music which defied old forms.
Image: Music lesson, c.460 BC, from this site about ancient Greek music.
Wednesday, April 22. 2009
"Ancient," to me, means before 1000 BC. After that, it's historic, more or less.
These are old pots. I stumbled on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site with their collection of Athenian 6-4th Century BC red and black containers while searching for an illo for last Saturday's Saturday Verse. I am sure you have looked at their like before. These decorated containers were surely not for everyday use.
Here are a few of them:
Amphora, c. 530 BC
Amphora with chariot and soldiers, c. 540 BC
Bell-krater (wine mixing bowl) with three women, one playing lyre. c. 460 BC. I would assume that she is singing too.
Hydria (water jug), c. 500 BC
Ain't these intertubes cool?
Tuesday, April 21. 2009
There are things we can touch and perceive, or perceive with technology. Some things cannot be touched but can be easily perceived, such as the charming young lassies above. Or mental life: ideas, emotions, etc. And spiritual life.
For some reason, it's Greek Week at Maggie's and, while looking for something else, I found this bit somewhere at Wiki:
Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.
 Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.
It is certain that many are indifferent to the invisible world - practical, earth-bound types who are happily without the muses' gift - or burden - of reflecting on the "higher realities" and the hidden realities which seem to try to connect the human heart with the cosmic. The meta-physical or trancendent realm of thought and experience which many of us seek to grasp and hold. More:
The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.
Indeed we are all Greeks - especially those of us who are Christians (the Greek Paul thoroughly Greekified the Christ Cult, thus translating it into a world religion). "Psyche," the soul, was a combination of the psych-ological (mental) and the spiritual/divine aspects of reality as we experience it, until academics in modern times separated psychology out as a topic of study in the Aristotelian slicing-and-dicing way. Being sober sorts, they did not want to call Psychologists "soul students," nor did Psychiatrists want to call themselves "soul physicians." So they put it in Greek, same as most of the other -ologists and -iatrists.
Photo on top of a few untouchable Muses borrowed from Egotastic.
Image below: Bust of Socrates, Louvre
Left and Right participants, from Trotsky to Hayek, in the 20th Century’s debates over the role of government have agreed that a major danger emerges from the coming to power of the “New Class” of intellectuals and public policy managers whose primacy over the hoi polloi (some even refer to the commoners as sardines) is ensured by self-profiting politicians, together extending government controls into more spheres of society. (A brief summary of New Class thought at Wikipedia.)
This New Class debate lay at the core of understanding the essential corruption of morality, of true popular governance, and of state powers that ensues from the rise of this privileged New Class.
My friend Lorie Byrd tries to explain to the in-denial and in-disparagement New Class the Tea Party protests across the country by about 600,000 ordinary citizens: “many average, everyday Americans were not thrilled with the ‘change’ they were getting from the new administration.” This is not an intellectual movement, couched in fancy words, but is the hoi polloi’s recognition of a basic intellectual truth, that the New Class is robbing their resources for their own expansion of power and profiteering.
The rude – indeed classless -- disdain and insult expressed by so much of the liberal commentariat toward the Tea Partiers exhibits their deeper fears of their spreading rejection as more and more Americans realize and react to their gross power grabs. Their fear, and arrogance, propels their haste to ram through major redefining programs before they are stopped by the 2010 elections reducing their Congressional majorities.
2010 can’t come soon enough. So, it is proposed that Tea Partiers crowd the townhall-type meetings held by their Congressmen and Senators to drive the point home before 2010.
The New Class may lack class, but they will recognize their overstepping will undermine their own survival. Behind their crude attitude toward Tea Partiers is their recognition their window of opportunity to further aggrandize themselves is short.
The legacy media is rapidly being replaced by alternatives which do not insult or ignore the legitimate grievances of the hoi polloi. The captains of industry in-bed-with taxpayer bailouts for their excess greed and irresponsibility are recognizing the self-destructive deal with the devil relegating them to managers of the corporate state. The unions, whose demise in private industry has been offset by controlling the government bureaucracies, are seeing their legislative goals to increase their sway sinking, while their bankruptcy of public services through excess benefits is arousing the poorly served public. The leaders of non-profits, who use their tax-exemptions to indulge in obtaining taxpayer grants that feed huge compensation packages, are startled that they are being viewed as abusing their privileges.
Onward, Tea Partiers.
Monday, April 13. 2009
A 30-minute video by Capt. Irving Johnson as a young man in 1929, capturing, in vivid black and white, the reality of sailing around the world on the Peking - including a Cape storm. h/t to Powerline for finding this remarkable record.
In the old days, going to sea was like going to war. Men died. John doesn't like the Captain's narration, but I love it. Sounds like he's from VT or NH, that old-timey Robert Frost sound. (Nope, Hadley, MA. I know Hadley well.)
The Peking is currently berthed at South Street Seaport, NYC.
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Today is Patriot's Day: