August 2013
-
Weekend Music Be warned: this is an emotionally intense song. I've seen this referred to as an anti-war song, and implicitly it is, but it's more personal than political, not a statement but a picture of an all-too-real human situation. Pug himself said: The song nearly wrote itself and yet I released it with…
-
Sometimes Google's auto-suggest feature produces interesting, amusing, and even vaguely poetic results. The other day I was looking for the blog What's Wrong With the World, which I read occasionally but haven't bookmarked, and this was Google's attempt to be helpful (click on the image to enlarge it): Assuming these are ranked according to the…
-
This is not a review, because I'm only on page 68 of this book. But I can't resist quoting from it. So far it seems to be the most incisive and thorough critique of liberalism I've seen. It's plain that liberalism, the doctrine of maximum freedom for all, is in fact exhibiting a paradoxical drift…
-
Obamacare is a bonanza for lobbyists. …the United States is a large and undisciplined country and includes far too many people who would see the system only as something to be exploited. And I don’t mean only the sort of shiftless people who always exploit welfare, social security, etc. as recipients—I mean doctors, lawyers, corporations,…
-
In Time: 6 Ways Syria 2013 Isn't Iraq 2003. The Drudge Report linked to this with the text "MSM Scrambles to Distinguish Syria from Iraq." Indeed. It's true that there are signficant differences, at least as of now, but they seem to be mainly of scale: Obama seems to want a mainly symbolic intervention, where…
-
"This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."
-
I can't let 2013 go by without noting the 100th anniversary of the performance that came to be viewed as Day 1 of the era of modern art. It wasn't really that, of course. Schoenberg's much stranger Pierrot Lunaire had been performed more than six months earlier, and cubist painting had been under way for several…
-
Weekend Music Several years ago my friend Robert sent me a CD of the Chopin Ballades played by Krystian Zimerman. It disappeared among a welter of home-burned CDs that I was having a lot of trouble keeping track of, and then was forgotten, until Robert mentioned it to me a few weeks ago. I found…
-
"kidney impaired function" says "This genuinely answered my own problem, thank you!" Of course I'm always happy to help, but the post was about the Zimmerman-Martin case.
-
Time continues to speed up unacceptably. And yet I am obliged to accept it. I thought it was about three weeks ago that pasted the URL for this piece on America's web site into a blog post template intending to write about it later. Actually it was almost two months ago, on June 28. But…
Light On Dark Water 