Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

5 Comments

Stunning news atop the Drudge Report, though this florid obit from AP is anything but objective:

Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Publicist Kristen Foster said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.

At her peak, Houston the golden girl of the music industry. From the middle 1980s to the late 1990s, she was one of the world’s best-selling artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and peerless vocals that were rooted in the black church but made palatable to the masses with a pop sheen.

Her success carried her beyond music to movies, where she starred in hits like “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale.”

She had the he perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise.

She influenced a generation of younger singers, from Christina Aguilera to Mariah Carey, who when she first came out sounded so much like Houston that many thought it was Houston.

But by the end of her career, Houston became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. Her album sales plummeted and the hits stopped coming; her once serene image was shattered by a wild demeanor and bizarre public appearances. She confessed to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, and her once pristine voice became raspy and hoarse, unable to hit the high notes as she had during her prime.

Not surprisingly, Houston’s Wikipedia page already has been updated to reflect her death.

Update: TMZ reports, “According to our sources, Houston died at the Beverly Hilton hotel. A police crime lab vehicle was seen outside the hotel just moments ago.

Related: “Whitney Houston’s Tragic Death Takes CNN to New Lows.”

3 Comments

Yes Virginia (and the NYT) Woody Guthrie was a Commie, Ronald Radosh writes at PJM. Plus, the Woody Guthrie/Solyndra connection, revealed!

Yesterday’s Arts section of the New York Times contained an interesting report about the status of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl balladeer, in his native Oklahoma. Reporter Patricia Cohen writes that “Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors.” Note that word, “communist sympathies;” evidently, Guthrie had some kind of innocuous sympathies, perhaps those of a naïve fellow traveler, but not those of a self-proclaimed hard-nosed Red.  As one resident of Guthrie’s hometown Okemah, who loved Guthrie told Cohen, Guthrie had been “kind of taboo because some influential people thought Woody Guthrie had communist leanings.” The implication, as you can see, is that those attitudes were the ill-informed opinions of old school Red-baiters from the ’30s.

Now, after years of denial, Oklahoma is ready to welcome Woody home. The story reports on how The George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa has bought Guthrie’s archives from his children, and are “building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.” It will include his notebooks and diaries, art work, letters, scrapbooks, and the like, including the lyrics of 3000 songs to which he never had the chance to write music. It cost George Kaiser some $3 million to undertake the project. We also learn that Kaiser is, as Cohen reports, “one of the richest men in Oklahoma,” a man who made his millions from the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company.

Kaiser, in other words, is just the kind of capitalist the Communists always yell about — an exploiter of both the workers and our country’s natural resources. If you read the Wikipedia entry about him, you will find that his net worth in 2008 was some $12 billion, although his  current net worth has dropped to a paltry $9 billion in today’s downward economy. He is still the richest man in Oklahoma (who also lives half time in San Francisco) but no longer one of the 20 richest in America, having slipped only to a tie for the 43^rd richest person in the world!

Yes, Kaiser does good things with his wealth. He gives his money to causes like childhood education and the Oklahoma Jewish community. But he is also evidently part of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, a man who argued before Oklahoma’s legislature that tax incentives for the oil and gas industry should be eliminated or reduced, and the money be used instead for health care, education and tax cuts for regular people. (He did not, as you might expect, make that argument as he was accumulating his riches.) As you might expect, Mr. Kaiser was also one of Barack Obama’s “bundlers” in the 2008 election campaign, as well as a major investor in — you guessed it — Solyndra! (A bundler, as the Wikipedia entry explains, is “an individual who collects contributions to a candidate from others that are then simultaneously given to the candidate.”)

Incidentally, note this six degrees of Soviet separation moment later in Ron’s article:

In the ’50s, when I took banjo lessons from Pete Seeger, his banjo case would be stuffed full of issues of the Communist paper. Why, I asked Pete, did he have a week’s supply of The Worker in the banjo case? He told me that while he was in the city, he would go visit Woody in the hospital where he was confined because of his Huntington’s disease, and would read him the issues aloud so he could keep up with the Party news and positions. Later, in a TV documentary made for British TV, Pete said proudly that “Woody and I were Communists.”

This is no big secret anymore, except evidently, for those who still believe that unless one makes it clear he or she is a Communist to identify the person as one is Red-baiting.

Of course, as James Lileks noted a decade ago, that’s long been SOP at the NYT:

On Wednesday, James Lileks wrote:

Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of – dum dum DUMMMM – McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

Yesterday’s New York Times has finally gotten around to reporting on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s communist ties, almost a week after several other publications on both sides of the aisle did. The Times’ article has these lines, printed without comment or dissent by the reporter who wrote the article:

In an interview today, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a spokeswoman for Answer, said questions raised about the group’s role were “classic McCarthy-era Red-baiting.”"When you select out the Socialists or Marxists,” she said, “the point is to demonize and divide and diminish a massive, growing movement.”

In reply, Glenn Reynolds writes:

It’s not McCarthyite to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

Sure they can — just ask The Nation, which at the end of 2011 is busy attempting to rehabilitate the rep of the Soviet Union.

Comments Off

Just in time for Christmas, from Seinfeld and SNL to The World at War, I have a post at the PJ Lifestyle blog on some of the best DVD box sets from television’s last 45 years. It’s a very idiosyncratic list, along with my thoughts on how these shows impacted pop culture history. Definitely drop by and list your favorites in the comments.

Comments Off

Sharp minds, fast Sharpies — and narration by PJTV’s own Bill Whittle:

H/T: Roger Kimball, who writes that OWS has finally found its own Leonard Bernstein to slum with them:

For a vivid taste of the humor, savor this delicious tidbit from The New York Times‘s  daily report on OWS:

The composer Philip Glass will make a statement at a General Assembly at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, where his opera, Satyagraha, on the life of Gandhi, is closing.

Occupy Wall Street. Philip Glass. Gandhi.  It really is droll.  There is a reason that George Orwell began his devastating essay on that Indian fraud with the observation that saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent. (It cost a lot of money, the historian Paul Johnson observed in his tart assessment of Gandhi in Modern Times, to keep Gandhi living in poverty.)

Perhaps Philip Glass will write one of his minimalist operas on Occupy Wall Street — if you thought the drum circles at OWS were repetitive, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. On the other hand, Glass’s reputation was made in the early 1980s with his soundtrack to the visually striking film Koyaanisqatsi, whose plot is focused on mankind’s destruction of pristine virginal Mother Earth (stop me if you’ve heard that one before from Hollywood). Curious that Glass would side with them, given that’s a topic that OWS and its offshoots have proven definitively that they’re expert on.

3 Comments

I have some initial impressions of Amazon’s Cloud-based MP3 player, some tips on how to relatively painlessly convert 200 albums worth of Windows Media files to MP3s, and some half-baked ruminations on both inherent nostalgia of recorded music and high-eighties pop culture at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

1 Comment

Commentary’s John Steele Gordon on “Liberal Myths About the Middle Class and the Wealthy:”

Did Steve Jobs make me poorer when I laid out $600 for an iPad the other day? Of course not. I valued the iPad more than the $600 or I wouldn’t have bought it. So I got richer and so did Steve Jobs’s estate. (And now, if a 19th century technology, electricity, ever comes back on after a freak October snowstorm, I might actually get to use it.)

Since money-grubbing businessmen are, in Bill Keller’s and the rest of the left’s opinion, beneath contempt, let’s look at another great fortune. Paul McCartney was born poor. Today he is one of the richest men in Britain. Who did he impoverish in the course of getting so rich? No one, of course. His music has greatly enriched the world and the lives of all its inhabitants.

Taxing away great fortunes or preventing their accumulation is what makes the world poorer. It transfers wealth from those who created it to those who will pay off their political allies with it. It is often dreams of great wealth that makes people work so hard to come up with the next big idea.

Why would anyone want to take wealth away from Steve Jobs and give it to the people who ran Solyndra? Liberals, that’s who.

Exit question: when will we stop calling them liberal?

5 Comments

This clip is apparently twenty years old, but the timing couldn’t be better. During a period when the left has decided to jettison reality and hermetically seal themselves up somewhere between 1968 and 1972, Herman Cain takes their most revered gnostic anthem, turns it on its head, and completely takes the mickey out of it, proving some much needed comic relief during the Obama’s administration’s long slog into the dustbin of history:

As Allahpundit writes, “Watching it, two things are clear. One: Lennon’s ode to possessions-less brotherhood actually makes a hell of a corporate jingle. [No shocker there -- Ed] And two: The inauguration ball is going to be amazing.”

A new poll shows Cain beating Obama by two points.

And that was before this awesomely awesome moment. Rock on, Mr. Cain – Rock On.

9 Comments

“Cool,” as it came to be known in the 1950s and pre-hippie ’60s was always a facade; a mask against letting honest feelings and emotions show. A decade ago, the late Michael Kelly provided an exceptional definition of the early days of cool:

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the ’50s and ’60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age’s essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even. Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

And Miles Davis (before he cracked up and started wearing outfits that M.C. Hammer would think were simply too out there) was another avatar of cool in the 1950s. Davis titled his breakthrough early 1950s recordings The Birth of the Cool, and for instrumental jazz, still fighting the bebop/swing wars at the time, it was a sonic breakthrough.

As Roger L. Simon writes in a great post today that bookends Kelly’s take from a decade or so ago:

Cool depended on liberalism. In fact, it was an offshoot of it, suckling on the mother’s milk of Keynesian economics. As long as there was plenty of deficit spending to go around, we could all be cool. Life would be one long evening at Max’s Kansas City.Of course, it’s not. In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.

This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.

And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.

And they’re dropping the mask of cool themselves; which helps to explain why their anger (and rage! — but non-violent rage, please! as this parody video spotlights) is so palpable these days: there’s a lot of emotion that’s been kept bottled up over the years.

In a way, it’s the a repeat of Charles Krauthammer’s Pressure Cooker Theory from 2004:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five bestsellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud’s Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They’ll need therapy.

But the therapy never came. Instead, the left attempted to reconstitute Kerry’s radical chic past and far left economic views into a slicker package, one that was initially much easier to defend against attacks, and then convinced themselves at the end of 2008 that the singularity had arrived, and the forty year leftwing nirvana would now commence. (Life would be measure pre and post-PBO, Spike Lee had assured us, echoing Kelly’s BF and PF calendar above.) And that peace, prosperity and four percent annual growth would magically arrive, even as business owners were being demonized, Alinsky-style. For almost four years, from late 2007 when Obama was on the ascendency until last year’s midterms loss and this summer’s cluster-fark of the pathetic Darth Vader Battle Bus tour, the yet-another-jobs-speech, and the electoral losses last week, the left was sure it will all eventually work. While no one knows what will happen next November, at the moment, the left’s frustration with Obama is palpable.

But really, what’s the problem?

• Obama is “the first Jewish President,” according to New York magazine. (Toni Morrison could not be reached for comment.)
• It’s all Bush’s fault.
• We can rage our way back to economic health.
• We can spend money we don’t have back to economic health.
• “We can’t just cut our way out of this hole” that we created by spending money we don’t have.
• If only we acted more like China, it would all work out.

This time, unlike in 2009 when the left controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress, it will all totally work. Right?

Right:

Barack Obama’s team seems to think that demonizing the wealthy will win him back his base and let him roll to re-election.  Not so fast, says Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn at Huffington Post.  Obama’s plan makes for great strategy, Penn says, only if the President wants to pattern his next election like that famous Democrat, Walter Mondale:

Obama’s team actually believes that in the last six months they have courted independent voters and that didn’t work, so now they are turning to activating the base with higher taxes on the wealthy. However, he never made any meaningful appeal to those voters in terms they would understand. He supported extending the Bush tax cuts, temporarily zoomed up in the polls, and then promptly repudiated what he had done, only to then fall back down.

The 2010 mid-term elections were fought over Obama’s healthcare plan and on his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy by ending the Bush tax cuts. The results were, in his own words, a “shellacking.” After his most recent speech to Congress, voters in New York City’s Ninth Congressional District just elected a Republican for the first time since 1920.

And now, Obama is pressing the case for higher taxes, following in the footsteps of Walter Mondale. Higher taxes always seem to poll well, but in reality the country sees that as a last resort.

Voters see it as a last resort because the call for higher taxes always seems to follow a rapid increase in spending.  That was certainly true in 2010, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and nearly lost the Senate as well.  Penn reminds the White House that the anger over spending hasn’t yet dissipated from the midterms, and Obama is now stoking even more discontent by positioning himself as a typical tax-and-spend liberal — exactly as Mondale did in 1984.

That’s not the only historical parallel, either.  Penn thinks that Al Gore had the 2000 election sewed up until Gore went to his left and tried to run as a firebreathing populist.  John Kerry did the same thing in 2004, Penn says, with the same result.  Even in good times, voters don’t respond well to class warfare.

“Cool was oppressive,” Roger concludes, “It told you how to be and what to be. In some ways cool was the inverse of itself. It was the enemy of freedom while pretending to be its apostle. Nowadays there is nothing more square than to be cool. So feel free to be whatever you want to be.”

Even if it means putting up new construction in Woodstock.

Related: Speaking of establishment hipster-poseurs, Jon Stewart is disappointed that Obama “Deferred to the legislative process.” Am I misreading that quote, or does it sound very much akin to Thomas Friedman’s pining for the one party rule of China?

Stewart adds:

“He feels like the only president who begins every press conference with a heavy sigh. I think he was already kind of over us by the time he got into office. And now he’s like, ‘What the f*** is wrong with these people?’”

Let’s ensure that he’s really asking himself that question at the end of next year.

4 Comments

Kathy Shaidle recently found the quintessential moment when the Gray Lady that is the New York Times finally admitted that she could really use a dye job. Here’s the opening to a Times piece titled, “In Woodstock, Values Collide Over Housing:”

If they had decided to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, the issues might have seemed simpler.

Instead, a protracted battle over a 53-unit affordable housing project is dividing this still-crunchy town where mellow ’60s vibes and liberal politics coexist uneasily with real estate prices increasingly out of the reach of the humbler classes.

When workers finally began clearing land for the Woodstock Commons project in July, it looked as if the uncomfortable dispute might finally be ending. Instead, new issues kept popping up: the plight of black bears and endangered Indiana bats threatened by the construction; a botched permitting process; uncertainty about water service.

In some ways what is playing out in this Ulster County town is a more colorful microcosm of affordable housing controversies elsewhere. Still, the collision of environmental, neighborhood and social justice issues is making people squirm in a place where the only thing more important than making the world better can be keeping Woodstock the same.

Or as Kathy wrote quoting the above bolded text,  “NYT accidentally summarizes ‘progressivism’ in half a sentence:”

“Progressives” live in the past — a past that (like the one they so often accuse conservatives of romantically yearning for) didn’t exist:

Rosa Parks wasn’t just “tired” — she was a semi-professional activist, trained at a Communist “school”; Alger Hiss was guilty; so were Sacco and Venzetti; there really were Communist spies in the State Department; FDR prolonged the Depression; “busing” increased racial hatred; Bush’s verbal SATs were higher than Kerry’s…

Once you realize that liberals live in a nostalgic past of their own invention and on-going promotion (like Mrs. Havisham or a tragic Tennessee Williams “heroine”) almost everything “progressives” do then makes “sense.”

Freeze-dry the (mostly imaginary) past, but hurry up and change the entire existing social and economic order, seem to be the two modes the left seems to operate in, sometimes simultaneously. You can see it in Barack Obama, with his love of 1930s-era socialism, and his ’70s-era sci-fi obsessions with “green” jobs and global warming.  But it’s folly to cast all of the blame on Obama; it’s been the mindset of the left for the last decade or so.  At the end of 2004, Paul Mirengoff, then with Power Line wrote:

The Democratic party, [Michael Barone] argues, is defined by 1930 era views on social security, 60s views on the state of race relations and the use of military force, and 70s views on feminism. Cosmetically at least, this state of affairs constitutes a reversal of roles from 1996 when the Democrats claimed they couldn’t “stop thinking about tomorrow,” while Bob Dole promised to be “a bridge to the past.”

But the problem for some factions of the far left is that Dole didn’t go far back enough. Or as Pete Seeger once told the New York Times, “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Just as long as it’s the right village, somewhere far out of sight, where the low-income housing won’t clash with the namesake of the location where half a million high-income hippies had their ultimate moment of nostalgie de la boue.

Speaking of music and “progressivism,” back around 2004, libertarian blogger Radley Balko explored the intersection of  “Tower Records and the Conservative Left.”  When the Tower Records chain fell apart in 2004, a New York Times columnist wrote:

But we have reached what to me, back in 1966, was an unimaginable place — an America where the small-town variety stores have gone out of business because a Wal-Mart opened up out by the highway; an America where with a few keystrokes and a valid credit card you can own virtually any recording you want, the instant it’s released. Somehow it sounds more inviting than it actually is.

It sounds pretty darn amazing to me — it’s also an America where you can read just about any newspaper from anywhere in the world online, or start your own digital version, should you so desire. And the flip-side is that any musician is guaranteed of getting listened to, particularly if he applies just a modicum of self-promotion. If you make it to the top, the odds are greatly decreased that you’ll have your own private plane to tour in, ala Led Zeppelin, but given the Times’ obsessions with equalizing income, that should be a feature from their perspective, not a bug, right?

But then, as Balko wrote, in words that echo in the recent Times article at the top of this post:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Getting back to Woodstock, it occurred nearly concurrent with the Apollo moon landing in the summer of 1969. Apollo marked the apogee of the postwar industrial era and its massive engineering projects. And yes, NASA in the 1960s was simultaneously JFK’s Moral Equivalent of War as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, and LBJ’s TVA-style project to help further modernize the south, as space journalist Rand Simberg once noted. But it was still an era that was obsessed with building something, unlike today’s NASA’s obsession with multiculti emotional pablum. Mark Steyn explored this extensively in the early chapters of After America; including quoting from Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at England’s University of Buckingham, who posited last year that “Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined:”

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we cannot do.

It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

However, technological progress in the form of computers, new businesses, and ultimately the Web accelerated exponentially in the 1980s ’til the fall of 2008. The Obama administration has worked hard to slow that progress to a halt as well. One reason for the lack of dynamism is that too many small businesses slows the amount of Federal palms that need to be greased, while simultaneously multiplying the number of cats that need to be herded. That’s a topic that James Pethokoukis recently discussed in his must-read column, “Solyndra, the logical endpoint of Obamanomics:”

No wonder many Democratic strategists predicted their party’s 2008 landslide win would usher in a generation of political dominance. Obamanomics, essentially, would divert taxpayer dollars to the Green Lobby – and then into the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party. This is what crony capitalism is really all about: politicians enriching favored businesses, who then return the favor. Or maybe it’s the other way around, Who cares, really. It’s an endless, profitable loop for both.

And Obama almost pulled it off. The Great Recession conveniently allowed the president to start the spendathon under the guise of economic stimulus. (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” – White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, 2009). As it turns out, the $38.6 billion loan program for clean energy firms that Solyndra benefited from has created just 3,545 permanent new jobs after parceling out half its dough. That works out to around $5 million a job.

Unfortunately for the Obamacrats, the financial meltdown also undercut political support for cap-and-trade on Capitol Hill. Voters worried the scheme would slow growth and cost jobs. But without permanently and continually raising the price of carbon-based fuels, many green businesses can’t make the numbers work.

But hey, what’s a little magic thinking when you’re riding the unicorn already? Even if it’s on a treadmill.

16 Comments

Investor and TV personality Jeffrey Carter on “Free To Choose and Farmageddon:”

Last night I went to see the documentary Farmageddon in Chicago. I also stayed for the full panel discussion.

The film is shocking. Documentaries are supposed to shock you. Michael Moore has made millions presenting slanted facts to us. Documentaries are designed to get you to do something.

This documentary illustrates the plight of the organic farmer, specifically the organic dairy farmer. If a dairy farmer wants to sell raw milk, they will be run out of business and many times imprisoned by the federal bureaucracy. The USDA actively tries to run Raw Milk Producers out of the business. They work closely with agents from state agricultural agencies.

The documentary shows film of agents descending on various organic farms and outlets, guns drawn, SWAT teams present. It’s straight out of science fiction and something that you can’t believe happens in America. I can understand a huge police presence when going after a drug lord, but a family farmer? Sure, farmers keep guns but in my experience they aren’t violent people.

Hey, as a candidate, Obama promised the San Francisco Chronicle that he’d bankrupt the coal industry.

…He didn’t say that was the only business he’d try to bankrupt, did he?

1 Comment

H.L. Mencken, in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

NIETZSCHE was a preacher’s son, brought up in the fear of the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers. Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever finite, variable and all-too-human – when he begins to realize that his father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings, and fallible like himself – then he will fly precipitately toward the intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother – a preacher’s daughter as well as a preacher’s wife – seemed his logical and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out the silly brains of theologians.

But while Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead” in 1882 (God would seem to provide a rejoinder 18 years later), everyone in pop culture seems determined to pose as His son. The most recent example was spotted at Glenn Beck’s perhaps appropriately named Website, The Blaze. “Atheist Comedian Ricky Gervais Poses as Jesus in ‘Blasphemous’ Mag Cover:”

(more…)

13 Comments

Ace of Spades and Verum Serum have a couple of interesting posts on what two popular early-’80s songs say about cars, the people who drive them — i.e., you and me, and the artists who wrote the songs. Verum Serum contrasts the Police’s “Syncronicity II” song with Rush’s “Red Barchetta,” for a way to explore a collectivist view of the automobile and the everyday people who own them, versus an individualist view.

The line in ‘Synchronicity II” goes, “Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, Contestants in a suicidal race.”

To which Ace responds:

That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.

You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea — the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life — in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don’t win Oscars a lot.

Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.

This is a silly and solipsistic conceit. Let me define that word, in case you don’t know it:

sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

Taken out of the realm of philosophy, the word is mostly used to describe a non-thoughtful, non-philosophical insistence that one’s own experience can be generalized to all other’s experience. That is, it’s a baby thing. Like babies who lack any sense of perspective outside their own heads, the solipsist is incapable of using his imagination to guess what the world might look like from other vantage points.

We are all prisoners of our own experience, it is true, but the solipsist is a willing prisoner, and generally refuses to even try to see the world from a different point of view.

Now, artists love songs like this, and movies like this, because these movies speak to them. They are of a specific psychological type, mostly. They themselves could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call “a normal life,” and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles.

I don’t begrudge them that. As someone who’s wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself. (Actually I don’t get the latter and never have — what the hell is the problem with a nice lawn?)

So these songs, and these films, can be said to be the stories of their own lives and their own choices, the rejection of “normal” life and more common non-artistic dreams and ambitions. And certainly, for any successful or semi-successful artist, their choice to take an oddball path can be justified; if it all works for them, wonderful.

But they don’t leave it at that. The message of these songs and movies is that the Square, Normal Suburban Workaday Life just wasn’t for me, because my psychology was such that I couldn’t hack that would always be miserable in such a state; it’s almost always generalized and universalized as something much, much bigger:

The life you lead (assuming you’re not an Artist) sucks and you’re a fool or a coward for leading it.

What? How did we get there?

Not everyone has talent enough to be an artist and produce art on an occasional schedule (when the Muse moves one) and yet be good enough at it so as not to starve. In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can’t make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.

This is so obvious, isn’t it?

So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?

Actually, it’s not artists; it’s leftists. Musically (for reasons I can explain if you’d like, but that would be a whole ‘nother post), country music isn’t my thing, but a few months ago when I spent a week in Texas, I listened to several hours worth of songs celebrating working hard, living on a farm, patriotism, and essentially being a grown-up. I imagine that once the country artist makes it to the point where he has a recording contract, he’s living a fairly similar and hermetically sealed life as Der Stingle was in the early 1980s, shuttling between the recording studio, the video studio, the stage, the hotel and the tour bus; it’s only the scale that’s different. But most country artists are smart and/or sane enough not to insult the people who buy their records and concert tickets. (See also: furious backlash by country fans against the Dixie Chicks.)

And it’s not just leftwing musicians and actors of course. Other performance artists on the left often express a similar level of solipsism. “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted last October by Glenn Reynolds:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

In June of 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted a similar theme in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in 2008:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Or average, everyday jobs — which bore the daylights out of the president, and presumably the first lady as well.

At the Weekly Standard today, David Gelernter looks at “Elites Gone Bad” and writes, “What America needs is a better class of left-winger.” Because let’s face it: when you go into the small college towns, and cloistered artists’ garrets like Hollywood, the smug has been rising for 25 years or so, and nothing’s replaced it. And they were angered by the Reagan administration and the Bush administrations,  and each successive generation has said that somehow these elitists are gonna re-embrace their fellow man, and they never do. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to Marxism or nihilism or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-business sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

22 Comments

What it is about the Middle East that causes self-styled “Progressives” to suddenly mumble, “Nevermind,” ala Emily Litella?

First up, you’d think that Prince, who debuted on the national scene in the late 1970s as an androgynous, pushing the boundaries kind of guy, would want his fans in the Middle East to have the same freedom to experiment. So much for that idea:

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Film&Music, Prince said: “It’s fun being in Islamic countries, to know there’s only one religion. There’s order. You wear a burqa. There’s no choice. People are happy with that.” When asked about the fate of those unhappy with having no choice, he replied: “There are people who are unhappy with everything. There’s a dark side to everything.”

Prince embraced religion in 2001, when he became a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was anti-authoritarian but at the same time I was a loving tyrant,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t be both. I had to learn what authority was. That’s what the Bible teaches. The Bible is a study guide for social interaction.

“If I go to a place where I don’t feel stressed and there’s no car alarms and airplanes overhead, then you understand what noise pollution is. Noise is a society that has no God, that has no glue. [And thus the 53-year old musician sounds like every 53-year old parent within earshot of a sports arena that's booked Prince for a concert -- Ed] We can’t do what we want to do all the time. If you don’t have boundaries, what then?”

He’s got his. Those of you in the Middle East, you’re on your own. Rand Simberg notes how immediately appalling Prince’s language would sound if it were applied to the American South rather than the Islamic Middle East.

Next up, there’s Amnesty International, which in the mid-1980s, ran commercials full of Hollywood celebrities and rock stars offering toasts to “freedom.” I’m pretty sure I watched this one on MTV more than a few times back then, including during Live Aid, if I’m not mistaken. Look fast for the late Ron Silver halfway through the ad, 20 years before becoming a PJM contributor:

Freedom? Dude, put the collar back down on your polo shirt, take off the Wayfarers, and get your mind out of the 1980s:

If you need a refresher, Hamas conducted a raid (probably illegal, as terrorists never wear uniforms) and snuck across the border, attacked an Israeli outpost, and kidnapped Gilad Shalit.Wikipedia uses the word “capture.” Um, yeah. Like Bruno Hauptman “captured” the Lindbergh Baby.

He has been held illegally for five years.

Those who “captured” him are making threats and demands, like legal armies always do.

Shalit’s captors issued another demand to the Israelis, demanding that Israel release an additional 1,000 Palestinian prisoners (in addition to all female and young prisoners, as previously demanded) and end Israel’s incursions into Gaza.[38] Two days later, the captors issued a 24-hour ultimatum for meeting their demands, threatening unspecified consequences if Israel refused.[39] Hours after the ultimatum was issued, Israel officially rejected the demands, stating that: “there will be no negotiations to release prisoners”

So, of course Amnesty International must protest this and demand his release, right?

Wrong.

If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn’t even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit’s imprisonment.

As Ace concludes, “If donating directly to Al Qaeda and Hamas feels too risky and too dirty to you, try us! We have Bono.”

Back in 2003, Steven Den Beste noted that Amnesty International “is demonstrating that when the cards are down, its soul is for sale.”

I’d say that for both AI and Prince, those transactions have now been concluded.

8 Comments

Schaefer  — it’s the one beer to have, when you’re having more than one Moog synthesizer:

3 Comments

Clarence Clemons, RIP, at a far too young 69 years old.

Update: Roger Friedman, who says he first broke the story of Clemons’ now-fatal stroke last week, writes:

Here’s the thing about the E Street Band, which has zillions of devoted fans who can argue their merits for weeks at a time. In the end, the sound of that band came from Clarence Clemons. When Bruce Springsteen released “Greetings from Asbury Park,” he certainly established himself as a premier singer songwriter ready to inherit the mantle from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon. But when Springsteen released “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle,” suddenly his intentions were clear. This was an R&B band that combined that poetry.

The music, thanks to Clarence’s horn, was now elastic. He gave it swing. “Rosalita” is now a concert favorite but when it first was heard it was nothing short of magic.  Proceeding into “Born to Run,” Clarence–I mean, it’s him on the cover with Bruce–is the signature sound beyond Bruce’s voice. The band is great, Steve vanZandt is a genius, etc. But suddenly the whole mission is defined, and you wait to hear that clarion call to know what’s coming–it’s The Big Man.  There’s a hint of it on”Spirit in the Night,” but by the time “Thunder Road” is done, the Clarence Clemons sound is established like a national landmark.

Replacing Clemons will be as difficult for Springsteen as replacing John Bonham or Freddie Mercury in their respective bands. It will be interesting to see how Springsteen proceeds from this devastating loss to his sound. Or as John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood, “Today we mourn the passing of the Big Man and also the E Street Band itself … because it’s impossible to imagine one without the other.”

3 Comments

If you’re a Canadian fan of Bill Cosby, don’t expect him to perform his stand-up routine north of the 49th Parallel anytime soon, based on what he told one what he said earlier this month on Twitter:

Dear @jinkerjacket your Canadian Gov requires a huge payment from my earnings. You’ll have to view me tax-free here: http://bit.ly/CosbyApp

As Kevin Hilferty of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity adds:

It is a commonly held belief that famous performers do not take tax rates into account when deciding where to go on tour. Mr. Cosby proves this to be incorrect.  Actors and comedians are normal people like anyone else, and as such are influenced by tax competition. All things equal, areas with lower tax rates will receive more business than those with higher tax rates. This tax competition helps restrain the size of government because politicians realize that jobs and investment can cross borders (or not cross in this case) if they get too greedy and impose high taxes.

This is an important lesson for governments considering raising taxes on non-resident performers. Actors, comedians, and sports stars all might make a lot of money, but they still want to keep that money by avoiding high taxes. While it may seem like an easy source of tax revenue to politicians, it may just end up keeping their constituents from seeing the shows they desire.

One late night a couple of weeks ago, I watched Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile, a documentary released last year on the making of 1971′s Exile on Main Street and available in streaming form from Netflix. The early part of the documentary lays out why one of the quintessential British rock groups recorded arguably their definitive album in France. The Stones’ desire not to lose their earnings to the British government is a reminder that while Keith Richards has long said that the Stones and the Beatles were always friendly musical competitors, in many respects, the Stones served as a counterweight for some of John Lennon’s sillier and grandiose attempts to play to the rafters.

In 1967, Lennon swore that “All You Need is Love;” Keith later responded (and I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t have the interview in front of me), “All you need is love? Try living on it sometime.”) And similarly, in 1971, Lennon as a solo artist wrote “Imagine,” in which he sang “Imagine no possessions.” Almost concurrently, the Stones were saying nuts to that — they left England and moved to France, where they recorded Exile, to avoid having their wealth confiscated by the rapacious taxation of high-earners by the British government.

Oh and speaking of Lennon’s longtime writing partner, Paul and his wife paid as much attention to the precepts of “Imagine” as multimillionaire Lennon himself, as Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago in the London Telegraph after the Live8 concert to (as best I recall the purpose of the concert), convince western governments to forgive Africa’s debt:

Seven years ago, you’ll recall, Sir Paul’s wife died of cancer. Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy in her final months to establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state.

That way she could set up a “qualified domestic marital trust” that would… Yeah, yeah, yeah, in the immortal words of Lennon and/or McCartney. Big deal, you say. We’re into world peace and saving the planet and feeding Africa. What difference does it make which jurisdiction some squaresville suit files the boring paperwork in?

Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. By filing for probate in New York rather than the United Kingdom, Linda McCartney avoided the 40 per cent death duties levied by Her Majesty’s Government. That way, her family gets all 100 per cent – and 100 per cent of Linda McCartney’s estate isn’t to be sneezed at.

For purposes of comparison, Bob Geldof’s original Live Aid concert in 1985 raised £50 million. Lady McCartney’s estate was estimated at around £150 million. In other words, had she paid her 40 per cent death duties, the British Treasury would have raised more money than Sir Bob did with Bananarama and all the gang at Wembley Stadium that day.

Given that she’d enjoyed all the blessings of life in these islands since 1968, Gordon Brown might have felt justified in reprising Sir Bob’s heartfelt catchphrase at Wembley: “Give us yer fokkin’ money!” But she didn’t. She kept it for herself. And good for her. I only wish I could afford her lawyers.

Of course, if it seems amazing to see celebrities as arch-liberal as Cosby and Paul and Linda McCartney suddenly become fiscal conservatives when it’s their own money that’s on the line, it’s a reminder of Conquest’s First Law of politics, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

(Of course, when they start telling you what you should do with your wallet, watch out. Or just tune out.)

2 Comments

I’m a day late to this one, but read Brad Schaeffer at Big Hollywood for a look at Townshend’s contributions as a musician and songwriter. As for how he wrote those songs, since so many early bloggers had a background in DIY music, here’s a look back at a post I wrote in 2003 for the then-nascent Blogcritics Website on Townshend’s “Scoop” series of albums, which helped to popularize home music recording, beginning in the 1980s, as the first affordable cassette four-track machines began to enter the market.

But years before that, beginning in the early 1960s, Townshend was first recording his music at home, initially on large reel-to-reel machines. Townshend, then a fledgling songwriter in the earliest incarnation of The Who, initially couldn’t read music. To make up for that, he started “writing” his songs by overdubbing first a drum track (first with real drums, eventually with drum machines), then a guitar track, then a bass track, and finally a vocal track to present his bandmates in The Who with an audio demo of his song.

Today, the technology has advanced sufficiently so that the line between “demo” recordings and the finished product has blurred — and the recording technology inside a $35,000 Fairlight sampling synthesizer of the early 1980s is inside almost any PC with a good quality soundcard and the appropriate software. And actually, the video below is a little outdated, since it promotes the benefits of 64-bit computing for recording, a technology that’s now fairly ubiquitous. But it does a good overview of what’s possible these days with the right hardware, software, and musical chops:

1 Comment

Signboard of the Day, for those who think JFK, not to mention Eddie and the Cruisers were documentaries:

4 Comments

As Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt discussed yesterday, evidently you can no longer have Kung Fu Fighting in England. The song I mean; presumably karate lessons are still kosher:

Hugh Hewitt: Now settling down to the serious stuff, Mark, today you also talked about the fact that we dare not sing Kung Fu Fighting in a pub in Britain.

Mark Steyn: No, this is a guy who is a singer in a bar on oldie’s night, and he was singing Kung Fu Fighting, which as I’m sure you know, Hugh, was Billboard’s number one record in the United States in December, 1974.

HH: Oh, you bet.

MS: And a couple of people happened to be passing by and heard the song, and they were Chinese. And they reported it to the police, and the police on the Isle of Wight arrested this guy for racism, for committing a racially aggravated offense. As I said, this was a number one record in the United States, number one record in the United Kingdom, in Australia, all over the world. But apparently it’s now a hate crime. And on a certain level, it’s funny. But at a certain level, the stupidity of Western civilization is reaching a tipping point. And I’m tired of this stuff, which is why I don’t regard Kung Fu Fighting as the acme of Western civilization. But we are committed now to defending this song to the end. I’m in favor of it, I don’t know whether the Isle of Wight has a national anthem, but if it doesn’t, I want it to adopt Kung Fu Fighting as their national anthem.

HH: And I want to say, we are heard by the internet around the world, so at this very moment, as I read the lyrics from Kung Fu Fighting with Mark Steyn humming in the background, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, those cats were fast as lightning, in fact it was a little bit frightening, but they fought with expert timing.

MS: Right.

HH: They were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown.

MS: Yeah.

HH: We are now, I think, in peril of arrest if we go to the Isle of Wight, Mark Steyn.

(more…)

1 Comment