About Rodin. Yes, know what you mean here. If you ever get to Paris check out the Rodin Museum there:

http://www.musee-rodin.fr/welcome.htm

Philly in the US does not have a bad Rodin collection either:

http://www.rodinmuseum.org/

Stick some late Brahms in your Ipod, sit down in the garden for a spell and take it all in.

A bit off-topic. As long as Rodin was mentioned, though, I urge anyone with the opportunity to visit the Met in NY to go find Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais”, which is off by itself somewhere around the edges of the American wing. It’s a life-size bronze of half a dozen men about to set sail as hostages during the Hundred Years War. I’ve had the great good fortune in life to have seen two sculptures that seemed to live and breathe. One was Michelangelo’s Pieta, and this is the other.

Anyway, you gotta love the Czechs – they just keep coming through on the right side of things

If you read A. Shlaes “The Forgotten Man”, you’ll realize that the ILN’s shining hour was really the FDR administration. And that they were not just curious about comrade Stalin’s Soviet Union – he was their role model. Nixon tried to push back at them. Not too successfully. Reagan tried with a little better success. GWBush tried to be both an ILN and a westerner – but pretty much remained (I think) an ILN except wrt the GWOT.

Our only hope is in the grave – that this particularly odious ge- ge- ge- generation will die off and our children and grandchildren will wonder what all the fuss was about – and settle down to hate us and all of our works when our bills come due.

Heaven is where the Germans make the cars, the French make the food, the Swiss run the hotels, the British are the cops and the Italians are the lovers.

Hell is where the Germans are the cops, the British make the food, the French make the cars, the Italians run the hotels and the Swiss are the lovers.

Even Physics and Computer Science departments have their share of idiocy at present; neither let us forget the ruckus Summers caused up at Harvard for making what any reasonable person would call and obvious observation. PC faculty appointments and admission policies are taking their toll as well in Science and Engineering programs. So let us not kid ourselves about Science and Technology programs in the Academy.

Moreover, we should not somehow congratulate ourselves that the so called “Humanities” or the “Liberal Arts” are the chief roosts of these sorts shenanigans. There is such a thing as “The Humanities” and it is even more vital to our society than Science. Science, Technology and Engineering do not address that major issues of life; scientism is an intellectual and a moral error. Technology and Science are value neutral — otherwise they could not properly function. Certainly, they will not keep vouchsafe our human dignity, liberty or prosperity in and of themselves, or even as the leading disciplines among many. As Chesterton once remarked, “One does not ask one’s horse where one wants to go” (or something like that).

Let me add that, when properly taught, these curricula should by no means be “easy” or for for people somehow else gifted or serious than those who would pursue science or engineering curricula.

Of course, to have such curricula, one would have to accept the standards, canon, knowledge, theories, practices and spirit of the Western heritage. Avoiding (destroying?) all this is rather the point of the current Academy. Short of revolutionary mobs in the quadrangle, the only way to effect change may be litigation and legislation.

This is an extremely serious issue — one much more dire than this overblown and over-hyped “financial crisis” that the Left is using for political cover this season.

The growing intellectual mediocrity of America is one of the next bubbles to pop, and it will be a loud one indeed.

We can grouse about a socialist ascendancy all we want, but we must remember that in the end socialism is much too parasitical to succeed.

Given the state of competition in the world today, we have little room to maneuver.

The American people really need to wake up and figure out what the left is up too.
Knaves and fools all.