"I think I know what Mr. Vance means, sort of. I've gone to a lot of terrible plays in my capacity as the Journal's drama critic, but I'd much rather squirm through a bad play than a bad musical, much less a bad opera or symphony. No doubt this is partly because I have musical training, but I'm sure that it has more to do with the fundamental nature of the musical experience. Music, after all, is the most enveloping of the arts, the only one that creates the illusion of occupying both time and space. Live theater comes close, but it lacks music's all-encompassing quality. To enter into the presence of a piece of music, be it a Schubert sonata or a single by Metallica, is to be surrounded and permeated by its essence. The air is full of it -- and the clock is ruled by it. You can't get away from music, which explains its unparalleled power to disorient and disturb."
Saturday, February 14, 2009
About how I felt at "Mama Mia"....
Musical Torture Instruments:
She may be the only one to stay in state....
OctoMom Gets Nailed:
"With her 14 progeny nowhere in sight, octuplet mother of the year Nadya Suleman took time out of her busy press schedule to get a federally subsidized manicure in Norwalk, Calif. on Friday."
Surprise!
Mark Steyn:
Governments get thrown off course by “events.
...Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence.
America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, and massive government housing, having become a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .
Let’s not go there.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Do you REALLY think they have "fair" on their little minds....
Dems target right-wing talk radio:
"Representative Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat from New York is the latest to say he wants to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine,' a federal regulation scrapped in 1987 that would require broadcasters to present opposing views on public issues.
'I think the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated,' Hinchey told CNNRadio. Hinchey says he could make it part of a bill he plans to introduce later this year overhauling radio and t-v ownership laws.
Listen: Hinchey says he wants to make talk-radio more fair"
Hope, Change & Bullshit....
The Agitator :
"Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), posting on Twitter:
“11 hours to review a 1000+ page spending bill that spends nearly a trillion dollars? This is not Congress’ finest hour.”
Looks like Obama will also again be breaking his pledge to post every bill on the web for the public to review for five days before signing it. And this on the biggest and (by his measure) most important bill he’s likely to sign in his presidency."
Not to worry, they will just make it illegal to move out...
States Recruit Worried Californians:
"States have been vying to lure businesses from one another for decades, and California has often made a tempting target. But John Boyd, a corporate relocation consultant based in Princeton, N.J., says he senses a new eagerness among his California clients to look for greener pastures.
'The tilt of corporate investment out of California is accelerating,' he said."
Please read the whole thing....
Jonah Goldberg:
"But that’s not what we got. Instead, the old adage “Everyone’s a capitalist on the way up and a socialist on the way down” is kicking in. The thing is, if you’re a socialist on the way down, you were never really a capitalist on the way up. Capitalism requires putting your own capital at risk.
What we do have is a grand adhocracy where “government,” a.k.a. Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and a dozen others, will figure everything out as they go. Businesses will rise or fall based on their skill at kissing up to the government.
And as sure as shinola, when government fails again, we’ll be told that only government can save us."
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Too late for that....
The Agitator :
"It’s too bad the debate has long ceased being about whether the government should apportion wealth."
Quote of the decade...
Instapundit :
"Politicians can’t do much to fix an economy, but they’re great at wrecking one."
Because until further notice "It's Bush's fault" is our defense of everything...
Pajamas Media:
What Mr. Obama “somehow” forgot to tell us is that almost 1.8 million of those seasonally adjusted job losses have occurred since his election, when his non-stop economic no-confidence game went into high gear, and that 2.8 million jobs have gone away during the seven months that began in July 2008, the first full month of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy..."
a huge "DUH!!!!"
Megan McArdle:
"In times like this, it's easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. But here's one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on: rent control is the surest way to destroy a city's housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York's painfully low vacancy rate. Rent control allows some people to stay in artificially cheap apartments, but only by forcing the people who would have rented them into some other, less desireable place. Those people bid up the price of the uncontrolled housing, so that you essentially end up with two housing markets, one with rents above the natural market price, and one with rents below it. There is no way to ensure that the deserving middle class folks you want to see stay in the city end up in the latter, and indeed, many of the owners of rent stabilized apartments were notorious for finding the richest tenants they could. Rich tenants rarely get behind on the rent, and move sooner than people who can just barely afford their below-market place.
Meanwhile, the stabilized stock deteriorates, because, especially in inflationary times, it does not pay the landlords to maintain them beyond the barest minimum required by law. And no one wants to build any new"
What would you expect from someone who has never really led or been in charge of anything before?
Steven F. Hayward:
"President Barack Obama's honeymoon period seems to have ended quickly. That's because Mr. Obama doesn't grasp the essentials of presidential leadership. Rather than making a compelling case for his economic policies, he has resorted to curt rebuffs, such as telling House Republican whip Eric Cantor, 'I won.' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the same thing the same day: 'We won the election; we wrote the [stimulus] bill.' This is the trope of a party that has lost its ability to make an argument.
Mr. Obama and his team would be well advised to put aside the imperious FDR model and study Ronald Reagan's first 200 days in office. The contrast is instructive."
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Via: Popehat....
Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act Leads Consumer Products Safety Commission To Advise Secondhand and Thrift and Consignment Stores To Destroy Children's Books Made Before 1985:
"What are the chances of Congress doing anything competent in the wake of this example of its own incompetence? Slim and none."
Ditto that...
Samizdata quote of the day:
"'We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous.'"
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Maybe a bit premature; but an apt description...
Chicago Boyz:
"Obama will face something of the same effect. All his life he has been the up and coming ernest black man in a political subculture that fawns over such people. He’s never really had to decide and to produce. He campaigned on being himself. He campaigned on the story of being the first black President. People listened to him in the context of partaking in the story of the first black Presiden. As President, he no longer has that context. He’s no longer the mythic story but just another politician. People listen to him with a certain suspicion. They want to know the specific whys and hows of his proposals.
Obama isn’t the inspiring story anymore. He’s just another huckster with a spiel. It remains to be seen if he can adapt."
Thoughtful, as always...
How Much is Afghanistan Really Worth to Us?:
"Predicting the trajectory of a war is fraught with peril, like predicting next season’s hurricanes. Anything can happen, and often what changes the course of a war has little or nothing to do with the war. For instance, a failing global economy, or supervention of some chain of events perhaps still unimagined could cause the Af-Pak war to become less relevant. Caveats behind us, it seems that 2009 will see the sharpest fighting so far. That much has been clear for some time, and 2009 is now within our headlights. We can already resolve from the fog much of what is likely coming this year. Imagining what is beyond the headlights, my guess is that 2010 might bring the sharpest fighting of the entire war. My guess is that 2010-11 will likely be crucial years in this process, and that many allies will be making decisions during those years whether to stick it out or to punch out. By the fall of 2010, we should be able to resolve whether our renewed efforts under President Obama are working or failing.
The Great Game continues, but it’s no game for the people who are fighting it."
Who would have thunk?
Belmont Club:
"A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain."
You have to read it...
Of Ants, Elephants, and FDR:
"I know that there are still voices of sanity around because I have counted them—on one hand."
