If You Think Your Life Sucks…………..

………take a look at this.

Renowned documentary photographer Thomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a business man looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24 hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people – images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimpses of everyday life in the world’s last Gulag.

Obama and the US Military.

I sat, as did millions of other Americans, and watched as

their

government under went a peaceful transition of power several

months past.

At first, I felt a pride and patriotism as I watched Barack

Obama

take his Oath of office.

> > However, all that pride quickly vanished as I later watched 21

> > Marines, in full dress uniform with rifles, fire a 21-gun

salute to the

> > President.

> > It was then that I realized how far America ‘s Military had

deteriorated.

> > Every last one of them missed.

Europe is Turning………

……….as I always thought it would when conditions there and the causes thereof would sink into enough of the population.

So take yourself over to City Journal where Bruce Bawer has a column entitled ‘Heirs to Fortuyn’.

When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues’ sneering over cocktails about his nation’s shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment, or health care. For much of the American Left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia.

This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe’s socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the Left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

I suppose the surprise to me is that there wasn’t a revolt against the socialist cliques years ago but I guess a healthy world economy helped to keep them afloat, now that the economy is on the skids their so superior philosophy of providing for everyone on the backs of the workers is no longer sustainable.

The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

My bold.

Read the whole thing, you’ll feel a bit better if you do.

H/T bookworm, she should be on everyone’s daily reading list.

We Said Obama Was Scary.

While the administration is playing politics with the methods that kept the US safe for eight long years against all expectations of further attacks, and while the Obamaniac swans around the world making nice to thugs and vicious dictators, the forces of evil are not sitting still.

Con Coughlin writing in The Daily Telegraph tells what the fools in Washington should know.

The Taliban continues its menacing advance on the Pakistani capital. The Iranian president reiterates his hateful anti-Israeli rhetoric, while Israel’s newly elected Right-wing prime minister makes veiled threats about launching military action to prevent a second Holocaust. Yet the only subject that appears to concern Barack Obama is whether or not senior officials from the previous administration should face prosecution for the harsh interrogation techniques used against terror suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Read it all. It really is hair tearing time over the lunatic asylum that passes for government in Washington.

Man and Wolf.

A review of a book, The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands might not seem worthy of your time to read, but this one is fascinating.

Rowlands’s unusual book — part autobiography, part philosophical discourse; harshly cynical yet somehow also inspirational — is above all a meditation on the nature of friendship, and on the human/animal bond, which is a remarkable but precarious and overlooked thing. This is not the sole province of the philosopher (Rowlands’s profession); but philosophers, from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer to Tom Regan, have a long and uncommon history of treating animals as a subject worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Rowlands’s own method is to intersperse autobiographical chapters with philosophical explorations of subjects like happiness, grief, and time, especially insofar as his life with Brenin helped him find answers. The book has much to teach us about our relationship to animals, and even more to teach us about ourselves.

I have posted before [don't have time to find it now] somewhat disparagingly on people who treat their pets as substitute children, and others who clothe their pets, but this is a different thing altogether. There is something special about the way we humans have both domesticated and befriended animals as well as the many benefits of doing so. I promise you won’t regret the time it takes to read this review.

H/T Arts and Letters Daily.

Be Prepared!

A Gunfighting Living Legend.

Yet More on Susan Boyle.

I have to stop posting on her but everywhere you look her name intrudes in the most unlikely of places. Now there is a new competitor from Wales, a 12 year old boy who I listened to and wasn’t too impressed, a Michael Jackson/Stevie Wonder wannabe, with neither the charm of the very young singer………

…..or the presence of a more mature performer of that age…..

[Meaning Faryl Smith in the blue dress of course.]

Anyway, isn’t it a bit suspicious when S Cowell stops his song after less than a minute and asks him to pick something else which happens to be more suitable and they just happen within a few seconds to come up with the music for it?
Maureen Callahan thinks the whole thing is scripted. I have thought that with American Idol too, the manipulation is wondrous to behold and anti-democratic for that reason. Remember how Simon trashed Jennifer Hudson presumably because he thought she wasn’t a commercial proposition? That one sure came back to bite him.

Meantime, Spengler is on to more weighty stuff on the Boyle phenomenon. He makes some interesting points but to load the amount of significance that he does on to SB’s shoulders is going too far and misses the point that you can have both popular and classical music.

Singer Susan Boyle, our latest instant celebrity, reminds me of any number of singers I conducted in amateur renditions of the easier Schubert or Haydn masses, or the sort of matron who sings “Katti-Shaw” or “Buttercup” in the local Gilbert and Sullivan production. Musical talent springs up like grass, and engaging voices are a dollar a dozen. That Boyle has come to embody the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity, complete with invitations to appear on Oprah and Larry King, is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own

But each voice has its own timbre and character and millions of people have decided they like SB’s voice, couldn’t he just say good luck to her?

In a time of economic strife and stress, she came out of nowhere to make us smile and maybe even shed a congratulatory tear or two for someone who had finally fulfilled a life-long dream. Hey, we all have our dreams, right?” gushed Steve Rosen at the Kansas City Star newspaper on April 17, in a variation of a theme that has appeared in numberless versions in the media.

Meanwhile, in China, 60 million children are learning Western classical music
under the gimlet gaze of strict teachers. East Asian singers, particularly Koreans, are working their way up the ranks of provincial opera companies, and every one of them sings better than Boyle. Who do you think is going to run the world 20 years from now? As the Italians say, we’re bolliti, “boiled”. Now we can spell it with a “y”. I hate to always be the one to say this, but the hope is fatuous. No, you can’t.

There is an undercurrent of self-worship in the aptly-named American Idol and its British knockoff, which lifted Boyle to stardom. As I wrote some years ago (American Idolatry Asia Times Online, August 29, 2006), at some time during the 20th century, the people of the West elected to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is above them.

Churlish resentment of high culture comes from the slacker’s desire for reward with neither merit nor effort: the sort of artistic skill that requires years of discipline and sacrifice is a reproach to the indolence of the popular audience of the West. Better voices than Boyle’s can be found in a thousand choirs and amateur theatricals, but the crowd has embraced this late-hatching Scottish songbird as a symbol of its own aspirations.

He goes on to symbolize all this as emblematic of the decline of the West.

This isn’t exactly how I had in mind to do this post but it’s late and I’m tired so excuse if it’s a bit disjointed and not as well expressed as it might be.

In Passing.

A Whim a Day, Keeps the Doctor Away.

……………………………………………………..

Sir Clement Freud has died. He was the grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Lucian Freud the painter. There was a typical brotherly feud between the two, to the extent that Lucian turned down a knighthood because Clement had already been knighted. All very Freudian I’m afreud. [Dont' do that! ed. Sorry!]He was held in much regard and affection in England for his various activities which include being a gourmet cook, a Liberal MP for many years, writer and columnist and a radio and TV personality. Read the details here, a full and varied life.

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A Study in Opposites

Noisy globetrotting clowns like George Galloway get all the press. But it is unassuming visionaries, like Canada’s Tony Fell, who supply true leadership

Conrad Black, National Post

I have no interest in egregious George but Tony Fell should be more widely known and I’m surprised some enterprising government hasn’t grabbed him as advisor on economic matters.

When the U. S. northeastern establishment lost its nerve after the Vietnam debacle, Californians Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger and others were there to pick up the torch and win the Cold War. Now there is no one.

But that is not quite true in Canada. Almost six years ago, I invited the redoubtable Anthony Smithson (Tony) Fell, long-time head of RBC Dominion Securities, to a Bilderberg meeting at Versailles, of about 140 prominent public and business figures, senior journalists and public policy intellectuals from North America and Europe. He said nothing at the general sessions for the first two days and then intervened to predict almost everything that has since afflicted the world’s economy: too little saving, a glut of housing and questionable mortgage debt in the United States, severe imbalances of money flows, inaction on oil imports, the torpor of Europe and serious uncertainties in Russia and China. He predicted a severe reversal, of the proportions that has occurred, culminating in deflation (which still seems unlikely because of the U. S. Federal Reserve’s wise inundation of the monetary base, an activity now sheltering under the splendid jargonistic parasol of “quantitative easing,” i. e. an expanded money supply).

Tony Fell is a pretty sober and businesslike man to have his name bandied about in such company and circumstances, and his remarks were received at Versailles with incredulity and a little bemusement. But in an eminent international forum with several central bankers, prominent lending bankers, finance ministers and senior politicians, including Stephen Harper (then the leader of the Opposition), Tony Fell was the only person who predicted the greatest international economic crisis in seventy years.

Not all prophets look and sound like casting-studio choices for the role, and Canadians tend not to be flamboyant when there are a lot of powerful Americans and Europeans around. I have known Tony Fell for 55 years and he has never been a scene-stealer. When I sent him an e-mail a couple of months ago reminding him of his prescience, he graciously replied, taking no credit for himself. But in the last 30 years, his economic and commercial opinions have almost always been proved accurate. The George Galloways entertain and irritate us. People who speak presciently on important matters are hard to find.

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In 1797, Thomas Cadell made one of the greatest mistakes in publishing history. A Hampshire clergyman had written to him, offering a three-volume novel for publication by a first-time author. Without a word of encouragement, Cadell declined the book, manuscript unseen, by return of post.

Unfortunately for Cadell, the clergyman was the Revd George Austen, soliciting publication on his daughter Jane’s behalf, and the novel in question was an early version of Pride and Prejudice, recently voted the one book that the British nation can’t do without.

Read it all.

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“I was a vegetarian until I started leaning towards sunlight.”
–Rita Rudner

Obama’s Foreign Policy Summarized.

This is stolen from Dr Sanity.

Susan Boyle Update.

Susan Boyle mania has swept the world! From The Times, a recording Susan made ten years ago of Cry Me a River has surfaced. It’s a mystery how someone didn’t recognise her talent years ago.

Susan Boyle.

Since I posted on Susan Boyle she has become a real phenomenon with over 50 million hits on You Tube and some very good essays on her and what she means to a world gone somewhat awry in the last few decades.

American Digest from where I first learned of SB is keeping tabs noting first an essay by Collette Douglas Home, The Beautyl That Matters Is Always On The Inside.

Susan is a reminder that it’s time we all looked a little deeper. She has lived an obscure but important life. She has been a companionable and caring daughter. It’s people like her who are the unseen glue in society; the ones who day in and day out put themselves last. They make this country civilised and they deserve acknowledgement and respect.

Susan has been forgiven her looks and been given respect because of her talent. She should always have received it because of the calibre of her character.

The Anchoress weighs in with her particular insight.

Why is the world so obsessed with a woman so “ordinary” – even her name seems “flat and ordinary” – in every way, except in her powerful voice?

I suspect it is because Susan Boyle has reminded us of something we’ve forgotten for too long. Hypnotised by Madison Avenue and Hollywood and the culture of youth, we’ve forgotten that the things they offer to us as “the norm” are ideals, and mostly fake ones. In embracing those fake ideals (how much money was spent last year in cosmetic surgeries and teeth-whitening?) we’ve forgotten that beyond all of those superficialities, we each have within us something of much greater value than perky breasts and unlined skin: the divine spark, the God-kiss, that lives in each and every one of us – no exceptions.

I think we look at Susan Boyle and her artistry (and she is clearly an artist) and we think, “wait a second…that’s not the narrative! Ordinary people who look ordinary, and live obscurely and who don’t run with the herd are not supposed to be great.” And then we dare to think: “what if there is greatness in all of us?”

That’s quite a thought, isn’t it – almost subversive – that there may be greatness in each of us, but that it goes unappreciated, because what is great in us is not valued by the people who “define” things and set the narratives?

William Tate at American Thinker sees her as the ‘anti-Obama’. It seems almost sacreligious to bring the O into it but the comparison is worth making.

At a time when the President of the United States feels compelled to use a teleprompter for even the most minor appearances, when Grecian columns are necessary props for campaign speeches, when public figures are as carefully packaged as your morning cereal boxes, after watching plain Susan Boyle sing with a voice for the ages, you feel like you have witnessed a real person do something that’s real. And right. And good. No, extraordinarily good.

She is, in effect, the anti-Obama. No artifice. No teleprompter. As likely to stumble over words, or do a spontaneous bump and grind as she is to belt out a song that could leave you with chill-bumps.

Now I must get off somewhat late to my mundane work! Well you wouldn’t want to hear me sing anyway. But I do have two cute grandkids: