This and That.

In English history kings would often receive names denoting some personal attribute or else commemorative of an action taken, Richard Lionheart, Alfred the Great, [though some say because of the story of how he allowed the griddle cakes to burn it's a corruption of Alfred the Grate {Gee, those old schoolboy jokes never die}], William the Conqueror, so it seems to me that were Obama king, he would come to be known as Obama the Banal. [Or maybe Obama the Banana since you never see a straight one]. Anyway, the banal because in contra-distinction to his portrayal as an honest, above the fray of politics as normal guy, he is now being seen as groveling in the lowest levels of politics and electioneering thuggery. Charles Lipton at Real Clear Politics writes about Four Stumps in the Water for Obama.
Hillary is being written off by many but I’d be most surprised if Obama gets the nod, the gurus of the Dhimmis must know by now he is pretty much un-electable. Well so is Hillary actually, but it wouldn’t be quite the debacle an Obama candidacy would be. Read what Thomas Lipton has to say and see how far you think Obama would go in a general election.

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The addle brained adolescents, aka The Democratic Party, have brought their sophomoric antics to Wikipedia. The supporters of Hill and Barak [sounds like a firm of funeral directors] have been changing each other’s entries.

There was the day in February when an editor replaced a photo of Hillary on her Wikipedia page with a picture of a walrus. Then there was the day this month when a Hillary supporter changed Obama’s bio so that it referred to him as “a Kenyan-American politician.” But such sweepingly hostile edits are usually fixed quickly by other Wikipedia users. Often, it’s the most arcane distinctions on the candidates’ pages that provoke the bitterest tugs-of-war. Recently, an angry battle broke out on Hillary’s page over whether to describe Clinton as “a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination” or just “a candidate,” since each phrase implies a different shade of judgment on her chances. Five minutes after an Obama supporter deleted “leading” just after 11 p.m. on March 8, another editor put it back. Seven minutes after that, the word was deleted again. Some thirty minutes after that, it was put back. On it went, with different Wikipedia editors debating the significance of Hillary’s delegate deficit on her talk page and accusing each other of introducing the dreaded “POV”– or “point of view,” a violation of Wikipedia’s most fundamental principle–into the article. At around six in the morning, completing the atmosphere of pandemonium, somebody replaced Hillary’s whole page with “It has been reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton has contracted genital herpes due to sexual intercourse with an orangutan.”

This is pathetic and also a little scary if they are actual adults doing this.

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Here is the beginning of an article from a few years back that is worth re-visiting, it is Politics Without God? by George Weigel.

At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.

The arch’s three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed “Fraternity Arch.” That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.

All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy “unsameness” of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?

Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I’ve tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?

Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe’s constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione’s candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?

Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today — the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.

My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy.

The lefties can argue all they want on the superiority of their culture but they can’t argue with demographics, the proof of the pudding and all that.

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This is bleak January’s pic of the tree.

In February already things are looking better, still damn cold though.

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This and That.

I’ve been working on improving the quality and size of my pics as posted, with some success as you see. This is Katy getting mad at the other kid who was throwing sand on the slide! Whew, her future boyfriends will have to watch their p’s and q’s.

I had more stuff all ready to post and I lost it. Comes of doing things when you’re tired and it’s too late to re-do it so just the pic for now.

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A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,
“Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The woman below replied,
“You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”
“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.
“I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”
“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”
The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

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“Other than that Mrs Lincoln….” Chicago Boyz has a post on one liners.

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This and That.

First, not one of my best, but to introduce you to ‘my’ tree in the ravine, taken last December.

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Obama’s Bamboozling. I’m a fan of Peggy Noonan’s writing in the WSJ, but when I read her column on Obama’s speech I had cognitive dissonance, I couldn’t square what I knew of her writing, insightful, full of common sense, with what I’d read of the speech. It’s probably behind subscription but here is the beginning, you’ll get the idea.

I thought Barack Obama’s speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to. It was clear that’s what he wanted, and this is rare.

It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution. We’ll see if it was a success. The blowhard guild, proud member since 2000, praised it, and, in the biggest compliment, cable news shows came out of the speech not with jokes or jaded insiderism, but with thought. They started talking, pundits left and right, black and white, about what they’d experienced of race in America. It was kind of wonderful. I thought, Go, America, go, go.

Time to come back to earth with Bruce Thornton who eviscerates [fisk doesn't do justice to it] the speech
A sample:

The next rationalization arises in the last sentence, and employs another trick Obama will use throughout the speech: specious moral equivalence served up with a false analogy. To imply that people attending churches and temples in this country regularly hear the sort of lunatic bigotry Wright preaches, is simply dishonest. I grew up in a rural, fundamentalist church whose members were mostly from the Jim Crow South, and I never once heard in church anything about blacks equivalent to the racism Wright indulges. Later I attended for a while a Congregationalist church — after Unitarians, the most wacky liberal denomination in America — and though I heard much political nonsense, nothing came close to Wright’s bile. Obama is trying to avoid the simple fact that Wright’s comments reflect the worst sort of irrational extremism, rather than, as Obama goes on to whitewash them, a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice, as though Wright’s sin was merely one of excessive zeal in a noble cause.

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Tom Stoppard, another of those superb Czech writers has a column in The Times on the student riots of ’68. Do check it out.

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Lig Pic.

It was a beautiful day here in Toronto yesterday and I managed a half hour walk down the ravine. I have a series of photographs of a lone oak tree on the slope of the water reservoir there, you see that behind the row of trees in today’s pic, and once I can pretty them up a bit I’ll post them maybe one a month or more often to correspond with the time of year they were taken. It’s a nice little challenge to go to the same place over the course of a few years and come up with something different each time, helped of course by the natural variations of weather, time of day, seasons and so on, even one night pic in which you just see a grainy outline of the tree, not sure if I’ll post that one though it would be a good finale.

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Lig Pic.

This is Lara my younger grand daughter at about five months.

Still got a few things to learn about posting pics, like how do I upload them from Light Room, but it’s a start.

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