Stirring……

I am trying to stir. Really.Truth of the matter is, I’ve darn near forgotten the mechanics of blogging. Doesn’t help that I can’t get this template, which I am fast becoming disenchanted with – to cooperate.
As far as the bear is concerned, well, we’ve been in hibernation. Or hiatus. Whatever. But hell, tides may be turning, one can hope,. If not, best go out having our say.

So, yes, we are stirring, but not yet awake.

Stay tuned….

Jackson

A Celebrity Who Is A Grownup!

Maybe this is old news to most people, but Tiger Woods gave a great little speech at the Lincoln Memorial somewhat incongruously given the content and the occasion, but for those who missed it, it’s worth reading.

I grew up in a military family — and my role models in life were my Mom and Dad, Lt. Colonel Earl Woods.

My dad was a Special Forces operator and many nights friends would visit our home. They represented every branch of service, and every rank. In my Dad, and in those guests, I saw first hand the dedication and commitment of those who serve. They come from every walk of life. From every part of our country. Time and again, across generations, they have defended our safety in the dark of night and far from home.

Each day — and particularly on this historic day — we honor the men and women in uniform who serve our country and protect our freedom. They travel to the dangerous corners of the world, and we must remember that for every person who is in uniform, there are families who wait for them to come home safely.

H/T Secular Apostate.

In Passing.

Gee, that Adam Smith can really hurt a guy:

What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

H/T Cafe Hayek.

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Charles Winecoff has left the left, read all about it at Front Page Magazine. Seems to happen a lot that people as they get older move from left to right, neo-neocon has a superb account of her move that is worth re-reading at least once a year. Those who do move the other way like Colin Powell and Arlen Specter were too soft to be real Republicans all along so I don’t count them as real conversions.

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Talking of conversion, did you see Roger L Simon’s column on his move from atheism to some sort of understanding of what religion and a faith based belief in God is?

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Still on religion a bit, at the end of an article on ‘Obama, the Quintessential Liberal Fascist’, Kyle-Anne Shiver has this comment and warning from Pope Benedict:

As Pope Benedict XVI has so presciently warned:

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic.

Be not fooled, America. The movement, which appears most benign is instead the most malignant growth ever seen on our soil. It’s a cancer that will kill, and however slowly it grows or however nice it may look on the surface, doesn’t change a thing.

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Found a baked potato recipe I just have to try as soon as possible. I love potatoes cooked any which way, the humble potato, a gift from God. [Can't get away from religion tonight!]

What Makes Us Happy?………….

……………….is the title of an article in The Atlantic. I haven’t had time to read it all yet but wanted to bring it to your attention since it’s quite fascinating.

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

H/T Arts and Letters Daily.

In Passing.

A Whim a Day, Keeps the Doctor Away.

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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

In Passing.

Great news! Evan Sayet has another talk at The Hetitage Foundation. This time it is: Hating What’s Right: How the Modern Liberal Winds Up on the Wrong Side of Every Issue. If you missed the previous talk, How Liberals Think, you can find it here. Don’t miss it.

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The good old EUtopians are about to bump into reality. The world seems to be awash with idiots these days, it’s all those sixties boomers who were handed everything on a plate and just given a spoon instead of having to learn how to use a knife and fork. [Too difficult for the little darlings don't you know]

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Gary Kasparov, who knows a thing or two about Russia and ras/Putin, gives Obama a warning. Maybe he could give the Obama-fuehrer-man a few chess lessons. He might get an inkling that the world is a little more complicated than he thought.

It’s a Mad, Mad World.

Another nutty Obama appointment.

Pregnancy provokes a welter of feelings, physical and emotional. But does anyone really think of pregnancy as slavery? Apparently so: Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Yale-educated and ACLU-trained, Johnsen already has done one tour of duty at OLC. She spent nearly six years there during the Clinton administration (1993–98), the last two as acting chief. OLC, a critically important agency, is the administration’s lawyers’ lawyer. Staffed by graduates of top law schools who are then polished by elite judicial clerkships, it authoritatively interprets the law for the attorney general and, in doing so, drives administration legal policy. OLC’s credibility is derived from its reputation for apolitical, academic discipline — its commitment to informing policymakers of what the law is, rather than what staffers believe the law should be. Johnsen is, for that reason, a poor fit: She is an ideologue, and an unabashed one.

Her bizarre equation of pregnancy and slavery was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was her considered position in a 1989 brief filed in the Supreme Court. At the time, she was legal director of NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League, since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America). The case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, involved a Missouri law that did not ban abortion but restricted the use of state funds and resources for abortions. It’s an obvious distinction, but one without a difference — at least according to Johnsen. Any restriction that makes abortion less accessible is, in her view, tantamount to “involuntary servitude” because it “requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest [in the life of the unborn].” In effect, a woman “is constantly aware for nine months that her body is not her own: the state has conscripted her body for its own ends.” Such “forced pregnancy,” she contends, violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery.

Where do all these assholes come from?

From the UK Telegraph

Terrorist suspects claiming unemployment benefits
Terrorist suspects placed under control orders restricting their movements are being paid unemployment benefits after promising to seek work in Britain.

Too many Western governments have gone soft in the head.

As a counterbalance to such idiocy, see this extremely interesting story of a British female ‘tree hugger’ who was invited by General Odierno to shadow him as he carried out his duties. As a bona fide tree hugger she hated armies and the US equally, but in the end came to admire both Odierno and the US Military.

I’m saving this post from American Thinker for all the people I run into who think Bush [of course] and Wall St are responsible for the financial crisis. The icing on this particular cake is that it’s from the NYT before Bush was elected.

Old Cancer Treatment Re-visited.

I have wondered sometimes if there was a way of boosting the immune system to fight cancer, lupus, arthritis etc. and if the cases that occur sometimes of spontaneous remission are just that. Seems there might be a way, check out this article in American Scientist.

Conventional wisdom long held that the human immune system was no match for cancer. Born of native cells, the logic went, cancer fooled the immune system into concluding it was harmless. Thus protected from attack, cancer easily thrived until its host died.

A deeper understanding of our biological defenses has changed that. The human immune system does battle cancer. But we could better optimize our defenses to fend off malignant disease. That’s clear from cancer treatments attempted in New York City and Germany as early as the 19th century. Those experiments and other undervalued evidence from the medical literature suggest that acute infection—in contrast to chronic infection, which sometimes causes cancer—can help a body fight tumors.

It’s not the pathogens that do the good work. But the way our bodies respond to the pathogens is key. Infection events, especially those that produce fever, appear to shift the innate human immune system into higher gear. That ultimately improves the performance of crucial biological machinery in the adaptive immune system. This lesson comes, partly, from doctors who risked making patients sicker to try to make them better.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio……”

Orson Scott Card…….

……is a newspaper columnist and a Democrat. Not what you think though, in this column he ladles out the truth to his fellow Democrats and journalists.

There is hope. I think.

Normblog.

I used to read Normblog every day but now it’s once a week. It’s come to seem to me too ‘plodding’, or is my ADD getting worse! I usually catch his blogger profiles on Fridays, I intended at one time to do a little critique of each one but you know what they say about good intentions. Anyway this week’s is Harry Barnes, a retired Labour MP who blogs at Three Score Years and Ten. Not one of his best, in fact what struck me about his answers was the earnestness of the exercise, no creativity and no sense of fun. Just about sums up the left generally, as is shown by all the feminist jokes poking fun at their lack of humour.

‘Knock, knock’.
‘Who’s there?’
‘That’s not funny’.

Woman in feminist bookstore to clerk.
‘I can’t find the humour section’.
‘This is a feminist bookstore, we don’t have a humour section’.

Here are a couple of questions and replies:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > ‘No man is an island.’ When this was first used by John Donne (1572-1631) he was dealing with mankind which to him included women.
What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > ‘Democratic Socialism… is based on the conviction that free men can use free institutions to solve the social and economic problems of the day, if they are given a chance to do so.’ From Nye Bevan’s In Place Of Fear. His terminology was also meant to cover women.

Disegarding his positing ‘free men and free institutions’ as the solution to society’s problems, because well we know what an Orwellian construct that is given Socialism’s penchant for controlling everything in sight or not in sight too really. How can someone live through the last 72 years and still believe that crap?
But what do you make of him twice thinking it necessary for our edification to point out that women are included? Again, where has he been living the last fifty years? Earnest, well meaning and ponderous, I met them in England, they mostly went by the name of shop stewards.

We use words that are so familiar when they denote something like the shop floor official of a union, that we don’t think it unusual for someone doing that ‘work’ to be called a steward. One of the definitions of steward is :

A person employed to manage another’s property.

When applied to an official of a trade union, it has a chilling ring to it.

Powerless: A Foretaste of Obama

Oh my! I have electric! I have internet! Sunday started out as pleasantly as any day, and I paid the brisk winds little heed. As those winds increased I was not particularly alarmed as high wind days aren’t particularly unusual around these parts. Now everyone I had talked to had heard that we could expect gusts up to 35 miles per hour. When trees started falling over and the tin roof on a house down the block started peeling off, I came to the brilliant conclusion that the weather folks had it wrong again.
Then the power went off.

I have been fortunate in having little experience with power outages. And though our entire city was blanketed in darkness, our experience does not compare to those regions that experience the full onslaught of a hurricane. We had gusts up to 80 MPH and nary a drop of rain. Loosing power during benign weather is a blessing. With mild days and cool nights, no one froze and no one endured unbearable heat. As disasters go, this one was mild.
But it sure provided a lesson in preparedness that this family has taken due note of. Fortunately this house is full of manly men and before long the kerosene lamps and camp stoves were out of storage and running. Water was not affected and with a gas fueled water heater we were not deprived of hot water. We fell short of all other necessities though. No generators and a diligent search conjured up only four batteries for a beat up radio that took them. Candles were rather sparse but with the camp lights, we got through. The boys went in search of ice and found a few pockets near by that for some reason still had power. There chaos reigned as folks sought out ice and food stuffs and gasoline. Those without cash had to search for operating ATMs and some businesses, though having power, could neither sell gas or products because everything is computerized.

Bottom line, we got through with little discomfort. But it became clear to me how addicted we are to cable and internet. Without either I was rather a nervous wreck. Especially since I earn my income online. A neighbor who lives alone and with even less resources than we had got our only radio so I was basically in a news blackout save for making quick trips to sit in the car and listening in to local talk shows. Though I caught some news from the elections, I have been spared my daily dose of Obama poison but a brief glimpse at what Ligneus has posted seems to indicate that the bastard is proving himself to be the traitor that intelligent people have long ago surmised. But one thought that came to me as we made our way through the last few powerless days is that this is a glimpse of the world that Barack Hussein Obama will bring America. A world of scarcity, of rationing, and, quite frankly , of darkness.
Well, I have to go catch up with business. I do thank my faithful blogging partner Ligneus for keeping up the pace. I’ll be back this evening.

This and That.

Peter Wehner reviews Bob Woodward’s new book on the surge.
Now GWB has taken so much flack over the Iraq war from all sides but particularly the virulent brainless left and also from fellow Republicans over his domestic policies, and I’m not saying these weren’t justified, but set against it what this passage says about GWB’s independent courage.

The most important point to make, I think, is that the book underscores what an extraordinary decision President Bush made in deciding on the so-called surge. As Woodward’s book recounts, and my own experience in the White House underscores, in settling on a surge of five brigades to Baghdad and 4,000 Marines to Anbar Province, the President bucked the views of most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (including the Army Chief of Staff, Peter Schoomaker, and Chief of Naval Operations, Michael Mullen), General George W. Casey, Jr., then the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq, John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command, military analysts, the entire Democratic Party, much of the Republican Party, most of the foreign policy establishment, the Iraq Study Group, and many within his own Administration.

The prevailing view was that of General Casey, whom Woodward quotes as telling the President in June 2006, “To win, we have to draw down.” General Casey was exactly wrong, as was the much-heralded Baker-Hamilton Report, which in its 96 pages dismissed the idea of a surge in a single paragraph. (The ISG did recommend a short-term surge, but it argued, “Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation… past experience indicates that the violence would simply rekindle as soon as U.S. forces are moved to another area… America’s military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence.” The ISG also recommended a drawdown of all U.S. combat forces by early 2008.)

The only real support for the surge was found within the White House and the National Security Council; from General David Petraeus, who succeeded General Casey and said, “I want all the force you can give me” and knew what to do with it once he got it; from Lt. General Ray Odierno, who had the courage to request the forces he knew were required despite the opposition from those he reported to; from retired General Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff; from Fredrick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and William Kristol; and, of course, the early, forceful support of Senator McCain, as well as Senators Graham and Lieberman, was crucial, politically and substantively. At the time the surge was announced, it seemed as if its supporters could fit in a large phone booth.

For the President to have made the decision he did, in the face of such widespread opposition and with the war deeply unpopular within the country and his own party, took serious resolve. It was easily the most impressive and courageous decision he made in office.

Again, based just on the excerpts and the 60 Minutes appearance, one major area in which I disagree with the assessment of Woodward–one of the most influential journalists in American history–is his claim that the surge was not the primary factor in the staggering drop of violence in Iraq.

This is why history will see him as one of the great Presidents.

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Here’s an entry on a blog that’s new to me, The Fly Bottle. [Don't ask.] A sample:

Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision.

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Obama today on the campaign trail:

“You notice, at their convention, they spent a lot of time talking about John McCain’s biography, which is compelling,” Obama said. “They talked about Sarah Palin’s biography, which is compelling.”

When some members of the audience laughed at the notion that Palin’s biography was compelling, Obama insisted he was being serious.

“No, no, it’s an interesting story,” Obama said. “No, no, look, I mean that sincerely. I mean, mother, governor, moose-shooter, I mean, I think that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool stuff.”

Democrats, like their feminist allies, don’t have much of a sense of humor. As a comedian he’d better not give up his day job. Oh right, he doesn’t have a job. Voting present in the Senate doesn’t count, in almost Orwellian mode, voting present means you might as well not be there.

H/T Political Punch.

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In and article in The National Post on Sat, Conrad Black wrote this:

The Democrats and the feminist media establishment failed in their effort to represent Governor Palin as a Dan Quayle dunce in drag, a trigger-happy Stepford Wife and negligent mother (because she would choose to run for vice president despite her young family and 17-year old unmarried, pregnant daughter). The frenzy of the initial assault, and the sanctimonious conceit that American women would be offended by the candidacy of such an allegedly ditzy yokel, showed that McCain had remembered the basic military strategic lessons to apply maximum force at the decisive point and achieve complete surprise: If the liberal Democrats are taking the high ground on extramarital sex and working motherhood, you know they are frightened.

Doncha like that bit about military strategy, that would be completely foreign to the current crop of Dimcrats of course.

This and That.

Bob Hope was smarter than I thought.

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Julie Burchill is like many of us who became Atheists when young but changed with age and a modicum of wisdom.
I think I have a foot in both camps, I don’t believe in a Creator, there is no answer to the question that if the Universe must necessarily have been created because it couldn’t just happen, then where did the Creator come from? And if I should be asked, Do you believe in God? I don’t answer no, I say it depends what you mean by God. I tend towards the Hebrew idea, that God is so far outside our existence or knowledge that you shouldn’t even have a name for Him, thus they write G-d to avoid the naming which according to Erich Fromm in his book You Shall Be As Gods is a form of idolatry.

Fromm’s interpretation of the Old Testament is essentially as follows: Stage 1: A dictatorial God as absolute ruler, jealous of the human potential to be God’s rival. The use of force and brutality characterizes such a God, who expels Adam and Eve from Paradise and limits human lifetime to 120 years. Stage 2: God establishes a covenant with Noah and his descendants, promising to never again flood the Earth. For Fromm, the concept of the covenant is one of the most decisive steps in the evolution of Judaism, in that it leads to a conception of complete freedom for humankind, in particular freedom from God. God and human beings become partners in a treaty, this transforming God from an absolute ruler into a constitutional monarch. God then has less freedom to be brutal, to disrepect human life and other living creatures. Abraham’s numerical challenge to God at Sodom and Gommorrah is offered in evidence. Abraham’s confidence in the principle of universal justice is a departure from the concept of human beings as meek supplicants, fearful of God’s reprisals. Stage 3: The rejection of idols and the subsequent concept of God as a nameless God. One must talk to God, not about him, the latter results in idolatry. The philosophy of Moses Maimonides is offered as evidence of this. The “negative theology” of Maimonides allows only the employment of attributes of actions of God. Both God and humans in this stage become subjected to the same universal principles of truth and justice, and their relationships is no longer confrontational . Conceptions of God then evolve to the more abstract, with God working through history (“horizontally”), and not into it (“vertically”).

Going from Atheism to ‘Faith’ in this way is like coming full circle, from declaring there is no God to a state of knowing that you cannot know what or who He is, He is nothing and He is all.
The best expression I know of this comes at the end of the preface to W H Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, a commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which, after the play has ended, each of the characters speaks of the aftermath, each in a different poetic form, ending with a Jamesian prose monologue by Caliban. Here is the preface ending:

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is insubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall:
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

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Have you noticed or have I missed it that there doesn’t seem to be much ‘Global Warming’ talk lately? It begins to seem horribly more likely that we’re in for Global Cooling. Alan Sullivan does a great job of keeping up to date on it all. See his latest post on the Maunder Minimum.

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New York Times revenue for July falls 10.1 per cent.
Do I need to comment?

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Best idea since sliced bread.

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Little Lara gets cuter by the day. [Though I say so myself.]

This and That.

Subject: Headlights

There are fewer than five months until the election, an election that will
decide the next President of the United States . The person elected will be
The president of all Americans, not just the Democrats or the Republicans.
To show our solidarity as Americans, let’s all get together and show each
other our support for the candidate of our choice. It’s time that we all
came together, Democrats and Republicans alike. If you support the policies
and character of John McCain, please drive with your headlights on during
the day. If you support Obama, please drive with your headlights off at
night. Thank you and God Bless

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I don’t read books as much as I would like these days, [I don't do a lot of things!] but one novelist I can re-read any time is Penelope Fitzgerald. Julian Barnes [a writer I like almost as much as PF] has written an appreciation of her and her work.

Like her personal manner, her life and literary career seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist. True, she came from a cultured background, having one father and three uncles among the multi-talented Knox brothers, whose communal biography she later wrote. Her father was editor of Punch; her mother, one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, also wrote. Penelope was in turn a brilliant student at Somerville: one of her finals examiners was so astounded by her papers that he asked his fellow dons if he could keep them, and later, apparently, had them bound in vellum. But after this public proof of distinction, throughout what might for anyone else have been the best writing years of her life, she became a wife and working mother (at Punch, the BBC, the Ministry of Food, then in journalism and teaching). She was 58 by the time she published her first book, a biography of Burne-Jones. She then wrote a comic thriller, The Golden Child, to amuse her dying husband. In the period 1975-84 she published two more biographies and four more novels. Those four novels are all short, and written close to her own experiences: of running a bookshop, living on a houseboat, working for the BBC in wartime, teaching at a stage school. They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition. And with almost any other writer you might think that, having used up her own life, she would – being now in her late 60s – have called it a day. On the contrary: over the next decade, from 1986 to 1995, she published the four novels – Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower – by which she will be remembered. They are written far from her obvious life, being set, respectively, in 1950s Florence, pre-revolutionary Moscow, Cambridge in 1912, and late 18th-century Prussia. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

I have recommended her to many people, some like her and some not which tells me something about both types, though I put it down somewhat to her ‘Englishness’ and how well that translates to people whose mother tongue is not English however proficient they be in its use. The best comment I got from someone who liked her was, ‘She says so much with so little’.
Another old friend, now ex due to differences over Bush, America etc. asked me once for a recommendation for her reading circle, so naturally I gave her PF. Neither she nor any of her circle liked her. They are all highly educated people so I can only assume that she [PF] didn’t fit their received ideas as to what makes a good novel. As Stephen Leacock said on someone receiving their PHD, he has now been pronounced full and has no need to learn anything else for the rest of his life. The friend, by the way, was Danish and female.

If I encourage anyone to give her a try or if anyone reading this has read her I’d be most interested to hear what you think about her novels.

The article ends thus:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings”. The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are pre-eminent examples of this kind.

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I missed July’s tree pic, here it is a little late.

I should take a rainy day pic for Aug since it was just announced that it’s been the wettest summer here in Toronto since records have been kept. Strange but nice, no too hot and humid to breathe days, no watering lawns, everything green and it reminds me of England!

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Oregon, one of the socialist paradise States, couldn’t afford the $4000 a month treatment for a woman suffering terminal cancer but they did offer to pay for assisting her suicide should she so wish.

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I can’t remember if I posted this before but I just love this 12 year old girl singer from the Britain’s Got Talent show.

This and That.

Those poor Socialists can’t seem to get anything right. I went to Grammar School back in UK and an excellent school it was too, as were they all. Kids who were bright but from poor working class families by passing the eleven plus exam could gain a place in them giving them a chance to do better in life than would otherwise be the case. But in a particularly egregious example of the politics of envy the Labour Party decided to abolish them in favour of Comprehensives, this they reasoned would give every child the same opportunity and avoid the snobbishness they associated with the Grammar Schools.
Well guess what, didn’t quite work out that way.

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I try to ignore all diet advice or admonition, part because I can’t be bothered to follow it and part because it so often turns out wrong. I’ve wondered too if there is a link between the large amounts of milk consumed, which ‘they’ tell us is so good for us, and the incidence of heart disease. In my funny way of thinking, I see milk as a specialised food for the sustenance of baby cows. What the hell do we and our digestive systems have in common with them? [Confession, I can't stand the stuff and don't go near it] From the Daily Telegraph:

Eating an apple a day might keep the doctor away, but it could also be the reason why your figure is going pear-shaped. Scientists have discovered that fructose, the kind of sugar found in fruit, causes weight to build up disproportionately around the stomach, rather than being spread around the body.

There are significant implications to all of this: is the Government’s five-a-day campaign, with its insistence on filling our diets with smoothies and juices, actually a cause of the obesity crisis?

Will compensation be demanded by brewers, whose trade has been damaged by the link between their product and “beer bellies”? Will these, in turn, be re-labelled “berry bellies”?

All part and parcel with the previous item , the meddling nanny state telling and coercing us into what they think is good for us.

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Speaking of which, how’s this for gasket blowing and mind blowing idiocy?

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From The Diplomad, Obama and the Art of the Chinese Food Speech.

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That’s shallot. Night night.

This and That.

A couple of worthwhile things I came across today on the loser Obamadhinejad.

First a wonderful piece at Townhall by Mary Grabar, You Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way Obama Will Go.

When I heard a major part of Obama’s resume included a stint as a “community advisor”, I asked myself what the term meant.

Lovely take down of his pretensions and a clear statement of his lack of anything that would qualify him for any job requiring some sort of expertise.

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You’ve no doubt heard of one of Obama’s foreign policy advisors Richard Danzig citing Winnie the Pooh no less as a model for criticizing GWB’s ‘rigid inability to change direction’, well William Kristol at The Weekly Standard has intriguing thoughts on it, in a superbly titled piece, Obama’s Pooh-Bah.

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History Will Say That We Mis-underestimated George W Bush says Andrew Roberts in The Daily Telegraph.
Send it to any lefties you want to annoy.

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There seems to be a bit of an Obama-bashathon going on around here. Good thing too, apart from the danger that by a fluke he could become President, an even more scary thought than the bumbling Kerry winning, it’s such a target rich environment!

Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club says at Pajamas Media [I still have trouble not writing 'pyjamas'!]that Obama’s changing positions on Iraq coincide with the interests of his old pal Tony Rezko. Of course it will be dismissed by the Kos Kroud as a smear and a distraction but only because it is so damaging and they’ll try to sweep it under the rug, there being no more room under the bus.

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It was bad enough that the Goracle saw fit to put his lucrative amateur long range weather forecasts into a film and then a book, but an opera? On second thoughts since the Global Warming Scam is all smoke and mirrors then the opera house might be the best place to house it. I’m not the only one.

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” first a film and then a book, is becoming an opera. Officials of La Scala in Milan say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to write it for the 2011 season, The Associated Press reported.

Dear Mr. Gore,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my draft of “Verità Inconveniente.” Rest assured that I and the management of La Scala are committed to a serious presentation of your scientific work. I will try to adopt some of your suggestions, but I hope you appreciate the constraints faced by the composer of an opera that is already five hours long.

I agree it would “round out the résumé” of Prince Algorino in the opening scene if he were to sing about his creation of a communications network. But the “Mio magnifico Internet” aria you propose seems to me a distraction — and frankly out of place in an 18th-century Tuscan village. I believe the peasants’ choral celebration of Prince Algorino’s wisdom suffices to establish his virtues.

Britain’s Got Talent.

I don’t know if you remember Paul Potts on last year’s Britain’s got Talent TV show from UK, but here is another fabulous singer, Faryl Smith, and she’s only twelve years old.

Just as a reminder, here is Paul Potts audition.

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.

This and That.

If you want to know what’s really happening re Climate Change, go to Alan Sullivan at Fresh Bilge, he has a long essay on the factors affecting our long term climate. [Hint, it's not CO2, CO2 is an effect of global warming not a cause.]

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Mark Leyner in the NYT tells of the amazing revelation that Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a fraud, it is a true story and not fiction.
Something about that story always did bug me. [Oops, sorry about that.]

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Hillary Clinton goes to her doctor for a check-up, only to find out that she’s pregnant. She is furious…Here she is in the middle of her first run for President as Senator for New York …. how this has happened to her. She calls home, gets Bill on the phone and immediately starts screaming:

Finally she hears Bill’s very, very quiet voice in a barely audible whisper, he asks: “Who’s speaking?”

Thankyou Israpundit. [I think]

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Major Shul tells of flying the fastest plane ever built.

Totally fascinating. The designer was one of those geniuses who didn’t receive the accolades normally garnered because of the secret nature of his work.

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I don’t think I have witnessed any campaign in recent memory so full of platitudes and mush — and thousands of personal voice tales of catastrophe right out of Dickens.

That’s from an article by the ever wonderful Victor Davis Hanson on Michelle and Barack, as if I need to tell you.

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Timothy Garton Ash [aka Timothy Garton Trash] is very critical of the Euro Sceptics, Richard at E U Referendum puts him right.
Whether or not you are interested in the goings on of the Eurocrats, you should read this, it applies to many political nonsenses coming out of left field.