Lisa Hannigan Sings "Passenger," "Lille," "O Sleep," "Little Bird," & "Knots"

Haven't posted any of this lovely colleen's music in a while. These are her five best.

"Tolstoyan Conservatism"

Not sure how I missed this series by Noah Millman at The American Conservative:

• Es Muss Sein
• The American Consurfative
• Wu Wei and Prudence
• Eisenhower: The American Kutuzov?
• Kutuzovs of the Left and the Right.

Lev Nikolayevich has been a major influence on my thinking, ever since stumbling across his anarcho-Christian tome The Kingdom of God Is Within You at the 1988 Anarchist Survival Gathering.

Robert Zimmerman on the War Between the States

"If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today," said the singer, quoted here Thomas DiLorenzo, author of the book mentioned — Is Bob Dylan a LewRockwell.com Reader? Has He Read ‘The Real Lincoln’?

Radmilla Cody Sings "The Dawn Song"

Above, "of the Tła’a’schi’i’ (Red Bottom People) clan and... born [of] the Naahiłii (African-Americans)," is Radmilla Cody, the "Navajo model, award-winning singer, and anti-domestic violence activist who was the 46th Miss Navajo from 1997 to 1998," who spoke at our school today. I took my Saudi students to see her as a class assignment. What a lovely human being! She had a rough life, to be sure, both on the rez (where she was born) and in the city, but a great maternal grandmother, who spoke no English, to guide her. (I, too, had a great maternal grandmother to guide me.)

The audience steered her into the boring and diversionary area of identity politics, and her boilerplate condemnations Columbus Day (can understand that) and Thanksgiving (can't really understand that) were thankfully brief low-points in her hour-and-a-half talk. (Cf. her singing The Star-Spangled Banner (Navajo Lyrics) (National Anthem).) I'm no left-liberal, so am tolerant enough to handle diversity of opinion. And when she did talk to me, perhaps the only DWEM left in the room at the time, she offered her hand with such radiant warmth and genuine human interest that I knew she was the real deal and no empty ideologue. It was a pleasure to be in the presence of a person with true grace and dignity. She closed with the above song.

Quick Review of the Spirit Family Reunion Concert

As you know, the missus and I went to see Spirit Family Reunion just the other night at Water House Music Hall here in town. I stumbled upon the band just this past Saturday, but now count myself as a fan, especially since they're almost local. The introduced themselves, almost apologetically as being from "downstate, Brooklyn, in New York City." Midway through the show the washboard player for some reason started listing off names of companies from our town; there were huge cheers from the smallish crowd when he mentioned Genesee Beer, which made me proud.

Their music speaks for itself, as evidenced in the videos posted on these pages over the last couple of days, with its "deep, subtle spiritual lyrics heavily influenced by traditional mountain string band music, with drums, an occasional accordion and lots of soul." No accordion the night we saw them, but I, who normally don't see the need for drums, liked the deep banging on the bass drums and toms. I was reminded a bit of the Butthole Surfers, another band with two drummers and primitive percussion, when I saw them in '87. Indeed, the Spirit Family had the raw intensity and DIY spirit of '80s Punk. Sure, there are more accomplished musicians out there, but that's not what this is about. These guys were a blast! The missus started laughing out loud at one point. (A Korean, she had never seen anything like this before.) She said, "They're like a bunch of crazy people!" ("Crazy" has more negative connotations in Korean than it does in English.) They were; and we loved it.

Their a capella rendition of Man Of Peace by Bob Dylan, about which they were a bit hesitant (it was the first night of their tour), did not work out so well, but it got me thinking. Mr. Zimmerman's observation that "sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace" had me pondering the band's self-professed "open door gospel" approach, i.e. uplifting vaguely spiritual music not "burdened" by Christianity, almost bringing to mind the "The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ" from Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. What if Hazel Motes had a band?

But I put these theological musings aside to enjoy the the rest of the show. Opening had been the Wilco-like Clinton's Ditch, "a five-piece Progressive Americana act from Rochester, NY" whose "name pays homage to the Erie Canal, which passed through their home town and helped to spur the growth of the Mid-West," and whose "deep, churning sound that may be best described as Outlaw-Western Roots-Rock." Not exactly my cup of tea, but these guys could play their instruments and it is always enjoyable to watch polished musicianship. Still, I preferred the rawness of the headliners. I bet they make it reasonably big in the future.

Spirit Family Reunion Perform "When My Name Is Spoken," "Green Green Rocky Road," "I Want To Be Relieved," "The Night Replaced The Day," "Alright Prayer," and "Leave Your Troubles At The Gate"

The band the missus and I'll be seeing tonight.

Spirit Family Reunion Perform "I Am Following the Sound"

More of the band the missus and I'll be seeing tomorrow.

Three From the Right

Jim Goad reminds us, "Modern triumphalist progressives share a common delusion that history is a linear process wherein societies continually perfect themselves morally" — Happy to Be on the Wrong Side of History.

"The emerging order will not only represent a break from the way all societies everywhere have functioned up until a few decades ago," warns Paul Gottfried , but "will also eliminate erotic passions, which have been keyed to significant gender differences" — Gender-Neutral Societies Suck.

Bruce Bartlett writes that "in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong" — Revenge of the Reality-Based Community. "Those who were wrong should be purged and ignored; those who were right, especially those who inflicted maximum discomfort on movement conservatives in being right, ought to get credit for it and become regular reading for them once again."

Spirit Family Reunion Perform "Alright Prayer," "100 Greenback Dollar Bills" and "On That Day"

More of "the ready-to-break Brooklyn band" Spirit Family Reunion, whom No Depression's Ernie Hill says "concentrates on deep, subtle spiritual lyrics heavily influenced by traditional mountain string band music, with drums, an occasional accordion and lots of soul. Not preachy at all," Mr. Hill continues, "just tastefully rousing and raucous. Without copying, their music reminds me of a blend of the Felice Bros, Old Crow Medicine Show, and even John Prine." My Old Kentucky Blog is quoted as hailing their music as having "the fervor of a tent revival with the wallop of a bare-knuckle brawler."

Commenters seem to taken by the "little lady banjo pi[c]ker," calling her an "instant favorite." The missus and I'll see this "best Banjo pickin['] girl" and the rest of the band for ourselves this Tuesday.

For the Beauty of the Mass

The kiddies woke up with sore throats today, so the missus and I left them at home with their Lutheran grandparents and for a change ventured into the city to St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, hands down the most beautiful church in the area, for the Traditional Latin Mass, something we need to do far more often.

The homily was pretty humbling, as homilies should be, starting off with For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada (2012) but focusing on the hagiography of Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ (1891–1927), and ending on the coda of Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), shown after the martyr's death in Mexican movie theaters. ¡Viva Cristo Rey!

A nice contrast to all this Polack pre-conciliar papistry was that after the Sacrifice of the Mass we sang the lovely "For the Beauty of the Earth," a hymn perfect for Thanksgiving but which I've associated with good ole New England Transcendentalism after that lovely little scene in Little Women (1994) of the girls singing the hymn running around in a circle holding hands, even though it was written by good Tractarian Folliott Sandford Pierpoint.

Spirit Family Reunion Perform "Leave Your Troubles At The Gate," "Green Rocky Road," and "I'll Find A Way"

Say what you will (or won't) about what this "new old-timey" band's "members call 'open-door gospel' — gospel music that's not tied to any particular religious denomination" — this "unsigned band living in Brooklyn" sure "makes music filled with joy" with its "fiddle, banjo, guitar and washboard, all gathered around a single microphone in an old-style tradition."

UPDATE: I stumbled across this band just this evening, and after posting this, decided to check Spirit Family Reunion's website to find, much to my delight, that they'll be in town in three days' time at the Water Street Music Hall, where I took the missus to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops a few months back.

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away

Took the kiddies to the picture show to see Spirited Away (2001), part of the Hayao Miyazaki Film Series at The Dryden Theatre [sic]. Wow. I think I finally appreciate Shinto.

Young-ha Kim’s Black Flower

CounterPunch's Charles R. Larson reviews a novelized "account of the 1033 Koreans who, in 1905, left from Jemulpo Harbor, in Korea, believing they were escaping the political upheaval at home and emigrating temporarily to Mexico to improve their lives" — Koreans, Longing for Their Homeland. The reviewer tells us that

they had been “sold” to the Mexican owners of large haciendas in Yucatán, under contract to work for four years abiding conditions that were akin to indentured servants, if not slaves. Moreover, none of them knew any Spanish. There were no other Koreans living in Mexico and no diplomatic relations between the two countries. Thus, virtually everything could go wrong—as it did—beginning with the voyage itself.

William Byrd's Ye Sacred Muses, Performed by Robin Blaze and Concordia

Today is the CDXXVII^th anniversary of the death of Thomas Tallis, whom it eulogizes:

Ye sacred Muses, race of Jove,
whom Music's lore delighteth,
Come down from crystal heav'ns above
to earth where sorrow dwelleth,
In mourning weeds, with tears in eyes:
Tallis is dead, and Music dies.

Question of the Day

“Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?” asked Southron Catholic novelist Walker Percy, quoted here — Sympathy, Empathy, or...

Arvo Pärt's Cecilia, Vergine Romana Performed by the Choir and Orchestra of the National Academy of St. Cecilia, Directed by Neeme Järvi

Virgin and martyr, patroness of church music, St. Cecilia is remembered today.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929)

Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want

Johannes Ockeghem's Deo Gratias Sung by The Hilliard Ensemble

Something for tomorrow's holiday, our best American holiday.

The Unspeakable

James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters was one of the best books I have ever read; here Lew Rockwell interviews the author — Why Was JFK Murdered? An excerpt:

Why did Kennedy die? He died because he was turning towards peace. That can be established. It's in all kinds of documents, and I've cited hundreds of them, and there are tens of thousands behind the hundreds I've cited. He turned toward peace, so that's the reason why he's assassinated. What if he had not turned toward peace? Of course, he wouldn't have been assassinated because that's the critical issue right there. If he had not turned toward peace, if he had not, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, turned toward his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, and said, I need your help, and had Khrushchev, for that matter, had not turned toward his enemy and said, yes, now we need to let Kennedy know that we want to help him – he said that to Gromyko, who was standing beside him, his foreign minister. Had that not happened, you and I wouldn't be talking about this right now, nor would anyone else be doing much talking. We'd be in a nuclear wasteland.

The Welfare/Warfare President

Two cryptogon.com analyses — More Americans Will Use Food Stamps For Thanksgiving This Year Than Ever Before and “No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” Says Man Who Regularly Bombs Pakistan and Yemen.

The New Anna Karenina

Steve Sailer says it "may be the first of the numerous Anna Karenina adaptations whose sympathies lie firmly with her cuckolded husband, the unsexy bureaucrat Karenin" — Anna Karenina: Sympathy for the Cuckold. Mr Sailer concludes:

Today it’s universally assumed that an unfaithful wife should get custody of the children. Yet Wright and Stoppard don’t seem terribly interested in pointing fingers at 19th-century Russians for their lack of enlightenment about family law.

When Anna laments that she can’t possess both her lover and her son because “The laws are made by husbands and fathers,” it’s hard not to respond, “As well they should be.” Wright’s film depicts the staggering amount of wealth piled up in Imperial Russia by aristocratic families—much of it spent by women on fashion. But all of this acquiring and saving depended on an orderly system of inheritance where men knew that their heirs really are theirs.

"There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"

Thus spake the Frog Henri Langlois about Louise Brooks, whom I did not know had lived, died, and is buried right here in Rochester, New York (in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery no less!) until reading Bill Kauffman's delightful Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive, in a chapter about Rochesterian writer Henry W Clune, taken from this article — Henry and Louise in the Lair de Clune. This exceprt explains how she came to live among us:

Louise Brooks staggered into Rochester because she had nowhere else to go. She was a Kansas chorine who made a slew of silent movies, most famously the German G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929), in which she played Lulu, the guileless hedonist, irresistible to men (among others) until, lucklessly, she picks up Jack the Ripper. (Talk about Mr. Goodbar!)

Louise was an erratic, arrogant, dissipated beauty. She refused to sleep with the moguls (though she conferred her favors on almost everyone else) and ridiculed Hollywood while taking its money. The industry was run, she later wrote, by "coarse exploiter[s] who propositioned every actress and policed every set. To love books was a big laugh. There was no theater, no opera, no concerts—just those goddamned movies." A has-been at age 33, Louise fled the glitz.

She ended up back in Wichita, teaching dance, until a scandal involving the better part of a high-school football team made it best for her to move on. She drifted downward until 1956, when she settled in Rochester at the invitation of the curator of the Eastman Museum of Photography, whose archives she mined to write a series of razor-sharp essays later combined in Lulu of Hollywood.

"Traditionalism Has Never Meant Conformism"

The American Conservative's Daniel McCarthy argues that the "clash of time and place, the mixture and divergence of identities, [i]s nothing new for Anglo-American conservatism," but rather "very nearly the essence of the thing" — Outsider Conservatism. He writes:

It’s a tradition, after all, that by convention begins with an Irishman serving in the English Parliament, a man who was of the Church of England but had a Catholic mother and sister. After Burke, the 19th-century apostle of “One Nation” conservatism was an Anglican and a Jew, Benjamin Disraeli; while a century later and an ocean away, Barry Goldwater would joke that the first Jewish major-party nominee for president had to be Episcopalian.

Today, in a historical reversal, the populist right demands conformism along the lines once laid down by progressive nationalists such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. The rough edges of human difference must be rubbed down. This is what conservatives from Burke to Russell Kirk would not allow.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

The New Beginning links to this story about a "provocative new study published in Trends in Genetics suggest[ing] that human intelligence has been slowly deteriorating since societies moved away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles" — Are We Getting Dumber? Maybe, Scientist Says.

The Voynich Manuscript

The National Post's Scott Van Wynsberghe on a "manuscript... handwritten in a tidy, curvy format that cannot be read by anyone" with an "an origin point in the early 1400s," and on "the growing suspicion that the text does not involve any encryption" and "may not even involve any actual language" — Deciphering the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.

Rodrigo y Gabriela Perform "Hanuman" and "Buster Voodoo"

Two Politicos

The American Conservative looks at " a work in progress" — Getting a Read on Rand Paul and ponders whether "Bobby Jindal's populism go[es] beyond rhetoric" — The Anti-Romney.

Setting Loose the Juice

I always knew it was the right thing to do; this story just confirms that — What if O.J. didn’t do it? Film suggests serial killer—not Simpson—murdered Brown, Goldman.

Leoš Janáček's "Glagolitic Mass" Performed by Christine Brewer, Louise Winter, David Kuebler, Nikolai Putilin, The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus & The BBC Singers, Directed by Sir Andrew Davis

The Kinks' "Coming Dancing" Music Video

As an MTV kid, I cannot but appreciate The American Conservative's Alan Jacobs piece on one of my favorites, "a bouncy, catchy, almost silly little song with one of the saddest back-stories" — Come Dancing.

The State of Israel's War on Gaza

Antiwar.com posts the above graphic with The National Interest's Paul Pillar's piece — The Symmetry and Asymmetry of Violence in Gaza.

Vladimir Vavilov's Ave Maria Sung by Hayley Westenra & Tomotaka Okamoto

Above, an aria attributed to Giulio Caccini (1551-1618), but actually written by Vladimir Vavilov (1925-1973). How the hoax that this was a late Renaissance or early Baroque composition gained adherents among knowledgeable people is hard to understand.

Urban Renewal?

A local report on "a program designed to increase owner-occupied housing downtown and replicate it in the city's neighborhoods" — Homeowners wanted.

Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson vs. the Tyranny of the Majority

Randall Fuller reviews "a cautionary tale about the perils of being a writer in a nation defined and driven by the twin engines of democracy and market capitalism" about two literary giants who "had the great misfortune of writing just as antebellum America was creating a mass audience for its authors" — The Image of a Writer. An exceprt:

As Kearns reveals in Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret, Melville felt this particular conundrum with acuity. In a famous letter to Hawthorne, written several months after his refusal to Duyckinck, he complained, “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. . . . Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.” Melville was by no means alone in his alienation from the market and from mass opinion. Dickinson, too, struggled to imagine her authority as a writer, addressing the tyranny of democratic public opinion in one of her most trenchant poetic observations.


Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—

According to Kearns, both Melville and Dickinson developed authorial strategies that allowed them to turn their backs on antebellum America’s burgeoning mass audience and to imagine themselves as romantic artists governed solely by inspiration. Instead of courting the crowd, they became “garret” writers whose artistic prestige was bound up in the fact that they were not writing for “the street.” So dissimilar in so many ways, both authors nevertheless were linked by a mutual desire “to operate outside of the capitalist and mimetic markets (especially opposing advertising).” Suspicious of the tastes of a mass audience as well as the techniques by which publishing houses transformed authors into marketable commodities for that audience, “they desired to publish in ways that preserved their total control and ownership of their work.” By refusing to sell out, Kearns argues, they were able to write works governed by their own autonomous aesthetic criteria, works that ignored popular trends, that aspired to art for art’s sake. To accomplish this, however, they had to content themselves with small, private audiences capable of determining their respective works’ design and intentions.

"Ratzingerian Marxists"

"The current interpretation according to which this is a 'conservative' pontificate constitutes a complete overturning of the pope theologian," writes one of them, quoted by Sandro Magister, going on to note the "very close connection between transcendence and revolution" — From Marx to Ratzinger. The Turning Point Manifesto.

"Here comes everybody," said James Joyce of the Catholic Church in Finnegans Wake.

Frank Fairfield Performs "Call Me A Dog When I'm Gone," "Cumberland Gap," "Rye Whiskey," "The Winding Spring" & "Nine Pound Hammer"

Servant of God Dorothy Day, Pray for Us

Today was "a remarkable moment for the reputation of Day, one of the most famous figures in 20th-century Catholicism," who "lived a bohemian life in New York City in the 1920s while working as a leftwing journalist" and "endured a failed marriage, a suicide attempt, and had an abortion when suddenly, after the birth of her daughter, she converted to Catholicism" — Saint Dorothy Day? Controversial, Yes, But Bishops Push For Canonization.

"As we struggle at this opportune moment to try to show how we are losing our freedoms in the name of individual rights," profoundly noted Francis Eugene Cardinal George, O.M.I., "Dorothy Day is a good woman to have on our side."

[A five-year-old article of mine on her — Anarcho-Catholicism: Dorothy Day's Day Has Come.]

Le Vent du Nord & Harry Manx Perform "Écris-moi," "Bouteille Agréable," & "Don't Forget to Miss Me,"

Le Petit Poutine

Pictured above, a local truck that serves "the Canadian staple of hand-cut fries, savory gravy, and cheese curds, plus a scattering of thyme," which won the Best of Rochester 2012 Food Truck award, in a story about the growing industry — Wheels that deep fry, keep on turning.

I have not eaten from this truck but would love to. Poutine is new to me, only introduced to me a few weeks ago by my boss at the Tap and Mallet, another Best of Rochester 2012 winner. I foolishly did not even try the delicacy in neighboring Quebec on our family vacation there this summer, unfortunately, having listened to English Canadians foolishly disparage the dish. Now we have yet another reason to go back!

Coptic Kitsch?

Fayum mummy portraits, pictured above, are "2000-year old Roman Egyptian paintings... that families paid professionals to make to (presumably) remember lost loved ones [and] only survived due to the dry climate" mentioned by Steve Sailer in his recent post — Kitsch down through the ages. Mr. Sailer continues:

And they are just heartbreaking. If you are thumbing through a history of art of the ancient world textbook, these Fayum paintings often come last, after a long series of Egyptian-Babylonian-Greek-Roman art works intended to express aristocratic conceptions of the potential of human beauty, Ozymandias-like works intended to impose obedience, nouveau riche interior decoration, commercial pottery, and a lot of other stuff that is aesthetically impressive but doesn't make all that much of an immediate emotional impression on us. And then, at last, these cheap Fayum portraits are like a dagger to the heart, reminding us that the ancients were human beings like us who suffered emotional agonies when their ten year old children died.

But, keep in mind that these Fayum portraits were semi-mass produced, using standard techniques. They probably aren't terribly realistic pictures of the deceased, being more like reproductions from various pre-existing templates of say, a pre-adolescent boy. I fear that if I were an educated, aristocratic resident of Alexandria and had seen them all my life, I'd roll my eyes and disparage them as kitschy.

Perhaps. Mr. Sailer's post was in reposnse to comments that "traditional cultures in general seem to get degraded into kitschiness once they come into contact with modernity" and the lack of "kitschiness among traditional traditional cultures."

Lincoln vs. The Conspirator

Steve Sailer reviews the former — Lincoln: A Tall Man in a Small Film. There is no way this hagiography of a tyrant could hold a candle to the latter, a spectacular film I saw a few weeks back that a fellow Copperhead said "sits lonely in the almost empty sleeve of movies about spectacular violations of the Bill of Rights" — Bill Kauffman Reviews "The Conspirator".

The American Conservative's Birthday

Celebrating its "central message" "of America’s need for a conservatism distinct from the neocon version, more Burkean, more prudent, less remote from the concerns of average Americans, less tied to the Israeli right" — Ten Years in the Right.

The Petraeus Affair Exposed

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo and Ivan Eland rake some muck to expose what's really going on — Palace Revolution and The Real Petraeus Scandal.

The Civil Wars Perform "The Star-Spangled Banner"

Something to accompany this news story — Secession petitions filed in 20 states.

Constitutionalism vs. Hegelianism

Front Porch Republic's Jeffrey Polet lists as one of "at least three causes for conservatism’s decline... the replacement of constitutionalism with German (read: Hegelian) state theory" — Post Mortem. The author continues:

The constitutional regime is a complex mechanistic order predicated upon the division of sovereignty, and suspicion concerning human nature. Actually, suspicion isn’t quite the right word. Most writers were rather convinced that human beings, especially those interested in power, couldn’t be trusted and would constantly work toward aggrandizement. Convinced of the imperfectability of human beings, but also of the character forming properties of associative life, the originating principles of American political life sought to preserve, for better or for worse, the kaleidoscopic variety of American life.

Conservatives prefer voluntary variation to enforced collectivization, even if such variation can be off-putting or rife with problems. Collectivization destroys the liberty, sense of cooperation, governmental responsiveness, and immediate dependency we associate with local governance. Conservatives accept the fact the Constitution creates awkward clumsiness in politics, seeking balance among competing groups, interests, and places as perhaps the best that can be hoped for.

By the end of the 19th century and a catastrophic war, American thinkers and statesmen turned to the organicism of German (and Rousseauian) social theory. Herbert Croly’s hero in The Promise of American Life was … Bismarck. America could stick with the past or join the emerging progressivism of modern state-based politics which gathered the Rube Goldberg-like contraptions of American federalism and melted them down into an undifferentiated unity. The New Nationalism that resulted insisted on the absorption of local life and the transformation of human nature through systems of coercive education and genetic selection. Local associative life threatened the organic unity which was the non plus ultra of political life and, really, life in general.

To accomplish this required the destruction of the complex machinery which inhibited the movement toward monumental oneness. Central to the destruction was the devaluing of representative and federalist government to be replaced by nationalism as embodied in a charismatic leader. Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt sought to replace the cumbersome and awkward system of checks and balances with an organic system unified into the charisma of one man and having replaced politics with administration. Efficiency, uniformity, and bigness rather than liberty, variation, and modesty became the greatest goods of political life. So presidential politics and management became ways of bypassing constitutional restraints, and the Court became a central player in reshaping the Constitution to meet the demands of the new nationalism. Constitutional amendments turned the Constitution against itself.

The CCXVIIIth Anniversary of the Signing of the Treaty of Canadaigua

I was in attaendance with my family this past Sunday on the event described in this article — 218th Anniversary of Canandaigua Treaty.

"That treaty entails a recognition of the sovereignty of the people of the Six Nations, of our individual nations," said event coordinator Peter Jemison. "And, it recognizes that these territories were ours originally and that the only way these territories could be taken from us was by our consent and when and if we decide to do that, but we are dedicated to existing here as long as the earth is green and as long as the sun rises."

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem Performed by the NDR-Sinfonieorchester, Directed by John Eliot Gardiner

Both day- and month- appropriate.

Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989)

"A film with no spoken dialogue, just follows the music and lyrics of Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem, which include WWI soldier poet Wilfred Owen's poems reflecting the war's horrors, reads the blurb about War Requiem (1989). "It shows the story of an Englishman soldier (Wilfred Owen) and a nurse (his bride) during World War I. It also includes actual footage of contemporary wars (WWII, Vietnam, Angola, etc.)"

Petraeus' Betrayal

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo "establishes a context that goes far beyond the titillating details of the alleged affair between Petraeus and Broadwell" — A Covert Affair: Petraeus Caught in the Honeypot? An excerpt:

o who would have an interest in getting rid of Petraeus? Here’s where the Cantor connection comes in. The tip by an anonymous “FBI employee” that wound up in Cantor’s office two weeks ago came through Rep. David Reichert, Republican of Washington state, who has a friend who knows the whistleblower. Cantor then spoke to the whistleblower directly, who put him in touch with FBI Director Mueller.

Cantor is a great friend of Israel, and Petraeus — not so much. The General was attacked, as you’ll recall, by partisans of the Lobby, including Abe Foxman, when he delivered testimony before Congress citing Israel as a strategic liability in the Middle East. As the executor of the new Obamaite policy of sidling up to Islamists, not only in Libya but also in Syria and Egypt, Petraeus was no doubt seen by the Israelis as an enemy to be neutralized.

Broadwell’s affiliation with the Jebsen Center, and the Center’s connection to the neoconservative network, sets the scene: a young, attractive woman with impeccable national security credentials throws herself at Petraeus, and he takes the bait. Whether she’s been recruited by a foreign intelligence agency at this point or not is irrelevant: he’s already put himself in a vulnerable position, and there are any number of actors on the international stage more than willing to press their advantage.

English as the Global Language

"In the same way that American power creates asymmetrical geopolitical and economic relationships with certain parts of the world, so too does the reliance on English as an international lingua franca engender cultural asymmetries with non-anglophone cultures," writes Dissent Magazine's Paul Cohen — The Rise and Fall of the American Linguistic Empire.

The blurb tells us the author "is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto currently working on a book-length study of the invention of French as a national language in early modern France." Surely the parallels between the nationalist Jacobins of his research and the globalist Neoconservatives decried in his article were not lost on the author.

Thao Nguyen Performs "Tallymarks" and "Violet"

Who Lost Asian-America?

"Why do Asian-Americans now tend largely to identify themselves as Democrats, with Korean-Americans resisting the voting trend among Asian-Americans and continuing to lean Republican — not unlike Cuban-American voters who remain a faithful Republican voting bloc among the pro-Democratic Hispanic community?" asks The American Conservative's Leon Hadar about "an electoral bloc [that] should be natural political ally of a Republican Party that is, after all, committed to the principles of the free market, supports the interests of small businesses, and celebrates hard work and family values, which is probably the way to describe what Asian-Americans are all about" — The GOP’s Asian-American Fiasco.

"Biblical Principles and Support the Nation of Israel"

"I believe it is vitally important that we cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel," were the mutual exclusive words put into the mouth of Billy Graham by his son, quoted here by Sally Quinn — Sins of the son: Sad treatment for Billy Graham.

Ms. Quinn says of that full page advocacy ad that appeared two days before the election, "Of all the sad things that have happened during this year’s seemingly endless, divisive and vitriolic campaign, this ad was the saddest." I thought so too when I read it.

W.A. Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat Major, Performed by Grace Park, Wenting Kang, and The New England Conservatory Chamber Orchestra, Directed by Donald Palma

The Honorable Ron Paul's Victory

Writing from the "hard left," CounterPunch's C. G. Estabrook ponders whether "after the Romney fiasco, a hollowed-out Republican party – opposed from several directions by groups like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street – will be reconstituted somewhat as it was in 1896 and 1968, and as the Democrats were after 1932" — An Anti-War / Anti-Wall Street Republican Party? He concludes:

If so, there’s an obvious understudy waiting in the wings – the Ron Paul movement, already smarting at what they see as their illegitimate exclusion by the official Republican party, sealed at the convention in Tampa.

Is it possible that Barack Obama, master of the child-killing drones and the austerity-producing Grand Bargain, in his triumph will be accosted by a new Republican party, anti-interventionist and anti-Wall Street (or “isolationist” and “libertarian,” if you prefer) – Ron Paul’s characteristic positions? Remember that it was only a short while ago that Republicans and Democrats alike smiled haughtily at Rep. Paul’s demand to “Audit the Fed!” But by last July, as the Huffington Post reported, “In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to audit the Federal Reserve…”

Writing from the anti-war/anti-Wall Street right, The American Conservative's W. James Antle III claims that "Ron Paul won the war for conservatism’s future" — Who Killed Rudy Giuliani? He begins:

When Ron Paul leaves office in January, he will have been more successful than many of the legislators who spent decades maligning him. Paul’s ideas have gradually gone from marginal to mainstream, and his record shows how much even a single determined man of principle can do to change a movement. In foreign policy especially, the Texas congressman leaves behind a new generation of leaders, both libertarian and conservative, who challenge the disastrous bipartisan consensus.

Todos Somos Independentistas

Steve Sailer on the recent shameful vote for statehood in our shameful colonial legacy of 1898 — ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre! "¡Viva!" I respond. My Spanish professor, surely one of the mere 5% who voted for independence, lamented that his homeland was "el país que nunca fue."

"Steven Hunter's book American Gunfight about the two brave Puerto Rican terrorists who nearly assassinated Harry Truman in 1950 in the name of Puerto Rican nationalism, converted me to the cause of Puerto Rican independence," writes Mr. Sailer. "Sure, they were murderous terrorists, but they were men."

What sold me on the cause, in addition to my professor's rants, was Bill Kauffman's excellent Bye Bye, Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America's Political Map, about which I wrote a few words here — More of Bill Kauffman's (& Robert Frost's) "Insubordinate Americans". One of the most enlightening chapters dealt with "culturally conservative Catholics like Pedro Albizu Campos and the founding of the Puerto Rican Independence Party."

"好鐵不打釘, 好兒不當兵"

Ancient Chinese anti-militaristic, pro-patriarchal wisdom, translated by The Derb; “You don’t use good iron to make nails, a good son does not become a soldier" — Ballots and Bullets.

W.A. Mozart's Requiem, Performed by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge and the Aurora Orchestra, Directed by Stephen Cleobury

Appropriate for the day and the month.

Post-Election Hope

Srđa Trifković on the election that pitted "the embodiment of an anti-America–culturally, spiritually and morally—that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of real America" against "a pastiche, an oddly vacuous character whose tenuous appeal to the minds of the regular people was offset by their hearts’ awareness that he was not one of them" — Obama’s Victory. His conclusion:

Nil desperandum, however. The tempo of history is accelerating. The overall equation has too many variables for the would-be controllers of our destiny to be certain that the job is done. They will be swept away swiftly once the usurial hocus-pocus collapses, which it will.

My native country has survived half a millennium of Ottoman misrule, half a century of communism and two decades of Western sadism. My adopted country—which I love with a passion—will raise again from her current decrepitude, too. Because there are a hundred million real Americans who are determined not to go gentle into that good night. Because there is God.

Black Conservatives Opine

Thomas Sowell & Walter E. Williams respectively — Gross Misconceptions & Our Deviant Society.

President Obama's Unblackness

"You can tell how un-African-American Obama is by upbringing from his passive-aggressive sniping at his mother and grandmother, something that a normal black man just wouldn’t do," writes Steve Sailer in his article on "the seldom-mentioned oddness of Barack Obama running for re-election as the Feminist Avenger obsessed with halting the Republican War on Women, when Obama is among the least feminist Democratic politicians out there" — Hormonal Politics. More:

Over the years, Obama’s treatment of his pioneering female bank executive grandmother, who paid for the bulk of his posh education, has been noteworthy in its nastiness. In his celebrated 2008 Philadelphia speech, for instance, he compared her to Rev. Jeremiah Wright over her supposed racism for wanting a ride to work because she feared being mugged by a black drifter who had been hassling her at the bus stop. This hurt the strapping youth’s feelings. Over a decade later in his memoir, he described the emotional impact on himself of his grandmother’s worries about her safety as a “fist in my stomach.”

In 2011, Obama took the opportunity of his one meeting with biographer David Maraniss to call attention to his grandmother’s “alcoholism” (see p. 287 of Barack Obama: The Story.) Thanks, Mr. President, glad you pointed that out for us so we can remember her that way. Classy.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, Band of Horses and K'naan Perform "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World"

Seems appropriate for the day, and to accompany Steve Sailer's "diagnosis of the self-confident singer" — Neil Young. One of the best rock concerts I ever saw was Mr. Young's tour with Social Distortion and Sonic Youth.

Right-wing Peaceniks

"Conflict erodes a nation’s cultural continuity as well as its finances," writes The American Conservative's William Lind — Why Conservatives Hate War. He begins:

One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice.

The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.”

Conservatives’ detestation of war has no “touchy-feely” origins. It springs from conservatism’s roots, its most fundamental beliefs and objectives. Conservatism seeks above all social and cultural continuity, and nothing endangers that more than war.

And the Winner Is...

Justin Raimondo's prediction — Election 2012: Ron Paul’s Revenge!

I Voted For Another Loser

Just as I did last time, for "Old Right Nader." In addition to the Libertarian Party standard-bearer and U.S. Senate candidate Chris Edes, I also voted for local major party candidates co-endorsed by the Independence Party of New York, the Conservative Party of New York State, and even the Working Families Party, some of whom may turn out to be winners.

Sarah Jarosz Performs "Run Away"

The New Jersey Plan

Bill Kauffman calls it "the great decentralist what-might-have-been" that "would have saved us from the cult of the presidency, the imperial presidency, the president as the world’s celebrity-in-chief—the whole gargantuan mess" — Who Needs a President?

Guatemala, Tajikistan, the Marshall Islands, and Luxembourg

Members of this exclusive list — Only 22 Countries Have Never Been Invaded by the British.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Messe des Morts à 4 Voix, Performed by Collegium Vocale de Gent & Ricercar Consort, Directed by Philippe Pierlot

November is the Month of the Souls in Purgatory.

John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, George Bush, Barack Obama

All make Glenn Greenwald's short-list — Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history? An exceprt:

If one were simply to consider specific acts which constituted grave assaults on civil liberties - narrowly defined as the core political rights explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights: free speech, freedom from deprivation of life and liberty without due process, etc. - one could make a strong argument for several presidents. John Adams signed The Alien and Sedition Acts, which essentially criminalized certain forms of government criticism in preparation for a war with France, a radical assault on the First Amendment.

Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended the core liberty of habeas corpus without Congressional approval. Wilson's attacks on basic free speech in the name of national security were indeed legion and probably unparalleled. Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the due-process-free internment of more than 100,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.

And then there are the two War on Terror presidents. George Bush seized on the 9/11 attack to usher in radical new surveillance and detention powers in the PATRIOT ACT, spied for years on the communications of US citizens without the warrants required by law, and claimed the power to indefinitely imprison even US citizens without charges in military brigs.

His successor, Barack Obama, went further by claiming the power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review but to assassinate them (about which the New York Times said: "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing"). He has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, dusting off Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more then double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined. And he has draped his actions with at least as much secrecy, if not more so, than any president in US history.

Ultimately, it is close to impossible to rank these abuses strictly as a qualitative matter, in terms of the powers seized. How does one say that interning citizens in concentration camps (Roosevelt) is better or worse than imprisoning people for dissent (Adams and Wilson), putting people in cages with no charges (Lincoln, Bush, Obama), or claiming the power to execute citizens in total secrecy and without any checks of any kind (Obama)? If anything, one could reasonably argue that the power of due-process-free executions is the most menacing since it's the only act that is permanent and irreversible.

Harvard University vs. Immanuel Velikovsky

The London Review of Books' Steven Shapin reviews the new book on the man — Catastrophism. An excerpt:

When Velikovsky’s bizarre story about planetary hi-jinks was so energetically puffed up in 1950, the American scientific establishment was presented with a choice, a choice endemically faced by orthodoxy confronted by intellectual challenges from alien sources: do you ignore the heterodox? Do you invite it to sit down with you and have a calm and rational debate? Do you crush it? There were scientific voices counselling Olympian disdain but they were in general overruled. Still, pretending to take no notice of Velikovsky might have been the plan had Worlds in Collision not been published by Macmillan, a leading producer of scientific textbooks, and packaged not as an offering to, say, comparative mythology or as popular entertainment, but as a contribution to science. Elite scientists, notably at Harvard, reckoned that they might be able to control what Macmillan published when it was represented as science. A letter-writing campaign was organised to get Macmillan to withdraw from its agreement to publish the book; credible threats were made to boycott Macmillan textbooks; hostile reviews were arranged; questions were raised about whether the book had been peer-reviewed (it had); and, when Worlds in Collision was published anyway, further (successful) pressure was exerted to make Macmillan wash its hands of the thing and shift copyright to another publisher. The editor who had handled the book was let go, and a scientist who provided a blurb and planned a New York planetarium show based on Velikovsky’s theories – admittedly not the sharpest knife in the scientific drawer – was forced out of his museum position and never had a scientific job again.

From an uncharitable point of view, this looked like a conspiracy, a conspiracy contrived by dark forces bent on the suppression of free thought and different perspectives – and the Velikovskians took just that view. An establishment conspiracy centred on Harvard had sought to control scientific thought; the conspirators had closed minds and wanted to close others’ minds; they refused to engage with Velikovsky’s ideas at the level of evidence, to show exactly where he was wrong. When Velikovsky made specific predictions of what further observation and experiment would show, his enemies declined to undertake those observations and experiments. This was the way the Commies behaved, Velikovsky’s allies suggested. Analogies were drawn from the history of science seen as the history of martyrs to dogma. Velikovsky figured himself as Galileo and his opponents as Galileo’s critics, who wouldn’t even look through the telescope to see the moons of Jupiter with their own eyes. ‘Perhaps in the entire history of science,’ Velikovsky said, ‘there was not a case of a similar violent reaction on the part of the scientific world towards a published work.’ Newsweek wrote about the spectacle of scientific ‘Professors as Suppressors’ and the Saturday Evening Post made sport of the establishment reaction as ‘one of the signal events of this year’s “silly season”’. Some scientists who were utterly convinced that Velikovsky’s views were loopy had qualms about how the scientific community had treated him. Einstein, in whose Princeton house Velikovsky was a frequent visitor, was one of them. Interviewed just before his death by the Harvard historian of science I.B. Cohen, Einstein said that Worlds in Collision ‘really isn’t a bad book. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.’ Yet he thought, as Cohen put it, that ‘bringing pressure to bear on a publisher to suppress a book was an evil thing to do.’

The Velikovsky affair made clear that there were radically differing conceptions of the political and intellectual constitution of a legitimate scientific community, of what it was to make and evaluate scientific knowledge. One appealing notion was that science is and ought to be a democracy, willing to consider all factual and theoretical claims, regardless of who makes them and of how they stand with respect to canons of existing belief. Challenges to orthodoxy ought to be welcomed: after all, hadn’t science been born historically through such challenges and hadn’t it progressed by means of the continual creative destruction of dogma? This, of course, was Velikovsky’s view, and it was not an easy matter for scientists in the liberal West to deny the legitimacy of that picture of scientific life. (Wasn’t this the lesson that ought to be learned from the experience of science in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia?) Yet living according to such ideals was impossible – nothing could be accomplished if every apparently crazy idea were to be given careful consideration – and in 1962 Thomas Kuhn’s immensely influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions commended a general picture of science in which ‘dogma’ (daringly given that name) had an essential role in science and in which ‘normal science’ rightly proceeded not through its permeability to all sorts of ideas but through a socially enforced ‘narrowing of perception’. Scientists judged new ideas to be beyond the pale not because they didn’t conform to abstract ideas about scientific values or formal notions of scientific method, but because such claims, given what scientists securely knew about the world, were implausible. Planets just didn’t behave the way Velikovsky said they did; his celestial mechanics required electromagnetic forces which just didn’t exist; the tails of comets were just not the sorts of body that could dump oil and manna on Middle Eastern deserts. A Harvard astronomer blandly noted that ‘if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy.’

[....]

Was science meant to aim at the greatest possible explanatory scope, trawling as many disciplines as necessary in search of unified understanding? What in orthodoxy could rival Velikovsky’s integrative vision? Authentic science made specific predictions of what further observation and experiment would show. Velikovsky did too. Was science ideally open to all claimants, subjecting itself to all factual criticisms and entertaining the possibility of radically new theoretical interpretations? Who behaved more scientifically – Velikovsky or the Harvard ‘suppressors’?

The American Religion

The New Republic's Jackson Lears "explain[s] how the Mormon Ethic came to integrate so smoothly with the twentieth-century Spirit of Capitalism, even more smoothly than the Protestant Ethic had done" — The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. An excerpt:

The Mormon God is anything but an absolute, transcendent Other. He is flesh and blood as well as eternal spirit, and his creative powers are not what Christians might have thought. He did not make something from nothing. Matter pre-exists God: what is traditionally called creation was actually the organization of matter.... Much of this theology resonates with commonsense American sensibilities—the priority of matter, the organizer God, the celebration of doing over being, the faith in progress, the prospect of perpetual personal growth.

Best Milkshakes in the World

Above, one of the highlights of visiting my grandparents as a kid.

Gustav Mahler's Symphony N° 5 Performed by the World Orchestra for Peace, Directed by Maestro Valery Gergiev

Dinesh D’Souza Debunked

"I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced," Srđa Trifković quotes the "conservative" "thinker" — Dinesh D’Souza: A Charlatan’s Comeuppance.

"Have you ever actually read the Kuran? Do you know how are the Suras arranged?" asked Mr. Trifković in a quoted 2007 interview, who found that "this key feature of the Kuran was unknown to the man who claims to have spent four years studying it."

Romney and Roe?

Daniel Nichols debunks the candidate who "has publicly endorsed legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, the life of the mother, and (drum roll for the part you can drive a dump truck through) the health of the mother" — Because “Prolifers” Really Must Choose the Lesser Intrinsic Evil…

[Jeremy Beer does the same — The Conservative Vote: A Symposium.]

Black Flag Performs "White Minority" & "Depression"

Contemporary local music not listened to by a man whose "musical tastes in college in L.A., however, ran toward whatever universally popular pop had won a Grammy Award five or ten years before," Steve Sailer informs us — The young Obama's lame taste in music. [I'm nine years younger than the president, but was listening to this stuff just two years later, thanks to my kid sister.]

Expect to hear more from this pioneer in Obama Studies in the days to come; he writes, "I've got to burn through my unused Obama material in case he loses and then nobody ever wants to hear of him again."

Thomas Jefferson vs. Abraham Lincoln on Christianity

"Thomas Jefferson was anti-Christian" is but one of the hair-brained ideas debunked by the great Clyde N. Wilson, who observes that "the same people who calumniate Jefferson have sanctified the village atheist Abe Lincoln, who once wrote a treatise ridiculing Christianity and who, according to his closest associates, was never a believer" — More Dubious Notions. More:

Thomas Jefferson had a capacious, active, and questing mind, wrote prolifically, and lived through a more than usual number of years of more than usually full history. To understand his religious beliefs requires careful and extensive inquiry. Jefferson never scoffed at Christianity. He never denied its divine inspiration or its importance or that man is made in the image of God. He did want to remove the miracles from the Scriptures because he thought it made them less believable rather than more so. He did believe, quite reasonably, that, historically, religious dogma had sometimes assumed the guise of superstition that had stifled intelligence and that religious establishments had suppressed freedom more than was justified. His statement about the desirable wall of separation between church and state, though later hyped by haters of Christianity, was merely a standard American and Protestant position and emphatically did not advocate the banishment of faith from public life. When all is said and done, Jefferson’s belief, though not meeting strict definitions of Christianity (which disagree among themselves), differed little from that of many another Anglican gentleman then or later. Curiously, the same people who calumniate Jefferson have sanctified the village atheist Abe Lincoln, who once wrote a treatise ridiculing Christianity and who, according to his closest associates, was never a believer. The political context explains much about Jefferson’s thinking. He thought that Calvinism was responsible for the peculiarly malicious and domineering nature of Massachusetts and Connecticut, which had introduced a distorting element into the American polity. Calvinism, he wrote, was the mother of atheism because it presented God as unchristian, unloving, and unlovable.

A Real American in Post-America

Daniel Nichols, "a baseball guy in a famously football town," writes about a sports bar that "tuned one small screen to the Tigers game" and finding a local beer "so complex and satisfying, [that] Guinness tasted like Budwieser, flat and flavorless" — Baseball and Glorious Beer.