A beautiful kitten, an Istanbul stray. I love the song at the link; there are not many songs about cats that are not sickly, but the “cute punk” style makes up for the slightly unformed lyrics.
[WARNING: minor spoilers; go to the last line if you want to see the musical fresh]
The state of the entertainment industry, in Britain and America is such a case. The system is so shot through with politics that certain very normal, realistic events and characters are simply unthinkable.
I went with my wife to see Les Misérables recently, and some of the value of the play is the almost unthinkable behaviour of the characters.
When the main character, Jean Valjean, steals from the Catholic Priest and is caught, we assume that a Priest is going to be a terrible man who wants him hanged. Instead the priest claims to have given Jean the things he stole, even claiming he left more silverware behind and giving him the candlesticks. He had seen Jean as a desperate man who needed help and compassion, even if he did not deserve either.
When Valjean becomes a wealthy, powerful man, he is an important local employer. Much to our surprise he is shown as caring about his workers, but also satisfied that his enterprise is employing others; when he fears he will be returned to prison for breaking parole, one of his main concerns is for the people who would then lose their livelihoods.
Both of these characters are so surprising to us, not because they are abnormal. Many Catholic Priests are very generous, patient, kind and understanding. Many wealthy employers take great satisfaction in employing people and making a close community. What surprises us is that such characters are portrayed on stage. We are used to evil, small-minded or bigoted Priests and grasping, self-serving employers.
The musical is of course based on a book written long before such portrayals became ubiquitous. It is not politically biased, but does also touch other ideas that seem odd to the modern filmgoer or television viewer. The anti-royalist student radicals are naïve, well-meaning and courageous, but also their leader is shown to be uncaring of an individual, interested in the people but seemingly only as an ideal. That seems a very perceptively-written character. There are themes throughout of personal responsibility and the evils of an uncaring, impersonal government in the person of the police officer Javert, who is not a bad man but is the antagonist of the piece through just following his perceived duty as an officer of the law.
Oh, it’s a great musical by the way, I thoroughly recommend it. Matt Lucas (of Little Britain fame) made a fantastic innkeeper.
With all that an independent USA has done for the world, we should celebrate this one. Yes, I know that the words are anti-British, but they had a point. May today’s Tea Party lead to as much freedom as did the original!
As usual, click the pic for music.
Cornwall again, although more specifically known as the Michigan Lily it is not native.
It appears that NASA is going to bomb the moon. OK, not really bomb just drive a craft into it at high speed.
That is not the stupidity. There are very good reasons for doing this. The impact will penetrate deeper in the moon than we could on a reasonable timescale any other way, and imaging and sampling from another spacecraft (even possibly from the Earth) will allow us to analyse what is there, especially water. This is important if we are going to set up a permanent base on the moon, and there are sound (although I will admit debatable) reasons for doing that.
No, the stupidity is in the comments. Almost every one is against the project. Some for economic reasons, which I think have missed the point but could argue a case. The rest really do beggar belief. They think that NASA is doing significant damage to the moon. The actual moon. The 70-billion-billion-tonne satellite orbiting Earth. The one hit by huge numbers of asteroids with a lot of energy many thousands of times in its 4-billion-years or so. This one, with the scars that make it obvious it can take an impact.
I’m quite pleased with this picture. Taken with quite an old DSLR and 300 mm lens.
One suggests that we might shift the moon’s orbit and cause climate change of “omega” proportions.
I know I am supposed to be open, sceptical and doubtful, not scornful, but it is hard. It is difficult not to wonder why these people think they are knowledgeable enough to have something relevant to say. Are they arrogant enough to think that, despite little scientific education, they have seen some great catastrophe not considered by NASA engineers and scientist? Is the standard of world science education so low that people with scientific education can think these things? I can’t think of any other explanation.
It does strike me as significant in the environmental movement though. these are people who are worried about humans having an impact, however trivial. They have no sense of proportion at all. They have taken onboard the green lobby’s most extreme ideas and blown even those out of proportion, in scale or in time. Why are these people arrogant enough to think that humans could possibly do something in a universe of 100 billion galaxies, with maybe 100 billion stars in each that is relevant to except to us?
Hat tip to Instapundit.
It is a sad time to remember. Many thousands affected, far beyond even the injured and the friends and families who are today remembering the dead. I know dozens whose lives were turned upside down. More lasting, in that horror our whole industry lost its innocence.
I have often argued that describing a political party or an individual ‘extreme right-wing’ because they are racist is wrong, it is a slanderous propaganda that the Left themselves have come to believe. Yesterday Reason Online had an article about the history of violent racism in the American Left.
That is far easier to prove in the US than in Britain. While Britain was in difficulty coming to terms with the beginning of mass immigration of non-European people, a Democrat Senator was filibustering (talking out) the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now it is possible to object to rights legislation and not be racist, regardless of what the left will tell you, but Senator Byrd was a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation formed in 1865 in part to serve the interests of the Democrat Party.
In the 1920s it was the Republicans who were trying to legislate against lynching, and the Democrats who prevented that legislation. Please listen to Nina Simone, and ponder on the utter evil that can make legislation against lynching controversial.
The Ashbrook Centre article goes on to argue that many of the current policies of the Democrat Party when it was written in 2002 harm blacks more than whites. Those arguments transfer far more readily to the British Labour Party, which has remarkably similar policy aims and political tactics, even if the political climate means each achieves different results.
The most practical racism still existing in free nations, discrimination at work, is a form of protectionism which fits much more readily with socialism than free-market capitalism. In the UK, where most of the support for the left comes from inner cities and unions, recent immigrants (who tend to live in cities and work more cheaply than natural-born workers of equivalent skills) are far more likely to come into conflict with Labour supporters than Conservative ones. That is why a lot of the support for the BNP is in areas where Labour is losing core support.
The extreme left, both internationalist socialists, the communists, and nationalist socialists from German Nazis to the BNP, have had strong racist tendencies. The Soviet Union was anti-Semitic, as well as racist against citizens who were not ethnic Russians, especially non-Slavs. China is today racist against those not of Han extraction.
So never believe it when you see the Left equating racism with the Right. At the very least we have proved here that racism is as much a factor on the Left, I would contend that the Left has historically shown far more racism.
Update: one thing I failed to include is that more on the left than the right (self identified) claim to dislike or hate Muslims according to a poll on the Muslims Against Sharia website. While this is not itself racism, it is bigotry (note they dislike Mulims, not extremism or Islam) of a nature often caused by racism.
OK, so this time I didn’t take the photograph. Much as I would love to I have never flown that high, but it is an amazing shot, I couldn’t resist.
A warning of what the government might face if conditions get worse as they are enjoying their summer recess. All in good silly-week style, of course!
For those not brought up in the UK, or too old or too young to recognise the reference, I loved this iconic series when I was about 3 years old.
Until I can get up the enthusiasm to bring together a police abuse of authority and politicisation roundup, which I have been planning to do for a couple of weeks there is little novel I feel I can add to the blogosphere. So here is another musical post that seems to alternate the pointed with the appropriate, “England my country, The home of the free, Such miserable weather”.
It is the classic U2 protest song, dedicated to the protesters in Iran.
Additional support, albeit I suspect for Mousavi as a reformer rather than deeper political change that most protesters seem to want, comes from an important and perhaps unexpected quarter. the New York Times reports that an important group of Iranian clerics has described the election and government as illegitimate.
Hat tip to Instapundit for both these snippets, although Divas for Geeks has an eloquent comment on the NYT story, contrasting Obama’s fence sitting.
Update: young Iranians are still defiant.
Hat tip Harry’s Place.
I have noticed a few bloggers have started adding occasional posts of music videos they like. I have decided to do the same, purely for my own pleasure. I hope some of you like the songs.
The first is a well-known song, and although I like the original this is the first version I knew.
