S P E C I A L S: Robert Kaplan's primer on the thought of Samuel Huntington: Looking The World In The Eye [The Atlantic] Conor Cruise O'Brien's A Vindication Of Edmund Burke [NRO] Andrew McCarthy's Robert Bork On Law And Life [The New Criterion] ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN Tribute Page: Click Here Dr. Scott Atlas's 10 Surprising Facts About American Health Care Robert Stacy McCain's The Cosmo Syndrome [The Other McCain] --

John S. Barry, R.I.P.
[The New York Times]
Douglas Martin: 'John S. Barry, an executive who masterminded the spread of WD-40, the petroleum-based lubricant and protectant created for the space program, into millions of American households, died on July 3 in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. He was 84. Mr. Barry was not part of the Rocket Chemical Company in 1953, when its staff of three set out to develop a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for the aerospace industry in a small lab in San Diego. It took them 40 attempts to work out the water displacement formula. The name WD-40 stands for “water displacement, formulation successful in 40th attempt.” WD-40 hit store shelves in San Diego in 1958. In 1961, employees came in on a Saturday to produce the first truckload shipment to meet disaster needs of victims of Hurricane Carla on the Gulf Coast. WD-40 was used to recondition flood-damaged vehicles. Sales continued to increase, but it was the arrival of Mr. Barry as president and chief executive in 1969 that jolted the company to dominance in its unusual niche market. He immediately changed the name of Rocket Chemical to the WD-40 Company, on the indisputable theory that it did not make rockets. Mr. Barry brought marketing coherence and discipline to the company. He spruced up the packaging and increased the advertising budget, but most of all he pushed for distribution. He emphasized free samples, including the 10,000 the company sent every month to soldiers in the Vietnam War to keep their weapons dry.'
[tip of the fedora to John Miller]

One flap of a Butterfly's wings...
[Macleans]
Mark Steyn: 'Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu...was a he, although for a while that wasn’t entirely clear. As a famous headline in Le Monde wondered: “Espion Ou Espionne?” Spy or spy-ette? James Bond or Pussy Galore? When Bernard Boursicot first saw him across a crowded room at some enchanted diplomatic evening in Beijing in 1964, the espion was certainly a he—a slip of a lad in his mid-20s but already an accomplished singer and actor, and socially assured. By contrast, M Boursicot was the French embassy’s accountant, a 20-year-old schnook from the wrong side of the tracks whom the career diplomats already figured for a loser. The girls in the typing pool called him “Bouricot”—“Donkey”—and not as a compliment. He was a virgin, lonely and longing for love. And there, at the centre of attention, was the glamorous young Chinaman, if that’s the word. The categorization was complicated by Shi’s profession, for in Chinese opera the males can play female roles. At a subsequent meeting, the singer told him the plot of one of his great stage triumphs, The Story of the Butterfly. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who longed to study at one of the imperial schools. She was a gifted pupil, but, alas, in China girls were forbidden to attend school. So she makes a secret plan with her brother, who dislikes class and does poorly in his lessons, that they will swap clothes and she will go to the imperial school in his stead . . . A few days later, Shi and M Boursicot met again, and took a walk in a courtyard in the Forbidden City. “Look at my hands, look at my face,” the opera singer told the diplomat. “That story of the butterfly—it is my story, too.” For Shi was born a she, to parents who already had two daughters. And so they raised her as a boy. But she’s not. She’s the girl he’s been waiting for. Friend, lover, wife.' More days go by. They’re at Boursicot’s apartment, and Shi strips down to her panties . . .'

Ray Watt, R.I.P.
[The Los Angeles Times]
Roger Vincent: 'Watt was a pioneer and innovator in the development industry who continually created new products to meet the tastes of Southern California as the region grew after World War II. He was widely credited as the first in the West to popularize condominiums, strip shopping centers, time-share vacation homes and residential communities with shared amenities such as golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools and lakes.'

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
[The Wall Street Journal]
Rachel Emma Silverman: 'For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now. The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them. In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. "The art of secret writing," or writing in cipher, has "engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages," Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall "far short of perfection." Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote. There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code.'

Cheetos Lip Balm & More Bizarre Brand Extensions
[The Wall Street Journal]
Mario Marsicano: 'When I heard about the new Burger King Whopper Bar, my immediate thought was that it wouldn't be the first place I'd go for a cocktail. This also reminded me of Burger King's other recent brand extension -– a new fragrance called Flame by BK. This meat perfume was obviously a promotional stunt designed to sell more burgers, but in general, corporate brand extensions are serious attempts to grow a brand beyond its initial range of products. Sometimes the tactic works, and other times it just leads to good comedy.'

Operators Are Standing By
[The Smart Set]
Greg Beato: 'The television is a bit more quiet today. You probably don’t remember the first time you saw the human-powered public address system known as Billy Mays, but chances are it was a lot like the 10th time you saw him, or the 100th, or the 1,000th. It was late at night, you were nodding off to a Law & Order rerun, and then, suddenly, some guy who looked vaguely familiar was yelling at you about an overachieving dish rag, or spray paint for your lawn, or a wall hook that could change your life. He was stout and bearded and looked a little bit like comedian Dennis Miller, or your old high-school wrestling coach, or a less nuanced version of Popeye’s nemesis Brutus. His crisp blue oxford and the radiant flash of undershirt that peaked out beneath its two open buttons appeared unusually well-laundered. He was loud, very loud, like a leaf blower imitating the Ramones. It was a friendly, sincere, concerned kind of loud that he projected, but even so, it probably had you reaching for the mute button. Others, however, were reaching for the phone, credit cards in hand, and eventually Billy Mays, who’d begun his career hawking household gadgets to broke gamblers on the boardwalks of Atlantic City in 1983, established himself as the most successful and sought-after sales personality  in the world of direct response advertising. If you were an inventor who’d engineered a revolutionary new way to cook burgers, Mays was the man you wanted to tout your breakthrough to the public. By 2008, he was the ubiquitous face and lung-busting voice of dozens of products whose two-minutes commercials aired hundreds of times a week, at all hours, on all channels. In April 2009, Pitchmen, the Discovery Channel series Mays co-hosted with fellow Home Shopping Network alumni Anthony Sullivan, debuted. On Sunday, June 28, Mays died unexpectedly at his home in Tampa, Florida, most likely of heart failure. Just 50 years old, the genial and vital shouter was at the top of his game. Life, alas, is a limited-time offer. Mays leaves behind an oeuvre that marketing gurus will likely be studying for years. Watch one of his spots and it’s easy to understand the animosity Mays inspired among some viewers — his patter had less music in it than a smoke alarm and could make two minutes seem like two hours. But what was it, exactly, that made him so beloved, and so effective at moving product? If all it takes to increase sales volume is vocal volume, wouldn’t the airwaves be filled with people screaming at the tops of their lungs about plates that grate cheese?'

Jean Dausset, R.I.P.
[The Times Of London]
'Jean Dausset, the French immunologist and specialist in blood disorders, was best known for his discoveries about the human immune system that considerably increased the chances of success in organ and blood-marrow transplants. The results of his research enable surgeons to verify the compatibility of the donor and the recipient in transplant operations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980, sharing it with the American geneticist George Davis Snell and the American-Venezuelan immunologist Baruj Benacerraf. The trio won the prize for their research “concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions”, work that demonstrated why some people are better able to ward off infection that others. Their work also showed why some people are at risk of suffering from autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune hepatitis and lupus erythematosus. Autoimmune diseases are caused by an overactive immune response of the body to tissues and substances that are normally in the body; the body, in effect, attacks its own cells. Dausset’s discoveries greatly increased our understanding of the human immune system. His major contribution was to show that a person’s immune response is determined by molecules, called human leukocyte antigens (HLA). HLA antigens are a complex family of genetically inherited proteins found on the surface of cells throughout the body. They stimulate the production of antibodies to fight disease by helping the immune system to tell the difference between the body’s healthy cells and invading ones. Dausset’s research enabled surgeons to classify (or type) cells to find out whether a patient’s body would accept or reject tissue from some other person who was donating an organ. Tissue typing is widely used for transplanting organs, such as liver, heart and so on. It was an essential step forward for transplant surgery. Before it was available, transplants were often followed by organ rejection; the life expectancy of patients was then significantly reduced.'

Major Martin Clemens, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Major Martin Clemens, who died on May 31 aged 94, was the district commissioner responsible for supplying the American 1st Marine division with intelligence as they sought to dislodge a 30,000-strong Japanese force from Guadalcanal Island in the Pacific during the Second World War. Aided by some 300 islanders, policemen and planters, he established a hideout on Mount Austen. It was not as high up as he would have liked, and mountain mists affected his transmitter. Nevertheless he and his men had a good view of both Tulagi, the Solomon Islands' capital 25 miles away across the straits, and the airfield directly below the mountain, which the Japanese were frantically trying to build. General Archer Vandegrift's marines landed on August 7 1942, capturing Guadalcanal and renaming it Henderson Field. A week later, Clemens descended with flag and scouts. Although cutting an unprepossessing figure – gaunt, bearded, dressed in rags and barefoot – he was not shot by the astonished sentries, but welcomed and appointed British liaison officer with US XIV Corps. '

John Houghtaling, R.I.P.
[The Los Angeles Times]
Valerie Nelson: 'In 1958, Houghtaling -- pronounced "Huff-tail-ing" -- devised the Magic Fingers machines after he was hired to sell a combination mattress and box spring with a pre-installed vibrating mechanism. The beds didn't sell well and were far too expensive, but he thought he saw a way to shake quarters out of motel guests. Working in his New Jersey basement, he developed a fist-size motor that snapped onto existing box springs, transforming the bed into a "relaxation service," as the Magic Fingers coin machines would advertise. By feeding a quarter into a machine, motel guests could purchase about 15 minutes of shaking, a curious luxury that surely enticed children traveling with their parents, said Ed Watkins, editor of Lodging Hospitality magazine. "It was probably the first guest-room amenity after the TV, and almost ubiquitous in motels in the 1960s and into the 1970s," Watkins told The Times on Friday.'

Nicholas Phillips
[The Times Of London]
'Nicholas Phillips was a distinguished physicist and a pioneer in holography who launched holographic imaging in Britain. Holography provides a precise technique for measuring changes in the dimensions of an object. In medicine it is used to combine Cat (computed axial tomography) scans into a three-dimensional image. Military applications include holographic radar. Scientists use it in holographic microscopy. Holographic imaging is integral to providing security from forgery for credit and debit cards, identity cards and tickets. And holographic art is used in advertising, to produce postage stamps and even jewellery.'

Ken Mackenzie, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Wing Commander Ken Mackenzie, who has died aged 92, was a fighter pilot who destroyed at least seven enemy fighters during the Battle of Britain, one of them by ramming it after he had run out of ammunition, for which he earned a DFC less than three weeks after joining his squadron. Later, as a POW, he was involved in numerous escape attempts.'

Norman Brinker, R.I.P.
[Los Angeles Times]
Claire Noland: 'Norman Brinker, an innovative restaurateur who helped bridge the gap between fast food and fine dining with his casual, middle-of-the-road chains Chili's, Bennigan's and Steak & Ale, has died. He was 78. Brinker retired in 2000 as chairman of Brinker International, a Dallas-based restaurant group comprising the chains Chili's Grill & Bar, On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina, Maggiano's Little Italy and Romano's Macaroni Grill. Chief among Brinker's new concepts for eateries was the salad bar, which he popularized at Steak & Ale starting in the late 1960s. Besides asking diners to get up from their tables to serve themselves from a salad buffet, the Dallas-based chain also stood out for its cheerful servers' stock introduction, "Hi, my name is Dirk, and I'll be your waiter tonight." It was all part of Brinker's idea to make the dinner experience more relaxed and casual. He followed up with a succession of restaurants featuring festive atmospheres and moderately priced menus that found a niche between inexpensive burger joints and pricey gourmet restaurants.'

Home Mechanic: Joseph Epstein, unhandyman
[The Weekly Standard]
Joseph Epstein: 'When I was 11 years old, my parents bought a two-flat apartment building. The building had a small front and back lawn, the care of which was turned over to me. I was no more than 10 minutes on the job when I found it even more boring than hearing about your children's high SAT scores. I rushed through the rest, and returned to our apartment to let my father know I had finished. Looking around, he noticed the patches of grass I had missed, how uneven I had left the edges of the lawn where it met the pavement, all the little clumps of grass I failed to rake up. "You know," my father said, calmly, "comes another Depression, you are exactly the kind of guy they let go first." In Chicago grammar schools in those days, girls were required to take a course in home economics, where they learned the rudiments of cooking and sewing, and boys to take a course called home mechanics to acquaint them with tools. In home mechanics, we made bookends and lamps with bowling pins or fancy wine or whisky bottles as their bases. We did a fair amount of work with something called a coping saw. Every so often we used one of the large electric power saws; this was my first and last interaction with the firm of Black & Decker, apart from the few Black & Decker haircuts I've since had.' [Belvedere: Thank God I discovered Norm Abram.]
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Charles Donald Albury dies at 88; copilot on the Nagasaki bomb plane
[Los Angeles Times]
'Albury helped fly the B-29 Superfortress, nicknamed Bockscar, that dropped the bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. He also witnessed the first atomic blast over Hiroshima as a pilot on a support plane that measured the magnitude of the blast and levels of radioactivity. Three days later, Albury co-piloted the mission over Nagasaki. Cloud cover caused problems for the mission until the bombardier found a hole in the clouds. The 10,200-pound explosive instantly killed an estimated 40,000 people, and 35,000 more died from injuries and radiation sickness. Japan surrendered on Aug. 14. Albury said he felt no remorse, because the attacks prevented what was certain to have been a devastating loss of life in a U.S. invasion of Japan.'

A Room of One's Own
[The Smart Set]
Greg Beato: 'Today, we have man caves. Credit Maytag with coining the phrase. In 2004, its market researchers determined that “every guy would like to carve out his own little place in his home.” Maytag dubbed that little place the man cave and set about creating appliances to furnish it, including the Skybox, a vending machine designed for the home market (i.e., it dispensed canned beverages for free.) While the Skybox has been discontinued, the phrase “man cave” has flourished. By 2008, the man cave concept had established itself enough to inspire a TV show of its own, the DIY Network’s Man Caves, which is hosted by professional TV carpenter Jason Cameron and former professional football player Tony “Goose” Siragusa. The former is on hand to do most of the planning, sawing, and spackling. The latter is there to occasionally wield a hammer, and to hit viewers over the head with man-sized helpings of beer-commercial-style manliness.'

Britain's Spies Plan to Party Like 007 When MI-6 Turns 100
[The Wall Street Journal]
Stephen Fidler: 'The true life version of MI6 has always been less opulent than its fictional counterpart. But in the midst of a deep recession, when British bankers and members of Parliament are being publicly pilloried for extravagance, the spy agency's chiefs have decided that British taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pick up the tab. The espionage ball, nonetheless, will almost by definition be one of the most remarkable and exclusive of 2009. Along with a host of spies past and present, a carefully screened guest list includes, according to people familiar with the arrangements, the great and powerful of the U.K., from members of the royal family to leading politicians.'

My life with Whittaker Chambers during the Hiss trial and after
[The American Conservative]
Ralph De Toledano: 'He had known life and laughter, art and music, the benison of knowledge, a prophetic sense of life and history, the touch of hands. Well after the trauma of the Hiss trial and what followed, he had written, “When I was alone, you walked beside me. And when I was without a roof, you sheltered me. You gave yours. You were always there. In my groping way, I am trying to say that I remember.” I answered that I had given him little, but he had transformed my life, opening for me a glimpse of its pain and beauty, and the transcendence that was, is, and will be in saecula saeculorum. He had been father and son and brother to me, as I was to him. Not a day has passed since his death that I do not think of him.'

Millvina Dean, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Millvina Dean, who died on Sunday aged 97, was the last survivor of the Titanic disaster; at just nine weeks old, she was the youngest individual to come through the sinking alive, too young, indeed, to remember anything of it herself. A mere scrap of a baby girl, Millvina, her mother and her elder brother were rescued and returned safely to England, but her 27 year-old father, Bert Dean (of whom she also had no memory), drowned along with some 1,520 other passengers and crew when the "unsinkable" White Star liner Titanic, bound for New York on her maiden voyage, struck an iceberg shortly before midnight on April 14 1912. Although she had no memories of the disaster, Millvina Dean always said it had shaped her life, because she should have grown up in the United States instead of returning to Britain. She died on the 98th anniversary of the launching of Titanic – the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable".'

Art or Bust
[The Smart Set]
Morgan Meis: 'Move over horse head, water bird, and lion man. At 36,000 years old, a busty broad unearthed in a cave in Germany is now the oldest sculpture ever found. Indeed, Busty beats those other sculptures, also discovered in a Southern German cave and carved from mammoth bone, by around 5,000 years. Dubbed the "Venus of Hohle Fels" she is only about 6 centimeters tall. Her most prominent feature is the aforementioned rack, though her shapely gams come in a close second. This has led to a certain amount of snickering. The oldest sculpture in the world is basically a pair of breasts that hung on a string from some cave person's neck. As The Economist opined, "this discovery adds to the evidence that human thinking—or male thinking, at least—has hardly changed since the species evolved." The more uptight among us—i.e. the scientists—are trying to keep it clean.'

Robert Furchgott, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Robert Furchgott, who died on May 19 aged 92, was a Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose research into the effect of the gas nitric oxide as a blood vessel relaxant led to the development of revolutionary impotence treatments such as Viagra. With his colleagues Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad, Furchgott showed that nitric oxide – known primarily as an air pollutant from cigarettes and car engines that contributes to smog – plays a vital role in the human cardiovascular system, regulating blood pressure and circulation. The three researchers earned the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1998, with the Swedish academy stressing that it was the first time scientists had proved the critical effects of a gas on biochemical functions in the human body. The discovery of the effect of nitric oxide, a colourless and odourless gas, on the relaxation of blood vessels marked a critical stage in the development by the Pfizer company of the erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, which it markets under the name Viagra.'

The Godfather of American Liberalism
[City Journal]
Fred Siegel: 'Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led. These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells.'

The Stanley Cup Could Use an Editor
[The Wall Street Journal]
Reed Albergotti: 'There are four teams remaining in the National Hockey League playoffs, and their star-studded rosters can be frightening -- especially for Louise St. Jacques, whose job is to engrave the names of the winning team's players on the Stanley Cup. This iconic silver trophy, which is handed out each year to hockey's champion, carries with it the marks of another, quieter history -- decades of botched spellings, spacing gaffes, repeated words and the unsightly results of attempts to fix them.'

Drinking Harvey Milk's Kool-Aid
[City Journal]
Daniel J. Flynn: 'In his seven years in San Francisco, he made four bids for elective office, only emerging victorious in his last—a 1977 run for city supervisor. For his persistence, Milk jokingly referred to himself as the “gay Harold Stassen.” He served for less than a year. In naming the onetime camera-shop proprietor one of the 100 most important people of the twentieth century, Time conceded, “As a supervisor, Milk sponsored only two laws—predictably, one barring anti-gay discrimination, and, less so, a law forcing dog owners to clean pets’ messes from sidewalks.” Eleven months on the city council hardly seems the stuff of Hollywood legend. So Hollywood invented a legend.  Rather than the gentle, soft-spoken idealist portrayed by Sean Penn, the real Harvey Milk was a short-tempered demagogue who cynically invented stories of victimhood to advance his political career. ...Harvey Milk’s homosexuality played about as much of a role in his murder as San Francisco mayor George Moscone’s heterosexuality played in his. Before the congregants of the Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones’s deadly Kool-Aid, Harvey Milk and much of San Francisco’s ruling class had already figuratively imbibed. Milk occasionally spoke at Jones’s San Francisco–based headquarters, promoted Jones through his newspaper columns, and defended the Peoples Temple from its growing legion of critics.'

The Cooking Class
[The Smart Set]
Tony Perrottet: 'What sinister historical forces have converged to create the freakish likes of Sandra Lee, Emeril Lagasse, Gordon Ramsay, and Jamie Oliver? As with so much else in the history of dining, we can trace the rise of celebrity chefs to the early 1800s, when he was transformed from a humble artisan into a revered artist — the modern Prometheus.'

How Ex-Vice Presidents Made Ends Meet
[The Wall Street Journal]
Ethan Trex: 'The post-White House lives of presidents have been intensely scrutinized, but what becomes of former vice presidents? Here's what happened to a few notable ones....'

War-opoly: How History's Most Popular Board Game Helped Defend The Free World
[The Wall Street Journal]
Brian McMahon: 'During World War II, the British secret service hatched a master plan to smuggle escape gear to captured Allied soldiers inside Germany. Their secret weapon? Monopoly boxes. The original notion was simple enough: Find a way to sneak useful items into prison camps in an unassuming form. But the idea to use Monopoly came from a series of happy coincidences, all of which started with maps.'

When is a Journalist not a Journalist?
[JamesBowman.net]
James Bowman: 'Something’s up, you’ve got to think, when we start getting lectures from journalists on discretion. Yesterday, in the London Daily Telegraph, Mary Kenny was praising Mick Jagger’s ex-wife for returning the £500,000 advance for her supposedly tell-all memoir that didn’t, after all, tell all. Or enough. "Admirers of the Texan magnolia will be gratified that she has upheld the standards of a southern lady," says Miss Kenny, obligingly. "Only tarts kiss and tell and Jerry Hall was right to refuse to do so." I suppose she was too, though it’s not long since it never would have occurred to anyone to expect praise for such routine reticence.'

My, They Hold Up
[The Washington Post]
Dan Zak: 'Even though they were Swiss-cheesed by a blizzard of bullets 75 years ago, Bonnie and Clyde are still on the run. They're not so much robbing banks nowadays as they are gracing the covers of books -- at least a dozen in the past decade, and two within the past month. They're also singing and dancing, in four different stage musicals in development. Bonnie will be channeled by Hilary Duff in a feature film that starts production in July on the same Southern back roads the infamous duo once terrorized. In Gibsland, La., next weekend, thousands will watch shootout reenactments during the annual Bonnie and Clyde Festival. People will gather at the site of their fatal May 23, 1934, ambush to watch them die all over again. It's everything this pair of 20-something ne'er-do-wells ever wanted: fame, immortality and the elevated regard they never received (or deserved, some say) while they were living. How did this happen? How do two reckless losers -- amateur stickup artists who killed at least 10 people on a haphazard spree across six states -- remain celebrated icons capable of inspiring this current glut of projects?'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The English Conquest
[New York Post]
Stephen Lynch: 'No, English is not the most widely-spoken language in the world. Mandarin is. In some surveys, Spanish also ranks higher in native speakers. But these win by population alone. By and large, language, the one that a Chinese person would use to speak to a Spaniard, English has quickly become the unchallenged leader. A half-century of American cultural dominance has made English the preference of businessmen, programmers and - much to the annoyance of the French - diplomats. Why should we give a damn? Because, particularly in the past 10 years, English has begun to approach what was once the realm of science fiction novels and dubbed movies - a language the whole world speaks.'

This papal visit is a good time to reprieve Pius XII
[The London Spectator]
Simon Caldwell: '...if Catholics and Jews are to bury the hatchet for good (and, as the Pope says, religious types should really stick together in these secular times) there’s another ghost that must be laid to rest — that of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, so often and so wrongly accused of being ‘Hitler’s Pope’. It’s such a widely held conviction that Pius was anti-Semitic that there’s even an exhibit of him at Yad Vashem (one the Pope chose not to visit), suggesting that he was at the very least a coward. ‘When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene’, says an inscription. It’s time the truth was told. And the truth is that Pius was a good man who worked hard to save as many Jewish lives as he could; and that when the Vatican opens its secret archive in 2013, Pius’s reputation will be restored. As the distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert says, the Yad Vashem exhibit amounts to a ‘dangerous’ misrepresentation of the actions of a pope who should be considered a righteous gentile.'

The Next Age of Discovery
[The Wall Street Journal]
Alexandra Alter: 'In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures. In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.'

9/11 conspiracy theories
[The Times Of London]
Excerpt from Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch: 'Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of English-language websites have sprung up specifically devoted to proselytising for the 9/11 Truth movement. In addition many “independent” or “alternative” media sites routinely replicate 9/11 conspiracy material uncritically, and many of these sites link to or cite each other. Sites endorsing 9/ll conspiracy theories, and those subscribing to them in passing, far outnumber sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Paper Makes The Man
[The Smart Set]
Greg Beato: 'Stroll the least-trafficked aisles of your local office megastore and you might be surprised to find a few ghosts from job searches past haunting the shelves. 100% cotton resume paper in almond linen? With matching envelopes? Isn’t it illegal now in most states to send paper resumes to prospective employers? Hasn’t study after study determined that in the age of Monster.com, even smoke signals have a better chance of catching a human resource director’s eye than any document that has touched the filthy, technologically obsolete hands of a U.S. Postal Service carrier? Sure, all that may be true-ish. But it also doesn’t negate the possibility that old-fashioned resumes, on crisp, rich, ivory-laid paper may be the key to a return to boom times.'

Venetia Phair, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Venetia Phair, who has died aged 90, had the distinction of being the only woman in the world to have named a planet. On the morning of March 14 1930 she was having breakfast at the house in Oxford in which she lived with her grandfather, Falconer Madan, the retired Librarian at the Bodleian, when he drew her attention to an article in The Times which noted that the newly found frozen planet had yet to be named. Being keen on Greek and Roman myths, young Venetia suggested that Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld who could render himself invisible, would make a good name for the dark and remote world.'

How a banker avoided ruin by cleaving to Ayn Rand's system of ethics
[National Review Online]
Mark Hemingway: 'John Allison isn’t your typical bank executive. For one thing, when he retired at the end of last year as CEO of BB&T — a North Carolina–based bank with more than 1,500 branches managing $143 billion in assets — he had recently shepherded it through the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression, leaving it in fairly good shape. He’s certainly seen as a success where many others in his field have failed miserably as of late. ...Allison navigated through the overheated mortgage market and the ensuing banking crisis by relying, in large part, on a philosophy that many others are now turning to: “I got interested in [Ayn] Rand in the late 1960s. I read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I had already been interested in economics, and as I finished college, I got interested in finance. I saw the banking system as central to a capitalist economy.”'

Ayn Rand: Godless Prophet of the Capitalist Revolution
[Standpoint Magazine]
Simon Heffer: '[Ayn] Rand knew what she was trying to do: she chose a popular form, storytelling, to transmit her ideas because she sought the maximum number of converts. Judging by the persistence of her influence, it worked. She identified a raw nerve in the American body: that which prizes freedom and "the American dream" above all else, and which fears the state as the only engine that could ever compromise that. In the period of uncertainty after the Second World War, the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War, she had a strong audience. At a time when America and her dream have been shaken and challenged as never since the 1930s, hers is a ready-made prescription that can be made to seem a prophecy.'

Jack Kemp, R.I.P.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The Editors: '[Jack] Kemp, who died Saturday at age 73, was among the most important Congressmen in U.S. history. He wasn't powerful because he held a mighty post, and he never served in the House majority. He helped to transform the Republican Party though he was never its Presidential standard bearer. His influence sprang from the power of his ideas, and from the sincerity and enthusiasm with which he spread them. Kemp's loquacious optimism was contagious, even if he did sometimes get carried away.'

Get Solvent Fast!!!
[The Smart Set]
Greg Beato: 'Investors have lost faith in the economy. Employers and consumers, too. In contrast, the nation’s infomercial hucksters still believe in the American Dream. In the darkest hours of the night, they offer hope. Get rich fast? Well, no, that was a 1990s thing. But get debt free fast? That they can deliver. Luckily, there are still plenty of charlatans around to help us turn such reveries into reality. In fact, they’re working overtime. They know a good thing when they see it, and if there’s anything that can turn a frustrated wage earner into an easily exploitable dupe faster than guarantees of instant wealth, it’s guarantees of debt-free subsistence. Or to put it another way: Millions of impulsive, debt-ridden screw-ups who’ve already proven they’re more than willing to spend tremendous amounts of money they don’t have are now looking for a fast and easy fix to their addiction to fast and easy fixes. Recession? For hucksters, this is the greatest bull market ever!'

The Hawthorne Effect
[Slate]
Dr. Sydney Spiesel: 'Autism can present in many ways—hence "autism spectrum disorders"—but that range is nothing compared with the diverse techniques that parents use in their attempts to cure, ameliorate, or disrupt the progress of the disease. In the 60-plus years since autism was first described, many methods to treat it have been proposed—one research paper identified 111 recognized treatments or strategies. Studies have found that parents try an average of between 4.3 and seven interventions simultaneously; one family reported using 47 different treatments at one time. Alas, almost none of these treatments are evidence-based, and some have been clearly demonstrated to be worthless. In dealing with other medical problems, like the common cold, I've always annoyed medication-seeking parents by pointing out the obvious: If there is any illness for which 100 treatments are available, you can be sure that none of them works. But with autism, the stakes are much higher. It is especially difficult to know where to look for treatments when a condition is poorly defined and characterized.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Final Edition
[The Smart Set]
Stefany Anne Golberg: 'The obituary seems to be experiencing a renaissance. In her 2006 book The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson reveals a worldwide ring of rabid obituary enthusiasts—members of the Church of Obituaries, she calls them. They flip past the Sports and Business sections eager to read the day’s death roll. But the real change is with the obituary writers. Once shamed to the backs of periodicals to deliver dour...many are now part of this new movement to “out” death by making it more accessible and “natural.” They are reconsidering the obituary not as the final judgment, but as a way death can be presented as a sum total of its stories. Everyone has stories, everyone dies, and in writing about death, death and life become more of a circle. The obituary is not the period on the sentence of existence, but a mere interpretation.'

Lifestyles of the Rich and Eco-conscious
[National Review Online]
Mark Hemingway: 'From the people that brought you the Discovery Channel, Planet Green is available in roughly half the nation’s television homes. Even if you don’t know about it, there’s a good chance it’s tucked away somewhere in the triple digits of your program guide. Now, if you expect me to be cynical about a cable channel that purports to offer up tips for eco-friendly living 24 hours a day — well, you’re entirely correct. That’s not to say I haven’t given the channel a fair shake. I’m not a knee-jerk anti-green reactionary (though I prefer the term “conservationism” for a host of reasons). And at one point in my quest to be more environmentally aware, I had loaded up the family DVR with so many hours of Planet Green programming it threatened to delete unseen episodes of 30 Rock — an act my wife considered so treasonous that if it had happened, I’d probably have come home to find my clothes on the porch.'

Goodnight America
[National Review Online]
Jonah Goldberg: '...isn't there something a little racist about white folks deploring black gangster culture but oohing and ahhing over Italian mobsters? Baggy prison pants - that ass-crack chic came about because convicts aren't allowed belts - and rap-music lyrics about busting caps in peoples' Dershowitz's is a sign of the inexorable decline of American culture. We find something in mob movies that we are sorely lacking in our culture and our art: a strict moral code. Or in Tony Soprano's case, a strict immoral code, but a code nonetheless. The American fascination with Tony Soprano or Don Corleone is often explained by saying something like, "America loves a rogue." But that's simplistic in the extreme. There's a lot more going on here than the Bada Bing at the Bada Bing club.'

Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will
[The Wall Street Journal]
Emily Steel: 'Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it. Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer. The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: "Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, 'We don't serve your type.'" On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare. The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: "to eradicate this font" and the "evil of typographical ignorance."'

Captain Roi 'Tug' Wilson, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Captain Roi 'Tug' Wilson, who died on March 17 aged 87, was a brilliant aviator who survived numerous brushes with death to help the Navy pioneer its use of helicopters in search-and-rescue and in commando operations. The Royal Navy was quick to recognise the potential of the helicopter as a commando carrier, putting it to work in the Malayan conflict. From 1955 to 1957 Wilson was senior pilot of the newly-formed 848 naval air squadron, which flew the Whirlwind, ferrying troops deep into the jungle where they were taking on communist insurgents.'

Alice in Wonderland
[National Review Online]
Julie Gunlock: 'In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.” Her condescension is typical of a food culture that is increasingly withdrawn from mainstream America — a food culture that increasingly preaches to the average American consumer that eating non-organic food is bad for you. The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it, but organic food is not a panacea for the world’s ills.'

The War on Short Yellows
[The Wall Street Journal]
Holman Jenkins: 'Consider: Red-light running and speeding, the two main uses of traffic cameras, are implicated in fewer than 8% of accidents. A far more prevalent cause of nondrunken accidents is driver inattention -- one study estimated, in a typical case the driver's eyes are diverted from the road for a full three seconds or more, fidgeting with a cellphone, disciplining the kids in the back seat, snoozing, blotting up spilled coffee, etc. What's more, if not for the idiotic diversion of research dollars to fuel economy, the most highly touted auto-industry breakthroughs today would be exactly in this area. Available now or coming soon are devices that warn a driver when he's wandering out of his lane or when another car is in his blind spot, even applying the brakes to prevent a collision. Stop-light cameras are especially pernicious....'

The Left's Totalitarian List
[Front Page Magazine]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'It is one of the ironies of modern liberalism that diversity should so often come to mean uniformity, and tolerance so often to mean intolerance: that is to say, think and act like me, or else. There was a good example of this last week in an article in the venerable British Sunday newspaper, The Observer, by Aaron Hicklin, an American journalist of whom I had previously not heard. He is the editor of a magazine for homosexuals called Out, and his article consisted largely of a justification for his magazine having revealed that the actress Jodie Foster is a lesbian, something that previously she had neither affirmed or denied, preferring, apparently, to preserve her privacy.'

The Rosenbergs, Always
[City Journal]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'A recent story in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion of a lingering liberal indulgence toward the former Soviet Union. Headlined ORPHANED BY THE STATE, it consisted of an interview with Robert Rosenberg, the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed by electric chair in 1953 for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Robert was then six, and surely anyone with the most minimal human feeling must sympathize deeply with his account of his bewilderment at the time. The interviewer, Joanna Moorhead, tells us that she had tears in her eyes as he related the story, thereby imparting an element of kitsch to the proceedings.'

Attitude or Gratitude?
[New English Review]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste  – and waste on our scale must be unthinking – implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson, in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe. ...I suppose that what I would like is an abundance that everyone appreciated and did not take for granted. This would require that everyone was aware that things could be different from how they actually are, an awareness that it is increasingly difficult to achieve.'

Lock 'Em Up
[The New Criterion]
James Bowman: 'Today’s Washington Post gives an account of the arrival of the first of the fallen at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware — Air Force Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Virginia, killed by an Improvised Explosive Device in Afghanistan — since the Obama administration’s lifting of the ban on the media’s photographing such arrivals. I would have expected it to be yet another if somewhat understated bit of media triumphalism — a celebration of the demolition of one more barrier to the media’s freedom to do as it pleases at whatever cost to public decorum or private sensitivities. At the least, I would have expected to see some reference of the sort that appeared in The New York Times blog, "The Lede" to how the ban had been lifted in response to the charges of "critics" who "point to the First Amendment and have accused the government of trying to keep the public in the dark about the human toll of war."'

Pun for the Ages
[The New York Times]
Joseph Tartakovsky: 'Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies.'

Who Was Henry VIII?
[History Today]
Suzannah Lipscomb: 'We all think we know Henry VIII (r. 1509-47) and all there is to know about him. The Holbein portraits, the profusion of television dramas and films, the novels and histories set in his world make him ubiquitous. A whole set of clichés, truisms and fallacies accompany that famous silhouette. As a character, the king both repulses and fascinates us. His vast girth, larger than life persona, grandeur, pomp, arrogance and appetites make us strangely proud of this hyper-masculine, fabled monarch. Yet much of what we think we know about Henry VIII is just that – fable. We think of him in stereotypes. In 2007, in her column in The Observer, Victoria Coren wrote with heavy sarcasm: ‘If you type “wife-killing” into Google, the first listing is a reference to Henry VIII, of wife-killing notoriety. Oh, that Henry VIII.’ Popular perceptions of Henry VIII, according to focus groups consulted by the market research agency BDRC for Historic Royal Palaces, are that he was a fat guy who had six, or maybe eight wives, and that he killed a lot of them. In April 2007, next to a tomb in Oxford’s Christ Church cathedral, where the heads of female figurines had broken off, I heard one man comment to another, ‘Henry VIII has a lot to answer for, hasn’t he?’'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

George Orwell's son speaks for the first time about his father
[The Times Of London]
John Carey: 'What would it have been like to be brought up by George Orwell? Pretty grim, you might think. But you would be wrong. In June 1944, Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair (Eric Blair being Orwell's real name). Now a retired engineer living happily in an immaculate house in a picture-book Warwickshire village, Blair has never publicised the fact that he was related to Orwell, always preferring to remain in the background. But ahead of a talk at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival with Orwell's biographer DJ Taylor (details, below right), Richard agreed to speak to me about his memories of his childhood. Richard was only six when Orwell died in January 1950, but he remembers him with great warmth. He had, he says, “a heart of deep paternal affection”.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

A Better Sort of Insult
[The New York Times]
Dick Cavett: 'I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult. There are two kinds of insult. “I was bored by your book” is one kind. “Your book? Once I put it down, I couldn’t pick it up,” is the other. Although both are insults, only one is witty. Or, at least, funny. I suppose we should reserve the accolade “wit” for the very highest practitioners of the art — Parker, Wilde, Shaw, Twain, Kaufman, Levant, Marx et al. Some would include Rickles. (As when Sinatra entered a club while Don was onstage. Rickles: “Make yourself comfortable, Frank, hit somebody.”) While on the subject, I believe it was writer/critic Clive James who is said to have remarked, when a man punched Sinatra in the face one night outside the stage door, “That’s the first time the fan hit the . . . .”'
[tip of the fedora to Cinema Retro]

As Seen on TV
[The Wall Street Journal]
Steve Salerno: 'Here's one of the unintended consequences of cable-television deregulation in 1984: Remy Stern ended up with a closet full of junk he didn't need. When rules were relaxed governing the number and length of television commercials on cable television, the modern age of the infomercial was born -- and Mr. Stern was a sucker for the high-energy, low-price pitches that seemed to run nonstop after a certain hour. He bought a supply of Didi Seven, the German miracle cleanser; he ordered the Ronco Automatic Pasta-Maker touted by the indefatigable Ron Popeil; and he signed up for the Juiceman, even though, as he discovered, it sounded like a wood-chipper and couldn't make beet juice transcend being beet juice. Mr. Stern had failed to learn "the defining lesson of the infomercial industry: if it's too good to be true, it probably is." So he writes in "But Wait . . . There's More!," his entertaining portrait of an business that might have been sliced and diced by ridicule over the years but that somehow still has countless viewers reaching for the phone to order the latest labor-saving kitchen gizmo being flogged on channel 173 at 2 a.m. After all, operators are standing by . . .'

Black Tie and Stetson
[The Smart Set]
Tony Perrottet: 'Elegant parties were a dime a dozen in Gilded Age New York. After the Civil War, a customized journey to the Great Plains was an envied excursion for the fashionable man-about-town. Lacking the seamless organization of a modern Abercrombie & Kent safari, this sort of high-end wilderness party was not for the faint of heart or the poor of pocket... The most entertaining of these jaunts began in September, 1871, when 14 intrepid New Yorkers took a 10-day horseback tour from Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to Fort Hayes, Kansas, under the guidance of a little-known 25-year-old named “Buffalo Bill” Cody. At the time, Cody was the army’s chief of scouts, but the future celebrity was already an incorrigible self-mythologizer and hilarious storyteller.'

Does the Shamwow Really Work?
[Popular Mechanics]
Harry Sawyers: 'It works, but keep a roll of paper towels on hand. And don't expect to say wow every time you use it.'
Meet the next great TV pitchman
[Slate]
Seth Stevenson: 'There's something captivating about Vince, the Shamwow pitchman. I always perk up when I hear those initial, outer-borough syllables: "Hi, it's Vince wit Shamwow. Dis is fuh da house, da car." The real star here is Vince, who demonstrates an impressive and subtle mastery of the pitchman's art. The first thing I notice is the physical grace. Vince puts the Shamwow through its paces with the fluid dexterity of a three-card monte dealer. Cleaning up spills appears not just effortless, but fun. There's a genius, too, in his hectoring tone. He makes us feel like idiots for even entertaining the notion of not buying a Shamwow.'

Who Protects The Internet?
[Popular Science]
James Geary: 'For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie--a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman--patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light. The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. Most cable breaks go unnoticed by users. Maybe a YouTube clip will take someone a nanosecond longer to download, but that’s about all anyone might notice when a single cable snaps. There are so many different lines connecting so many different places—a map of the network looks like the inside of a baby grand: strand after strand of cable stretching across the ocean floor like so many piano wires that service providers can usually reroute around any break. But if several cables snap in chorus, as they did several times in the past two years, big problems result.'
[tip of the fedora to Instapundit]

Toxic Women
[Big Hollywood]
Skip Press: 'I thought of all the women constantly in the news for their looniness. Sharon Osbourne attacked another woman on a show and ended up with her own new show. Britney Spears came out with a new song “If You Seek Amy” (clever, not) and got a new endorsement contract from a major department store selling shoes to teen girls. Rhianna got allegedly beat up by boyfriend Chris Brown and got back with him, or maybe not. And then there’s the woman for whom eight isn’t enough because she has 14… Nadia Suleman, who didn’t get her own show, darn it. I sat back and I thought quietly WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE WOMEN!? Then it dawned on me. Walt Disney.'

Down with Facebook!
[The Weekly Standard]
Matt Labash: 'Look at the outer shell--the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt--and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn't my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple who have early-adopted drive the unsustainable way of life I so stubbornly cling to ever so close to the edge of obsolescence, that I've no choice but to follow. This explains why I bought cassette tapes until 1999, why I wouldn't purchase a DVD player until Blockbuster cashiered their VHS stock. Toothpaste? I use it now that it's clear it's here to stay. So I'm not inflexible. But there is one promise I've made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society.'

Patrick Kinna, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Patrick Kinna, who died on March 14 aged 95, was Winston Churchill's confidential assistant during the Second World War and saw the great man in some of his most private moments. ...As the prime minister paced the room "completely starkers", Kinna recalled, there was a knock on the door and Churchill went to open it. It was Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Mortified at finding his guest with nothing on, the president prepared to make his excuses, but was prevented by Churchill. "Oh no, no, Mr President," he said. "As you can see, I have nothing to hide from you."'

Celeb antics a mental disorder
[New York Post]
Maxine Shen: 'Celebrity bad behav ior may be the result of mental illness, says Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of "Celebrity Rehab" and "Loveline." What else could possibly explain antics like beating up assistants with cell phones, yo-yoing in and out of rehab and forgetfulness about underwear in public? The dysfuction that he's referring to goes way beyond being an annoying personality quirk. He's calling it a full-blown medical disorder. "Narcissism is not [the] egotism of self-love, it's more self-loathing," Pinsky told The Post yesterday.'

Happy Birthday Concorde
[The Weekly Standard]
Reuben F. Johnson: 'This year will make the 40th year since the Anglo-French commercial aircraft, the Concorde, made its first flight. Aircraft number 001 first lifted off on 2 March 1969 piloted by Andre Turcat from the aerodrome at Toulose, France, which is today the home of assembly plant for the Airbus A380 superjumbo aircraft. Ironically, it is the success of the A380 and the economies of scale that it brings to airline operations that have made sure that there will probably never be another Concorde-type passenger aircraft again.'

Criminal Verite
[ReasonOnline]
Greg Beato: 'In the 1880s, when a French crime fighter named Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the mug shot as a unique form of portraiture, the photographs he took were expected to do one thing: Help establish an individual’s identity at a time when driver’s licenses, fingerprint files, and Facebook pages didn’t exist. Today mug shots are still used to identify, but we also want them to punish, deter, and entertain. Unfortunately, they do such a good job of the latter that we’ve been indifferent to the ways they short-circuit due process. But while we’re gawking at the haunted eyes of a Midwestern meth freak or the haunted hair of Nick Nolte, cops across America are using virtual rogues’ galleries to normalize the idea that the government has the right to punish you without bothering to convict you of a crime.'

Mary Printz, R.I.P.
[The New York Times]
Margalit Fox: 'A long, long time ago, before the BlackBerry, before the fax machine, even before the answering machine, busy people relied on answering services to get messages from family, friends and clients. In rooms all over America, rows of women — for they were nearly always women — sat day and night at blinking, buzzing switchboards and plugging in, speaking up and writing everything down by hand. At one switchboard, on the East Side of Manhattan, sat a young woman named Mary Printz. To Mrs. Printz, clients were not merely disembodied voices: they were flesh-and-blood people with whom she became indispensably, if often invisibly, intertwined. If they needed it, she would walk their dogs, water their plants, pick up their laundry, listen to their troubles and, when those troubles were especially bad, run right over with consolation in a bottle. In the process, she came to know every aspect of her clients’ lives, from professional successes and failures to affairs of the heart. If the long, helpful career of Mrs. Printz, who died on Feb. 21 at 85, sounds a great deal like that of the Judy Holliday character in the hit Broadway musical “Bells Are Ringing,” it is no accident.'
[tip of the fedora to Mark Steyn]

The MRI and I
[The American Spectator]
Reid Collins: 'Had an MRI today (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which is a little like living through an eruption on Mt. St. Helens while lying at the summit.'

NYPD Lt. Joseph Petrosino
[New York Daily News]
John Marzulli: 'One hundred years ago, the NYPD's only secret weapon in the war on terror was a brave lieutenant known in Little Italy as "the Detective in the Derby." The terrorists of that time were called the Black Hand, ruthless gangsters who preyed on Italian-American immigrants, and Lt. Giuseppe (Joseph) Petrosino was dispatched to Sicily on an intelligence-gathering mission. Petrosino was ambushed by gunmen near a statue of Garibaldi in downtown Palermo. Thursday will mark the 100th anniversary of Petrosino's assassination, the only cop murdered overseas in the department's history. At least four Petrosinos followed his great gumshoe-prints into law enforcement....'

The 'My Bad' Syndrome
[InCharacter]
Joe Queenan: 'The “My Bad” syndrome, the act of being gutsy enough to accept responsibility for doing what one has unarguably done, is a cunning though ultimately cowardly way of deflecting attention away from the fact that no one else could possibly be held responsible for the screw-up. It is similar to George Washington’s disingenuous declaration: “Father, I cannot tell a lie; I chopped down the cherry tree.” By declaring that the idea of telling a lie was morally repugnant to him, young George immediately diverted attention away from the fact that chopping down a cherry tree, a far more serious offense, was not repugnant to him, and from the fact that nobody else could possibly have been fingered for this act of gratuitous arboreal terrorism. The whole point of false courage is to move the conversation away from one’s failings to one’s strengths: I am an idiot, I am a jerk, I am a lecher, I am a scoundrel, but at least I am man enough to admit it. Now, let’s turn the page. The primary objective of false courage in this context is to accept blame without accepting punishment. Real courage would call for confessions like: “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down the cherry tree. And because of that, I completely understand why you are going to break my legs.”'

Not Silent Cal, Thinking Cal
[Frontpage Magazine]
Dr. L. John Van Til: 'Let’s find the real Coolidge and see what difference it makes for the historical record. Sadly, decades of hostile historical comment about Coolidge in hundreds of texts has left a large percentage of the American public with a decidedly negative image. It is the contention of this essay that Calvin Coolidge certainly should be appreciated, and for several reasons. First, the textbook image of him believed by most who have matriculated in the nation’s schools is simply dead wrong. The prevailing view of him is not merely a matter of interpretation, it is a question of facts, and the texts have the facts wrong in most instances. Second, as I found in my years of study of his writings, Coolidge was a very thoughtful man with a comprehensive view of the world. Indeed, the nation would be much better served if more of its presidents had a worldview as consistent as Coolidge’s. We should strongly suggest that his writings be read today because they have a deep wisdom in them that was born of the man’s basic common sense. Besides, he was a man of great humor, and we all can use more of that. Fortunately, a more balanced view of him may emerge as a result of a modest Coolidge renaissance that is now under way.'

Women, keep drinking
[Spiked]
Basham and Luik: 'Why was a flimsy study apparently showing a link between booze and breast cancer so uncritically accepted? For over a decade, a constant stream of studies has warned women who drink that they run an increased risk of getting certain cancers, particularly breast cancer. But this steady stream of anti-drinks advice last week gave way to a global torrent when two new studies about the link between drinking and cancer in women received huge, and typically uncritical, international media attention.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The Middlebrow Moment
[ArtsJournal]
Terry Teachout: 'What's really sad is that most people under the age of 35 or so don't remember and can't imagine a time when there were magazines that "everybody" read and TV shows that "everybody" watched, much less that those magazines and shows went out of their way to introduce their audiences to high art of various kinds. Those days, of course, are gone for good, and it won't help to mourn their passing. I'm not one to curse the darkness.... Even so, that doesn't stop me from feeling pangs of nostalgia for our lost middlebrow culture. It wasn't perfect, and sometimes it wasn't even very good, but it beat hell out of nothing.'
[tip of the fedora to John Derbyshire]

The Age of Irresponsibility
[The Weekly Standard]
Matthew Continetti: 'America's political, economic, and cultural elites seem incapable of behaving responsibly and being accountable for their actions. That incapacity is why you wake up in the morning and dread reading the day's headlines. It is why, for years, there seemingly has been nothing but bad news. It is this larger crisis that has driven the public's opinion that the country is headed down the "wrong track" and fostered the widespread sense that American power has entered a period of decline. This is the age of irresponsibility.'

Paul Harvey, R.I.P.
[ABC Radio News]
Rupa Shenoy: 'Paul Harvey, the news commentator and talk-radio pioneer whose staccato style made him one of the nation's most familiar voices, died Saturday in Arizona, according to ABC Radio Networks. He was 90. ...Known for his resonant voice and trademark delivery of "The Rest of the Story," Harvey had been heard nationally since 1951, when he began his "News and Comment" for ABC Radio Networks. He became a heartland icon, delivering news and commentary with a distinctive Midwestern flavor. "Stand by for news!" he told his listeners. He was credited with inventing or popularizing terms such as "skyjacker," "Reaganomics" and "guesstimate."'

Plaza Veteran Finds Retiring Bitter-Suite
[New York Post]
Melissa Jane Kronfeld and Tom Liddy: 'The door has closed on the career of the longest-serving porter at the storied Plaza hotel. Ed Trinka is hanging up the white gloves after 46 years of greeting everyone from Joe DiMaggio to Richard Nixon.'

How to Bring Real Science Into the Courtroom
[ReasonOnline]
Radley Balko: 'A forthcoming study from the National Academy of Sciences on the poor quality of forensic science in America’s courtrooms is expected to send shockwaves through the criminal justice system. Law enforcement organizations have tried to derail the report nearly every step of the way, and with good reason. Police and prosecutors have been relying on bad science to get convictions for decades. It’s only recently, as the onset of DNA testing has begun uncovering a disturbing spate of wrongful convictions, that some of the criminal justice system’s cottage industry pseudo-sciences like "bite mark analysis" have been exposed for the quackery they are.'

Vitamin Pills: A False Hope?
[The New York Times]
Tara Parker-Pope: 'Ever since the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Linus Pauling first promoted "megadoses" of essential nutrients 40 years ago, Americans have been devoted to their vitamins. Today about half of all adults use some form of dietary supplement, at a cost of $23 billion a year. But are vitamins worth it? In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life.'

Fly on the Wal
[New York Post]
Former Wired Senior Writer Charles Platt went undercover as a Wal-Mart employee: 'Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It's the best friend we could ask for.'

MMR vaccine doctor fixed data on autism
[The Sunday Times Of London]
Brian Deer: 'The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition. The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal.'
[tip of the fedora to Jonah Goldberg]

When Hooligans Bach Down
[City Journal]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. There is surely something deeply emblematic about the use of one of the great glories of Western civilization, the music of Bach, to prevent the young inheritors of that civilization from committing crimes. The barbarians are well and truly within the gates.'

Che the revolutionary hero? Ruthless serial killer more like
[The Australian]
Guy Sorman: 'But once there was a real Che Guevara: he is less well known than the fictional puppet that has replaced reality. The true Che was a more significant figure than his fictional clone, for he was the incarnation of what revolution and Marxism really meant in the 20th century. Che was no humanist. No communist leader, indeed, ever held humanist values. Karl Marx certainly was not one. True to their movement's founding prophet, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro and Che held no respect for life. Blood needed to be shed if a better world was to be baptised. When criticised by one of his early companions for the death of millions during the Chinese revolution, Mao observed that countless Chinese die every day, so what did it matter? Likewise, Che could kill with a shrug. Trained as a medical doctor in Argentina, he chose not to save lives but to suppress them. After he seized power, Che put to death 500 "enemies of the revolution" without trial, or even much discrimination. ...Indeed, without his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than another serial killer.'

Mummy of Her Country
[The New Criterion]
James Bowman: 'I can’t resist this telling juxtaposition. In yesterday’s Washington Post a front page story by Brigid Schulte breathlessly announced a "Fresh Look at Martha Washington: Less First Frump, More Foxy Lady." ...My mind went back to Bill Clinton’s comment on the mummy, nicknamed Juanita, that he saw in a National Geographic Society exhibition "You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy." There is something about those who lust after the dead, or who expect others to, that is beyond creepy. And the corollary of that is that there is also something more than a bit off about those who profess to find the dead unattractive. What has Martha Washington, now dead for over two centuries, to do with either frumpiness or sexual attraction? What’s the point of being dead unless you can present yourself to posterity as who you were and what you accomplished, not how sexually alluring or otherwise an equally dead contemporary might have found you?'

Vulture World
[Slate]
Constance Casey: 'They aren't really birds of prey—they're birds of clean-up. The eagles and hawks we admire, the real predators, tear their living victims apart. Vulture meals involve no frenzied chase or bloody kill—in fact, no haste or suffering at all. Vultures wait a couple of days till the spirit of the deceased has safely departed and gases begin to leak from the decomposing corpse. Would you rather have putrefying carcasses or nice, clean bones lying around?'

NY's Deli King In Pastrami Heaven
[New York Post]
Rebecca Rosenberg & Larry Sutton: 'He was the man who turned the overstuffed pastrami sandwich into a New York landmark. And the Broadway legend who could bestow the ultimate accolade on the city's celebrities - by creating sandwiches named after them. Milton Parker, owner of the Carnegie Deli, who died last week, was a man who lived large and did his best to make sure his fellow New Yorkers did the same.'

Storied '21' cuts its ties to the past
[New York Post]
Lukas I. Alpert and Rebecca Rosenberg: 'Jan. 23, 2009, will forever be marked as the day that an era of old-fashioned elegance and gentlemanly standards in New York passed away. The hallowed '21' Club - one of the very last eateries in New York that still required male customers to wear a jacket and tie - has relaxed it rules and is making ties optional.'

The triumph of hyphenism
[American Thinker]
James Lewis: 'This election is an historic victory for a new kind of hyphenism, which could be called biological hyphenism. Look in the mirror with that little checklist. Woman? Check that biological hyphen. Gay? Check. Black? Check. It's all plainly visible in the mirror, making the New Hyphenism the easiest and dumbest way to categorize human beings and reduce them to brightly colored M&M's.'

Marking Time
[The Smart Set]
Greg Beato: 'Suppose the horse-and-carriage industry not only survived the introduction of the automobile but actually flourished as cars grew commonplace? What if 8-track tapes were a billion-dollar business today, more popular than iPods and Zunes? Would that be any stranger than the fact that consumers have purchased millions and millions of calendars in the last few weeks? Wristwatch sales have plummeted this decade because more and more people turn to their cellphones, PDAs, and computers to tell time. Those devices are equipped with calendars too, and yet our allegiance to the old-fashioned paper version is only deepening. Why?'

A Lawyer We Can Love - What Next?
[The American Spectator]
Larry Thornberry: 'The world has lost a wise, humorous, and prolific writer, an amusing raconteur, and a member of a particularly rare endangered species, the liberal who actually has a taste for liberty rather than just for policing other people's behavior. John Mortimer, 85, barrister, playwright, novelist, screen-writer, and creator of the world's most lovable literary lawyer, Horace Rumpole, died Friday at his home in Oxfordshire after a long illness. He's arguing before the Very Highest Court now. Mortimer was never pious. But he was respectful of Christianity. And as God is merciful, I like Mortimer's chances.'

The Joy of Rioting
[FrontPageMagazine]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'I’ve only ever been in one political riot, and it soon became apparent to me in the course of it that there are few pleasures known to man greater than that of smashing shop and car windows for the good of humanity. (Here, incidentally, I really do mean man rather than woman, for women are but poor and unenthusiastic rioters.) In those days, you had to go to a riot in a distant or exotic location if you wanted to witness it, unless it happened to be featured on the evening television news, which was seldom. Nowadays, however, thanks to advances in technology, you can watch riots thousands of miles apart without ever moving away from your computer screen. Talk about a giant step for mankind - or (as everyone calls it these days) humankind.'

Jim Boulet, R.I.P.
[The Corner]
John J. Miller: 'For conservatives, Jim was an unsung hero. As executive director of English First, he focused relentlessly on protecting and defending our common language against the political and legal encroachments of multiculturalism. When it came to issues such as foreign-language voting ballots or the Clinton administration's Executive Order 13166, nobody worked the Hill harder than Jim. He was a happy warrior who didn't seem to mind the fact that most of official Washington was on the other side, eager to ignore him. He loved his faith, his family, and his country.'

Government Policies Stifle Talk of Islam
[Pajamas Media]
David Rusin: 'When President Roosevelt addressed Congress after Pearl Harbor, he cited Japan fifteen times in a speech of five hundred words. When President Bush did the same after 9/11, he uttered “Islam” or “Muslim” more sparingly — just eleven times in a speech of three thousand words. And when Senators Obama and McCain spoke at the respective conventions and debates, asking to be entrusted with America’s security, not a single reference to Islam could be found. “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about,” noted linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. Based on the language used by Western governments, one must conclude that they do not want anybody thinking about the fundamental role that Islam plays in the conflict with Muslim radicals. If this self-imposed straitjacket hinders discussion of a foe that wishes to subjugate the world under Sharia law, then we have little chance of knowing him. And as Sun Tzu observed, only by knowing the enemy can he be defeated.'

Dai Llewellyn, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Sir Dai Llewellyn, 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai 'Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”. Good-looking in his youth, with dark Welsh curls, his success with women was famous. The journalist Peter McKay, who became a friend, was once having lunch with him at San Lorenzo when Llewellyn suddenly leapt from the table and disappeared for half an hour. “What happened?” asked McKay when his host returned, looking flushed. “Oh, I just remembered,” said Llewellyn. “I left my secretary tied up in the bath.” Quite what Llewellyn did by way of a career was never entirely clear. He once described himself as a “a kind of upper-class redcoat” who “earned his living out of being Dai Llewellyn”.'

Are you sophisticated?
[The London Spectator]
Paul Johnson: '...I intend to have a shot at defining sophistication in this day and age, and even devising a test by which you can fairly (or even unfairly) determine whether someone is sophisticated or not. The word provokes not just argument but rage. People really dislike being called unsophisticated, or accused of a lack of sophistication, unless they are very sophisticated indeed, in which case they don’t care tuppence, since they consider the person who calls them such lacks the qualifications to pronounce. To which my philosopher friend Professor Prodnose adds: ‘Yes, and the only true Sophisticated One is God.’ Let us then proceed to give the ten tests by which you can decide whether you, or those you know to be in the running, are sophisticated or not. You don’t have to pass all ten. Seven will do perfectly well.'

Am I Seducing or Being Seduced?
[Deep Glamour]
Virginia Postrel: 'The "Seduction" exhibit currently on at the Museum at FIT raises some interesting questions about what makes an outfit seductive.'

Sex on the Beach - is Western Decadence a Molotov Cocktail?
[New English Review]
Mary Jackson: 'Sex on the beach, according to [Ross] Clark, is a Molotov cocktail. Hot-blooded sex provokes cold-blooded murder. Violent Jihad is a natural response to Western decadence. Marrin is less direct: Western decadence makes “Muslims around the world despise us” and “look down on the host culture” and leads to “cultural hostility and separatism”. And we all know that when Muslims are hostile, “extremism” is never very far away. Islam does not permit sex on the beach, but neither does Christianity, and neither do traditional Western laws and standards. Islam has nothing to teach us about morality, and we should not pander to Muslims by claiming that it does.'

The White Shirt: A Roving Quest For Perfection
[The Wall Street Journal]
Christina Binkley: 'In recent years, men turned to shirt colors as vibrant as the booming economy. But we are now in an era of restraint, and a simple white dress shirt sends a savvy message. It says a man is ready for work and isn't vamping for attention. "When times are tough, men want to be more serious about their look," says Eric Jennings, men's fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue. But not all white shirts are equal.'

Keeping Cool with Coolidge
[The American Spectator]
Ryan Cole: 'Shortly before his life ended and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt began, Coolidge reportedly told a friend, "I feel I no longer fit in with these times." If Coolidge felt out of step in the Era of Roosevelt, he would have been a truly lost soul in the coming Age of Obama.'

Withdrawal from heroin is a trivial matter
[The London Spectator]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'The evidence is pretty conclusive that the great majority, though not quite all, of the suffering caused by withdrawal from opiates, insofar as it is real and not feigned, is psychological in origin and caused by the mythology surrounding it. In the 1930s, experiments were done demonstrating that morphine addicts could not reliably distinguish between injections of water and morphine: when they received water thinking it was morphine, their symptoms abated, but when they received morphine thinking it was water, they grew worse. It has also been established that the distress of withdrawal is not correlated with the physical severity of withdrawal symptoms, and is often at its worst before, not during, withdrawal.'

Joe Hyams, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Joe Hyams, who has died aged 85, was a Hollywood newspaper columnist and wrote best-selling biographies of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean, earning him the accolade of “journalist to the stars”; he was also the first to write about the group of hell-raising entertainers that became known as the Rat Pack. As well as his biographies, Hyams set two novels — The Pool (1978) and Murder at the Academy Awards (1983) — in Hollywood. His non-fiction titles included Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal (1969), co-written with Tom Murton and the basis of the 1980 film Brubaker, starring Robert Redford; and Flight of the Avenger: George Bush at War (1991).'

Alfred Shaheen, R.I.P.
[The Times Of London]
'Alfred Shaheen was the textile manufacturer responsible for making the Hawaiian aloha shirt fashionable, and spawning a new garment industry in the Pacific island chain. While cheap aloha shirts and dresses had already become popular with postwar visitors to Hawaii, Shaheen elevated the garments to the level of high fashion by coming up with high-quality designs which were well made and less garish.'

Hysteria in Four Acts
[Commentary]
Paul McHugh: 'In imitating a medical, surgical, or psychiatric disorder, hysterical patients may complain of subjective symptoms—such as pain, faintness, or confusion—or display physical signs like seizures or paralysis. To confuse matters, they may indeed already be genuinely sick, with such physical or mental ailments as epilepsy, toxicity, depression, and the like. In any case—and this is key to understanding the condition—their hysteria often builds incrementally, beginning with minor complaints or weaknesses that then worsen until the features become incapacitating. This process, in the past described as the “incubation” of hysteria, usually indicates that patients are gathering information about their “sickness,” frequently by way of suggestions inadvertently supplied by physicians, nurses, or other patients. These days, they may also be consulting the Internet, where they can find a vast wealth of information on how sicknesses “present,” which symptoms run together, and which attract prompt attention. Whatever the source—and it may just be the sight of someone else with symptoms—patients learn how their behavior affects others and then justify, mostly to themselves, the attention they are receiving by amplifying those symptoms. This suggests that appearing sick is not a goal calculatedly chosen so much as it is one gradually assumed—and learned.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Honourable Conspirators
[Standpoint Magazine]
Nigel Jones: 'The man [Tom Cruise] plays, Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, embodied rare qualities unfamiliar to our debased age, more used as it is to "heroes" whose sole heroism consists of kicking a ball into the back of a net. It will also be a shock to filmgoers accustomed to seeing German officers only as unreconstructed baddies to watch a parade of British actors - Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and even Eddie Izzard - supporting Cruise by playing the men in field grey as thoughtful, principled and self-sacrificing goodies. These are real heroes in thought, word and deed. And, however tainted by Hollywood vulgarisation Valkyrie may be, if the movie succeeds in showing a mass audience that not all Germans of the war generation were psychopathic sadists or monocled automata, it will have served some purpose.'

St. Vitus Dance
[The London Spectator]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'Reading an account by the historian John Waller of the Dancing Plague in Alsace in 1518 recently, I could not help but notice the interesting but perhaps incomplete parallels with our own time. Economic conditions in Strasbourg were dire in 1518 when a woman called Frau Troffea started dancing in public and continued for days on end until she was exhausted and had damaged her feet severely. Several hundred people soon joined her; the madness was collective. What accounted for this collective madness?'

What did they talk about in the Ice Age? The weather, of course.
[The London Spectator]
Paul Johnson: 'I was brought up to disregard the cold. A pious old great-aunt used to say: ‘Cold? Blow on your hands, and remember, no matter how cold it is, it’s better than the eternal fires of Hell!’ No one says things like that nowadays, more’s the pity. Those of us who lived north of the Trent expected hard winters, and got them. ‘Into the North,’ as Twelfth Night has it, ‘where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.’ We sometimes had snow on the ground for a month, two on Biddulph Moor, that glorious Abomination of Desolation. No central heating then, and the first thing to be done when you got up in the pitch dark was to lay and light the fire. How hyperborean the coal-cellar was! But once the kitchen fire was roaring up the chimney, things began to improve. My mother liked to invite the various tradesmen indoors to warm their hands, while the bodies of their patient horses smoked in the freezing street.'

Samuel Huntington's Warning
[The Wall Street Journal]
Fouad Ajami: 'Huntington observed that his was an "argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities."'

Do high heels empower or constrain?
[The Times Of London]
Germaine Greer: 'While feminists have been struggling to set women free, high heels have conquered the world.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Conor Cruise O'Brien, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Conor Cruise O'Brien, who has died aged 91, was the leading Irish intellectual of his generation, though he assumed so many guises – diplomatist, historian, literary critic, proconsul, professor, playwright, government minister, columnist and editor – that he defies further categorisation. His views were as variable as his career.'

WAS TEDDY ROOSEVELT A CONSERVATIVE?
Theodore Roosevelt Was No Conservative
[The Wall Street Journal]
Ronald Pestritto: 'We know that Barack Obama and his allies identify themselves as "progressives," and that they aim to implement the big-government liberalism that originated in America's Progressive Era and was consummated in the New Deal. What remains a mystery is why some conservatives want to claim this progressive identity as their own -- particularly as it was manifested by Theodore Roosevelt. The fact that conservative politicians such as John McCain and writers like William Kristol and Karl Rove are attracted to our 26th president is strange because, if we want to understand where in the American political tradition the idea of unlimited, redistributive government came from, we need look no further than to Roosevelt and others who shared his outlook.'
[tip of the fedora to Jonah Goldberg]
Tagging After Teddy
[The Atlantic]
Christopher Caldwell: 'By any scale of values that have prevailed since the Second World War, Teddy Roosevelt is a wretched example of an American President. As a person, he was a repellent figure. Squeaky-voiced and insecure about his masculinity, he devoted much of his young adulthood to tormenting his wayward but considerably more athletic brother Elliott (Eleanor Roosevelt's father) with every means at his disposal. ...What's more, the aggressive tenor of the Roosevelt Administration, meant to introduce the martial virtues into civilian life, wound up bringing other things instead: moralism, bureaucracy, and governmental bullying. ...The Theodore Roosevelt Administration was a time of tumult that offers many parallels to our own. We'd do well to think more about those parallels. But such thinking needn't be accompanied by adulation for an egomaniacal weirdo who was as close to being a psycopath as anyone who ever occupied the Oval Office.'
[tip of the fedora to Ramesh Ponnuru]

The Touch That Doesn't Heal: Complementary And Alternative Medicine
[The Wall Street Journal]
Steve Salerno: 'This should be a laughing matter, but it isn't -- not with the Obama administration about to confront the snarling colossus of health-care reform. Today's ubiquitous celebration of "empowerment," combined with disenchantment over the cost, bureaucracy and possible side effects of conventional care, has spurred an exodus from medical orthodoxy. As a result, what was once a ragtag assortment of New Age nostrums has metastasized into a multibillion-dollar industry championed by dozens of lobbyists and their congressional sympathizers.'

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
[The Wall Street Journal]
Joseph Rago: 'The mustache may be an even bolder political accoutrement. That its wearers resemble pornographers and '70s-era homosexuals is only a small part of the electoral risk. Politics, not sex, is the issue: Some of history's most loathsome political figures have been mustachioed, including Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Perhaps owing to such associations, the modern mustache often implies, or is interpreted as, evidence of dishonesty and untrustworthiness. Fake mustaches, for instance, are frequently used in disguises. "A man wears a mustache because there's something he wants to conceal, a spiritual defect," wrote Ayn Rand, more philosophically.'

Fooled by Ponzi (and Madoff)
[Skeptic]
Stephen Greenspan: 'There are few areas of functioning where skepticism is more important than how one invests one’s life savings. Yet intelligent and educated people, some of them naïve about finance and others quite knowledgeable, have been ruined by schemes that turned out to be highly dubious and quite often fraudulent. The most dramatic example of this in American history is the recent announcement that Bernard Madoff, a highly-regarded hedge fund manager and a former president of NASDAQ, has for several years been running a very sophisticated Ponzi scheme which by his own admission has defrauded wealthy investors, charities and other funds, of at least 50 billion dollars. ...In Annals of Gullibility I propose a multi-dimensional theory that would explain why so many people behave in a manner which exposes them to severe and predictable risks. This includes myself — I lost a good chunk of my retirement savings to Mr. Madoff, so I know of what I write on the most personal level.'

Society Builds Wall Between Men and Children
[Pajamas Media]
Mary Jackson: 'It is acceptable — just — for a woman to talk to someone else’s child in a public place, but a man who does the same thing must be a pervert. Has it come to this? How many perverts are there, for goodness sake?'

Lose the Pointy Shoes, Guys
[Pajamas Media]
Melissa Clouthier: 'The assault on manhood continues. Men fend off environmental hormone disrupters found in everything from bleach to soy products to shampoo. Fat produces estrogen so chubby men everywhere fight for their manhood through a sea of female hormones. And then there are the cultural messages through the media — education and research teaching that men are intrinsically flawed and stupid. Guys are portrayed as Daddy Knows Least in too many shows to list. Boys are medicated into compliant automatons so teachers have an easier time of it. Research questioning the necessity of men makes the covert overt: men are no longer needed. All in all, it’s a tough time to be a guy. And yet … Sympathy would be easier to find if men didn’t participate in their own demise. It’s sad, really, this new form of sartorial self-flagellation.'

A spacecraft designed by horses
[Spring Hope Enterprise]
Mary Parker: 'So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over 2,000 years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything. And current Horses Asses are controlling everything else.'
[tip of the fedora to John Hood]

Mark 'Deep Throat' Felt, 1913-2008
[SteynOnline]
Mark Steyn: '...Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the Director’s job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness. And, whatever Mark Felt’s motives, it wasn’t because of a distaste over illegal break-ins: at the FBI, he himself had authorized illegal burglaries at the homes of friends and family of various leftists.'

Mistress Manners
[National Review Online]
Kevin Williamson: 'Pin-up girl Bettie Page — sex symbol of an older, weirder America — has died. She wasn’t my generation’s pin-up girl. Like many young men in the Reagan years, I had that obligatory poster of Heather Thomas in a pink bikini on my bedroom wall, a sort of advertisement for my heterosexuality. Miss Thomas is perfectly adequate, if your tastes run that way, but she is no Bettie Page — all high-def blondness and obviousness. But if your tastes run more to the dark side, or to the unexpected, then you are bound to find yourself transfixed by less obvious sex symbols — Bettie Page, maybe, or in the case of some conservatives, Sarah Palin. In my case, it has always been Miss Manners.'

The Grand Duke's Conscience
[The American Spectator]
Hal G.P. Colebatch: 'Amid many more apparently momentous events, very few people have been aware that a small and very lonely but brave battle for something at the core of Christian civilization has been fought and lost by, of all people, a Grand Duke, in, of all places, Luxembourg. The Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg has lost executive veto power on legislation for doing, quite legally, what a constitutional ruler is apparently not supposed to do -- exercise his conscience on behalf of his people. [Belvedere: Could this be one explanation?] Grand Duke Henri refused to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide, which would allow doctors to kill terminally people who asked repeatedly and had the consent of two doctors and a "panel of experts."'

Wintry Mix
[The Smart Set]
Jennifer Fisher Wilson: 'Humans, unlike other animals, do not adapt so well to the winter conditions. We rely on fireplaces and indoor heat, hot baths and hot coffee, heavy coats and fuzzy hats, and slippers and blankets to survive the season in comfort. Nevertheless, these crutches are also often less cozy and protective than expected (just as my anticipation of majestic snow often runs into the reality of messy sleet). The wonderland of winter quickly crumbles when disease, depression, lethargy, and overall lumpiness arrive on the scene. Increasingly, science is proving that the seasonality of such discomforts and dangers: People really are sicker, sadder, and perhaps even a little slower — mentally — during the colder, darker seasons than they are in the warmer, brighter ones. Research has started explaining why.'

Bettie Page, R.I.P.
[The Times Of London]
'Bettie Page was an American pin-up girl who took the art of the provocative pose to new heights, or possibly depths depending on one’s capacity to be scandalised, in the 1950s. In an age when such images were in their infancy, she posed in bikinis, leopard skins, skimpy see-through underwear, corsets and stockings; she brandished whips and was tied up in sadomasochistic poses; and as often as not she was photographed wearing nothing more than a pair of high heels. With her raven-haired beauty and curvaceous figure she was the embodiment of every young man’s dream (and a great many older men’s too); a fantasy woman, a free spirit of unabashed sensuality with a beguiling smile and for many the ultimate sex goddess.'

What's inside your locker?
[The New Criterion]
James Bowman: 'The boundaries of the "transgressive" have been re-drawn for our time, but I wonder whether our enjoyment of crossing them with nostalgia as an excuse will ever prove as "charming" to our descendants as Bettie and her contemporary fans now do to us?'

Curing the Soul
[City Journal]
Theodore Dalrymple on if alcoholism is a vice or a disease.

The 'right to die' is fashionable nonsense
[The Times Of London]
Dominic Lawson: 'The very phrase “right to die” is a fashionable piece of nonsense. How can we be said to require a “right” to something that is absolutely unavoidable, whether we want it or not? It is not the “right to die” that campaigners such as Margo MacDonald want, but the right to be killed – at a time of their own choosing. This is why some doctors, less sensitive to public queasiness, refer to the practice of “assisted dying” as “therapeutic killing”.'

An Enduring Crisis for the Black Family
[The Washinton Post]
Kay Hymowitz: 'In the nearly half-century in which we have gone from George Wallace to Barack Obama, America has another, less hopeful story to tell about racial progress, one that may be even harder to reverse. , 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. In some neighborhoods, two-parent families have vanished. fractured black family is not the sole explanation for these gaps, but it is central.'

Turning the air blue
[BBC News]
'The odd expletive escapes most people's mouths in times of stress, but when we fall back on swear words just for effect have we really just run out of ideas, asks Clive James.'

Calculating Christmas:
The Story Behind December 25th
[Touchstone]
William Tighe: 'Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals. Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.'
[tip of the fedora to Joseph Lawler]

A Heady Affair: The Bals des Victimes
[The Smart Set]
Tony Perrottet: 'The end of the Reign of Terror unleashed a wave of euphoria in Paris as citizens celebrated the fact that they were still alive. ...the most frenzied events were called the Victims’ Balls, which could only be attended by family members of guillotine victims.'

Brit Obit: Nick Mills
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Nick Mills was a vet who worked as a sex therapist for racehorses, devised a skateboard for a tortoise and invented a fish attractor.'

They Just Don't Get It
[Standpoint]
Jonathan Foreman: 'I am, however, often struck by the gap between what Britons think they know of America and the reality. On the other hand nobody appreciates America like a Briton who loves it, and no one loves Britain more than Anglophile Americans. Thank goodness, there are plenty of both.'

You Do the Bath
[BookForum]
Katherine Ashenburg: 'The conjunction of warm water and flesh, the flesh being one’s own or that of others, inevitably has at least a splash of the erotic. After all, when we call an encounter or relationship steamy, it harks back to the ancient connection between the bathhouse and sex. Stew originally referred to the medieval bathhouse and its moist heat; by extension, via the sexual high jinks, often commercial, that took place there, the word bathhouse came to mean a house of prostitution. Even so, when I set out to visit some bathhouses, it wasn’t in the hope of a skirmish with Eros. It was pure, disinterested research for a book I was writing about twenty-eight centuries of people washing—and not washing—their bodies. I wanted to understand the art of bathing in public. The ancient Greeks and Romans did it, the Finns, the Japanese, and those who live in countries where the Turkish bath flourishes still do, but for most of us, public bathing is a mélange of exhibitionism, voyeurism . . . and confusion.'
[Tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Nine out of ten dogmas
[The Times Of London]
Frank Furedi: 'As someone devoted to academic research, I feel increasingly embarrassed when I encounter the words "research shows" in a newspaper article. The status of research is not only exploited to prove the obvious, but also to validate the researcher's political beliefs, lifestyle and prejudice.'
[Tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Is Crime Contagious?
[Reason]
Ronald Bailey on how experiments vindicate the broken windows theory of how disorder spreads.

Curing Diversity
[City Journal]
Peter Huber: 'The new medicine shows that we're biochemically separate and unequal-and regulators are starting to catch on. Life is unfair, and while others have suspected as much before, biochemists can now prove it. You have colon cancer—possibly because a flawed APC gene failed to produce the protein that helps prevent the disease. When the cancer spreads to your liver, you need Pfizer’s Camptosar. But if you’re the one-in-ten patient with a flawed UGT1A1 gene—find out with a Food and Drug Administration–approved test kit—you lack an enzyme to purge the drug from your body before it accumulates to toxic levels. Your oncologist may be able to adjust the dose so you can take Camptosar anyway. Or maybe not. Washington can’t help. The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t guarantee equal protection at the pharmacy. No privacy-protecting, discrimination-banning law, no promise that someone else will pay, will ensure that a drug that suits others will suit your genetic profile too. If Pfizer can’t make a gentler Camptosar, it will only do business with tougher patients. Meet “pharmacogenomics”—eugenics for drugs.'

Tombstone in the Raw
[The American Spectator]
George Wittman: 'No matter how wild the mythmakers have depicted the life of the early days of Tombstone, Arizona, it never has come near the unvarnished brutal nature of the reality.'

A Short History of the Bagel
[Slate]
Joan Nathan: 'After all, who doesn't know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American breakfast bun?'

Training Day
[National Review Online]
Bill Whittle: 'Next April, I’m going to turn 50. I’ll be 50 years old. Somehow, I’ve managed to get this far without working in a large corporate office. So today I got my first taste of a world that most of you are already much more familiar with than I am: the world of modern American big business. So what lit me up like a Fourth of July skyrocket was something that seemed to mean nothing at all to the other 23 people in the room, because today, for the first time, I had to attend a mandatory sexual-harassment training course.'

Herod, Augustus, and Us
[PajamasMedia]
Michael Ledeen: 'Which brings me to one of the great failures of modern education:  the politically correct notion that all cultures are morally equivalent.  That is false and dangerous.  I do not believe that history is the story of human progress, not at all.  When ancient Rome was sacked by barbarians, it was a huge setback for mankind, and it took a very long time before we got back to the notion of law and order, as it took a very long time for us to recover the technological skills that Herod and his contemporaries had mastered.'

Love in the Time of Darwinism
[City Journal]
Kay Hymowitz: '...the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.'

It's All in Your Head
[The Wall Street Journal]
Sally Satel: 'About one in two American doctors say they prescribe placebos to their patients, and more than two-thirds believe it permissible to do so, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health. Surveys of physicians in other countries, including Israel, Denmark and the U.K., have found similar results. These revelations, published last month in the prestigious BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, seem disquieting, even unethical. After all, when doctors prescribe a medication, we trust them to dispense the real thing.'

A Temporary Uplift
[The Smart Set]
Paula Marantz Cohen: 'All hail the perfect bra...since most women wear the wrong one. I was walking along the West Side of Manhattan when I found myself in front of the Town Shop. It was a nondescript store, the name written in dowdy 1950s-style script across the front, but I knew what it was: the famous bra shop.'

Longitude forged
[The Times Of London]
Pat Rogers: 'Most people know something of the events in 1714 when the British government instituted a prize for the discovery of a successful way to find longitude at sea. The aim was to reduce the heavy toll of shipwrecks caused by the crude navigational method of dead reckoning. Dava Sobel gave new life to this episode in her bestselling book, Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time (1995), which inspired the widely viewed television programme Lost at Sea (aired in 1998). After these came a feature film directed by Charles Sturridge in 1999, starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons. All these versions place at their centre the heroic figure of John Harrison and his struggles to perfect a clock which would finally carry off the prize of £20,000. Meanwhile, an early rival who figures in the tale has gone down in history as another projector from Yorkshire, named Jeremy Thacker. Unfortunately Thacker never existed and his proposal now emerges as a hoax.'

Fire Hazard
[The Smart Set]
Tony Perrottet: 'It seemed like such a good idea at the time... Medieval partygoers loved spectacles, and every decent feast would contain pranks such as dwarves leaping out of giant pies, or jesters climbing onto the dinner table and burying their heads into tubs of custard. But one joke performance went tragically awry in 1394 Paris. It was a wedding feast attended by the young French King Charles VI, who was given to fits of madness, and his long-suffering queen, Isabel.'

Helicopter Parents Heading for a Crash
[Pajamas Media]
Katherine Berry: 'With the school year well under way, helicopter parents are spinning into overdrive, hovering over their children and micro-managing their lives. But where did it come from, this belief that good parenting is synonymous with doing everything for one’s child? What makes so many otherwise sane and rational parents believe they need to confront a “mean” teacher to demand a better grade for their child? To rally against school bans on the cell phone they gave their kid so they could keep in touch throughout the day? To fill up a child’s schedule with piano lessons, soccer, football, Scouts, and additional tutoring, then spend their evenings chauffeuring them to each?'

Far Out
[The Smart Set]
Nathan Schneider: 'Fears of technological apocalypse have lost their urgency, and so have ancient astronauts.'

The Last Frontier
[The Weekly Standard]
Charlotte Allen: 'In Alaska, the folks are self-reliant and prefer to take care of things themselves. And they like Sarah Palin.'

The Politics of the Retouched Headshot
[The Atlantic]
Virginia Postrel: 'In an image-savvy culture, we’re increasingly forced to consider just what constitutes a valid portrait. The way most of us instinctively answer the question demonstrates the difference between objectivity and truth. Humans seem hard-wired to assume that good-looking means good and, conversely, to equate physical flaws with character flaws. We may preach that beauty is skin deep, but we’re equally certain that portraits “reveal character.” In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.'

Conservative vs. Libertarian
[The New Criterion]
James Bowman: 'A national community should have the same right to defend itself and its corporate identity, however "diverse," that an individual has, and the capacity for self-defense and self-preservation is crippled or even destroyed without, at least, the following five things — a list not meant to be exhaustive. Patriotism and pride in one’s country. A knowledge of its history and traditions which encourage patriotism and pride. A willingness and ability to use force against its enemies, and to honor those who undertake the risks of employing that force. A belief in some transcendent meaning or purpose to the national as well as the individual life. A willingness to reproduce and to take the time and effort required to inculcate in the rising generation the values — I would rather say, virtues — necessary to self-preservation.'

Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, R.I.P.
[The Times Of London]
'At the height of his unappetising career in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Chicago-born Frank Rosenthal simultaneously ran four casinos in Las Vegas, most notably the world-famous Stardust Hotel. He also, bizarrely, hosted a television talkshow, The Frank Rosenthal Show, among whose celebrated guests were such entertainers as Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. Epithets like “unparalleled” and “visionary” were used to describe his achievements. Even after his disgrace his myth was given the imprimatur of a Martin Scorsese-directed film, Casino (1995), in which the character inspired by him (renamed for celluloid purposes Sam “Ace” Rothstein) was played by Robert DeNiro, and that of his glamorous screen wife by Sharon Stone.'

I'm Sorry For Your Sins
[In Character]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors, or at least of their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of political breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome.'

Peering Into the Mystery of Those Enigmatic Fragments
[The New York Times]
Edward Rothstein: 'They are not really scrolls. They are scraps — darkened, cracked fragments of parchment. Yet the faded ink strokes of Aramaic or ancient Hebrew refer to epic incantations: to trumpets blowing in battle, to praise of the righteous and condemnation of the wicked, to “the heavens, the earth and all its thinking creatures.” Go see these six encased bits of ancient text at the Jewish Museum’s new exhibition, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World,” before it closes on Jan. 4.'

The New Plastic
[Culture11]
Alex Schmidt: 'Today we're on the cusp of another technological change on par with plastic. Like Ben, the Ivy League graduates of today need to know one word, just one word to make it big: nanotechnology. Only, they don’t know that word. Lots of skeptical, serious people think nanotech will bring us everything from stain proof clothing, to skin cream that removes wrinkles (really), to oil drills that don’t damage the ground. Maybe, someday, even an elevator to the moon or a TV screen that rolls up like a yoga mat. But the companies that are already doing amazing things with nanotech are intentionally hiding it.'

Prince Michael Andreevich Romanov, R.I.P.
[The Times Of London]
'As early as the 1920s the family had been beset by pretenders. He recalled his grandmother, Grand Duchess Xenia, denouncing Anna Anderson’s claim to be her niece Anastasia. The family “looked upon Anderson and the three-ringed circus which danced around her, creating books and movies, as a vulgar insult to the memory of the Imperial Family”, he said. He felt vindicated when DNA tests indicated Anderson to be Franziska Schanzkowska, a Kashubian factory worker. He took a lighter view of less serious claimants. In the 1960s, on his first trip abroad since the war, he happily dined in New York with the celebrated restaurateur and actor Mike Romanoff. This Mike was, in fact, the Lithuanian-born Hershel Geguzin, a former trouser presser from Brooklyn — and splendid company.' 

Let the Grudges Begin
[In Character]
Philip Terzian: 'Please forgive me, but I think that forgiveness, while admirable in its way — perhaps even divine, as Pope suggests — is one of the overrated virtues. Yes, I think that Orwell is correct when he says that the instinct to seek revenge customarily dies when our foot is on the other fellow’s throat; and yes, as an Episcopalian, I suppose I am statutorily required to declare that Jesus’s prescription for one’s enemies is, on the whole, a Good Thing. But it’s not an article of faith that inspires much zeal in me, and frankly, it’s all very well for him to offer such advice, speaking as he does from his box seat at the right hand of God the Father, and so on.'

Republic of Vermont II: The Revenge
[Culture11]
Matthew Cropp: 'The State of Vermont is about as swept up in Obamamania as a state can get. While Hillary Clinton won three of four primaries on March 4th, Obama carried Vermont by a twenty point margin. The spirit of O is so intense that Vermont's Progressives — a social-democratic third party with enough seats in the legislature to put a thorn in the sides of state Democrats — have openly endorsed Obama; it is, there seems, no competition. But against this vast consensus of centralizers and statists runs an unconventional countercurrent: secession.'

From Hadrian to Gordon Brown
[The London Spectator]
Paul Johnson asks: Why do men want to rule the world?

Andrew Jackson's Inauguration Party
[The Smart Set]
Tony Perrottet: 'The man knew how to throw an inauguration party. The symbol of American statehood a wreck. Drunken revelers in the lobby. Boozers romping through the bedrooms. And all this 140 years before JFK moved in.'

Tabloid Guy
[National Review Online]
Myrna Blyth: 'Steve Dunleavy, a swashbuckling Aussie journalist, the ultimate tabloid guy, is retiring. He has worked for Rupert Murdoch for 41 years, and at Murdoch’s Post since 1976. He epitomizes the energy and derring-do of the type of journalism that is practiced daily on Fleet Street and throughout Australia. Steve is famous for lots of scoops — interviewing the Boston Strangler in jail, helping break the Son of Sam case, interviewing one of the “boiler room girls” on Chappaquiddick, managing to get an embargoed copy of Judith Exner’s tell-all autobiography. He also penned the book about Elvis’s decline that came out the week Elvis died of an overdose.'

Should A Widowed Mother Aged Thirteen Be A Saint?
[The London Spectator]
Paul Johnson: 'I have been reading about the fascinating case of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), who might fairly be described as the founder of the Tudor dynasty. She was both the beneficiary and the victim of outrageous fortune. She was, besides being a considerable heiress, the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III, and thus had a title to the throne. She was motivated throughout her life by strong religious impulses. Having discharged her marital duties to her last husband Lord Derby, she obtained permission to leave his side and take religious vows.... Someone should write her life as an example of how a woman of strong beliefs can survive a traumatic childhood and become a credit and exemplar to society.'

Burger Trimuphant
[The Weekly Standard]
Victorino Matus: 'How did a sandwich once reviled as something unsanitary and purchased outside factories and at carnivals come so far? The answer can be found in this little book, The Hamburger: A History. "What do Americans think of when they think of the hamburger?" asks the author, Josh Ozersky. "Is it a sizzling disc of goodness, served in a roadside restaurant dense with local lore, or the grim end product of a secret, sinister empire of tormented animals and unspeakable slaughtering practices? Is it cooking or commodity? An icon of freedom or the quintessence of conformity?" As you might guess, it depends on who you ask.'

Man and Sillyman
[The Wall Street Journal]
Kay Hymowitz: 'Not so long ago, unmarried men were called "bachelors," but the word now seems oddly out of date. Back in the day, bachelors were a minor, outsider group populated mostly by loners of ambiguous sexuality or Hefnerian swingers with a taste for cool jazz and dry martinis. Today, as men marry well into their 20s and 30s and enjoy both a boundless pool of sexually available women and a commercial culture awash with "stupid fun," the young, unmarried male has become a far more prominent -- and more vexing -- social type. He has devolved into the child man -- or, if you like, man child, boy man or "basement boy" (a nod to his penchant for taking up residence in the rec rooms of suburban parents) -- with crude obsessions for Xboxes, "hot babes," and Will Farrell and Seth Rogen movies.'

Charlatans to the Rescue
[The Wall Street Journal]
Linda Seebach: 'Ever since psychiatrist Leo Kanner identified a neurological condition he called autism in 1943, parents whose children have been diagnosed with the most severe form of the illness -- usually in the toddler stage, before age 3 -- have found themselves desperately searching for some way not to lose their children to autism's closed-off world. Unfortunately, such parents have often found misguided doctors, ill-informed psychologists and outright charlatans eager to proffer help.'

Look Who's Irrational Now
[The Wall Street Journal]
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway: '"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.'

Tortilla Nation
[The Weekly Standard]
Victorino Matus: 'YOU MIGHT HAVE heard that September is National Preparedness Month. Or that it is National Cholesterol Education Month. But did you know it is also, for the first time, National Tortilla Month? In a member's resolution, California representative Devin Nunes states, "I would like to recognize September as National Tortilla Month to highlight the contributions and hard work of this important industry." As in a staple of the Latin American diet has become so dominant in the United States as to merit thirty days of dedication.'

How the cult of childhood self-esteem explains America's Got Talent
[Culture11]
Amber Bryer-Wotte: 'Season after season, show after show, America proves that the its combo of ambition, confidence, and high-flying weirdness positively dwarf its genuine talent. The most plausible explanation is that there is a silent scourge in America that has taken otherwise humble Americans and turned them into douchebags in record numbers. And that scourge — that blight on our national character — is too much self-esteem.'

The Recess Regimen
[The Washington Post]
Bill Turque: 'So last year [Principal] Wright decided to outsource recess. He hired Sports4Kids, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that introduces students to a regimen of traditional playground games, along with a more closely supervised version of such team sports as basketball. The program also stresses conflict resolution, with disagreements mediated by, of all things, rock-paper-scissors.'

The Lurking Menace Of Presidential Wives
[National Review]
John Derbyshire: 'Peter Bauer’s insight of forty years ago that foreign aid is “a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries” remains as true today as it was then. I came across a person...who is intimately familiar with the workings of USAID, the federal government agency responsible for giving our money to foreigners. Why does an agency like USAID just keep going, I asked this person (who, by the way, is a lifelong Republican), after decades of futility? “It’s the wives,” he replied. “Say again?” “The wives. U.S. presidents don’t care about aid. ...they mainly do it for the wives. There’s nothing Laura likes better than being photographed holding some African AIDS baby. Cindy McCain is worse. It’s the damn wives that help keep it going.”'

Getting It
[The New Criterion]
James Bowman: 'Naturally, no one wants to be outside the circle of those who "get it" — a formulation once applied mainly to jokes but now used to indicate a political group-identity which defines itself in part by stressing the stupidity of those who do not share it. To be among those who "get it" is not only to hold a certain set of views that make one reliably progressive but also, by holding them, to be a member of the progressive club— which, like the Starbucks club, is decidedly up-market socially. The phrase...was really an exercise in political branding, in wearing the cool T-shirt or flip-flops or sun-glasses, all with the labels on the outside, and not the tacky or down-market knock-offs from Wal-Mart. Unsurprisingly, then, "getting it" involved, among many other things, hostility to Wal-Mart itself — and, less vocally, to the sort of people who continue in defiance of fashion, both political and merchandising, to patronize its numerous emporia.'

The Art Of Teaching
[National Review]
Thomas Hibbs: '[The Miracle Worker] is one of the greatest American statements on the nature of education, the craft of teaching, and the many obstacles to its implementation. The story of Sullivan and Keller remains a devastating critique of the self-esteem movement and an affirmation of the proper role of obedience and repetition in the life of the student. Most dramatically - and most surprisingly - it insists that the true teacher cannot simply be an instrument of the wishes of the student's family.'

Coming Up Conservative
[Culture11]
J. Peter Freire: 'Earlier this year, the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr. was attended by tributes to his mentorship of young people throughout his career. Though frequently considered conservatism's patriarch, in this respect, he was also its nurturing midwife. He had effectively brought up the next generation up -- one that now spans an entire movement. But who now waits in the wings? And are they being trained to become thoughtful journalists, or right-wing hacks?'

Anchormen: The legends of Annapolis
[National Review]
James S. Robbins: 'A recent Washington Post profile of John McCain’s years at the Naval Academy portrayed him as an unruly, fun-loving, under-achieving Midshipman struggling with his obligation to live up to his family’s brilliant military legacy. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in 1958, five spots above the “Anchorman,” the lowest-ranking midshipman. ...the bottom of the class tends to produce a different kind of leader than the top. Those who wind up at the foot are often there by choice. They could do better if they studied, but they would rather trade class ranking for other pursuits. They tend to be the risk takers, the innovators, usually very well liked and in their own way driven. They know how to get into trouble, and more importantly how to get out of it. They also tend to have more than their share of luck.'

Hollywood Infidel
[The New York Observer]
Spencer Morgan meets Andrew Breibart: 'He said that so far the media has not figured out what to make of him, but that there was nothing mysterious or ambiguous about his cause. He wants decency to prevail. “My father-in-law’s mother committed suicide in the great depression. He said to me, ‘Movies saved me, every week I would see heroes winning and I thought I could be that.’ That’s a pretty powerful argument. Why do you think people come to the United States of America? Are people smuggling the constitution under their pillow and reading it at night in Bangladesh? Or are they seeing things in American film? A movie could have a direct message with Maggie Gyllenhaal and the Gyllenhaal triumvirate of hate that says that America is horrible, and yet that message is overwhelmed by the proliferation of excess on the screen. They’re like ‘Did you see there were four different types of orange juice on the table? I’d rather go to that place where those people are complaining about how badly they have it.’ You know it’s like I think that people read between the lines, that America, despite the fact that our Hollywood class says ‘It sucks here. It’s horrible.’ People see it on the screen and go, ‘No it doesn’t. Look at all that shit you have! It’s so good there, I want a piece of it.’”'

Would You Mind Turing It Down?
[Standpoint]
Peter Whittle: 'Most of us, thankfully, still have relatively little direct experience of violent crime, but the fact is that everyone but the richest now suffers death by a thousand antisocial cuts: by the petty rudenesses, the incivilities and the transgressions that might not amount to crime but which manage to make us despair, fill us with fear and finally inspire more and more of us to call it a day, pick up sticks and flee in the name of what pollsters call “quality of life”.'

Infantilification of Us All
[Standpoint]
Noel Malcolm: 'The dictionary defines "infantilism" as "a condition in which infantile behaviour patterns persist", and "infantilisation" as "the action of prolonging or perpetuating a state of infancy". So I am looking for another word - "infantilification", perhaps? - to describe what I encounter on an almost daily basis: the deliberate treatment of adults as if they were infants, either to make them docile, or simply for the sake of being liked.'

The Traffic Guru
[The Wilson Quarterly]
Tom Vanderbilt: 'In the last few years...one traffic engineer did achieve a measure of global celebrity, known, if not exactly by name, then by his ideas. His name was Hans Monderman. The idea that made Monderman...most famous is that traditional traffic safety ­infra­structure—­warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so ­on—­is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.'

Oh God
[Search Magazine]
P.J. O'Rourke: 'Is faith compatible with science? Does science take faith into account? Should scientists keep religious faith in mind while they do their scientific theorizing, their scientific experimenting, their scientific … But here I begin to lose faith in my ability to ask the question. I have some idea what God does. I have no idea what scientists do. My entire store of information about scientific activity comes from what I’ve seen in the movies.'

Anarchy on the Internet
[National Review]
Thomas Sowell: 'The Internet provides vast amounts of information, but it can also spread vast amounts of misinformation, or even deliberately misleading disinformation. For more than two weeks, scarcely a day has gone by without e-mails pouring in to me, asking about columns that someone has written and brazenly spread around the Internet with my name on them. We usually think of “identity theft” as involving using someone else’s name for economic fraud. But identity theft can be used for political fraud as well — as in this case.'

Chinese Shadows
[National Review]
John Derbyshire: 'The various petty deceptions that have come to light at the Beijing Olympics - the computer-generated "fireworks," the bogus "ethnic minority" dancers, the little girl who lip-synced because the kid with the voice wasn't cute enough, the suspiciously preteen look of some of the "16-year-olds" on the gals' gymnastics squad ... What's going on here? Or, the question I'm getting asked a lot: How much of this is totalitarian, how much is, well, Chinese?'

Men-Bashing
[RachelLucas.com]
Rachel Lucas: "...if you really have a need to express your loathing and disdain for an entire group of people (and to make money off of it), there is one safe target and that is men. I am actively embarrassed by the hordes of man-hating women out there doing their level best to convince every man they come across that we’re a bunch of mean, bitter bitches. I wish they would grow up...."

The Death Of The Monoculture
[The Smart Set]
Ryan Bigge: 'The season of popcorn blockbusters, beach reads, summer girls, and boys of summer has arrived. And the only thing missing is the (un)official song of the summer — a ubiquitous pop smash that demands we shake our hands in the air and sing along as though we had not a care in the world.  ...So where is this year's hot, hazy hit? Although New York magazine recently handicapped eight potential summer songs...a leading contender has yet to emerge. And at this point, we're starting to run out of summer.  If you wish to play the game of blame, the death of the monoculture has become a popular choice in recent years. The infrastructure that made the winner-take-all monoculture possible during the mid-to-late 20th century — the radio-MTV-record store monopoly of music distribution — is gone forever, thanks to the Internet.'

The Perils Of Elderspeak
[RachelLucas.com]
Rachel Lucas comments on a subject that really ticks me off too: "I spent many years working in nursing homes and cancer clinics, and you wouldn’t think those sorts of jobs would make you want to physically beat on your coworkers, but oh how I did want to. Because I swear to God, few things make me feel stabby like hearing someone talk to an elderly or sick person in babytalk. Not only does it simply not help, but it’s rude and disrespectful. And now there has been an actual study done that proves I am right."

The Tudor Delusion
[Times Of London]
Clifford S.L. Davies: 'The Tudors” and “the Tudor Age” are among the staples of English history. How can we do without them? Not only are the monarchs themselves referred to, individually and collectively – in books, articles, plays, films, television series and exhibitions – by their patronymic, but their subjects become “Tudor men and women”. In fifty years of studying sixteenth-century England, it did not occur to me to question the convention. Nor, apparently, did it occur to other historians. But how much was the “Tudor” word used at the time? Did the monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I think of themselves as a “Tudor dynasty”? Did their subjects think of themselves as “Tudor people” living in “Tudor England”?'

The Spoiled Children Of Capitalism
[National Review]
Jonah Goldberg: "Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude."

Got Gout?
[The Smart Set]
"Gout is a strange, medieval type of medical condition that manifests without warning, often in a person’s big toe, of all places, and causes almost unbearable pain and suffering without being fatal. Gout disappears just as mysteriously, and always threatens to reappear at any time, like some sort of invisible, unreasonable, otherworldly punishment. ...Cases of gout have doubled in recent decades...."

Olympic Fever
[The Smart Set]
"If the Olympic Village descends into orgiastic debauchery this summer — as it did during the 2004 Olympics, when 130,000 free condoms were given away along with 30,000 sachets of lubricant, or during the 2000 Sydney Games, when the Durex supply had to be supplemented with an emergency shipment of 20,000 extras — athletes in Beijing will be only be upholding the finest traditions of classical Greece."

Self-Interest Is Bad? Enough with the hectoring.
[The Weekly Standard]
Andrew Ferguson: "Oh, terrific. Now we have two of them--two presidential candidates, presumptive nominees of their respective parties, who insist they will not rest until they have inspired all of us stick-in-the-mud Americans to reach celestial heights of personal fulfillment by committing ourselves to a life of service. Service to what? Service to .  .  . something or other. The phrase that both John McCain and Barack Obama use is a "cause higher than yourself" or "greater than self" or alternatively a "cause greater than your own self-interest." Whatever the precise wording...we'll be hearing it a lot till November."

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics
[New York Times]
Ben Stein: "My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love."

Angelina Jolie has failed the name game
[The London Telegraph]
Mother-to-be Judith Woods: "My delight over the safe arrival of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's twins this weekend has been tempered with a serious outbreak of the Baby Blues. Bafflingly, they have failed to give their newborns suitably preposterous names."

Independence Forever
[The American Spectator]
Lisa Fabrizio on how Americans can remedy their lack of understanding the meaning behind the celebration of the 4th of July: So how then could adults be expected to gain a more genuine knowledge and love for our nation's founding?  One way is to rent or watch the movie 1776...."

America's Special Grace
[Asia Times Online]
Essay by Spengler: "If America has been given a special grace, it is because its founders as well as every generation of its people have taken as the basis of America's legitimacy the Judeo-Christian belief that God loves every individual, and most of all the humblest. Rights under law, from the American vantage point, are sacred, not utilitarian, convenient or consensual. America does not of course honor the sanctity of individual rights at all times and in all circumstances, but the belief that rights are sacred rather than customary or constructed never has been abandoned."

The Oprahization of Academia
[PajamasMedia]
Mary Grabar: "I blame it on women, specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate "ways of knowing." The feminization of education has led to the idolization of Oprah."

Obama's Black Edge
[John Derbyshire]
"I think there is more to be said about Obama's blackness as a factor in people's voting. There are positives and negatives to it. My rough guess - and I'm the guy who proclaimed that "Obama is toast" when the Rev'm Wright scandal broke, so don't be running down to the bookmaker with this - my rough guess is that net-net, it's a positive. Well, let's see what we've got."

Wrong Prescription
[The Wall Street Journal]
"How the emptying of state-run mental hospitals produced a social disaster"

Of course, people thought I was kidding. And, of course, I wasn't."

Belvedere: Good essay, but I must disagree with his statement:

Bond famously possesses a license to kill, but in some ways he also embodies license itself, the spirit of anarchy and transgression. No rules apply to 007. He lives beyond good and evil, outside the confining strictures of the biblical commandments. 

Bond does not live outside the strictures.  He is a force for good who is willing to do the dirty work none of us has the guts to do.

THE RELIGION OF PEACE...