Minitrue

The rulers of Airstip One knew better than to leave the scrubbing of history to amateurs - they employed an entire professional bureaucracy to ensure that all past cross-references matched the new history. I wonder whether Uncle O included funds for his own Minitrue among the job-creation provisions of the recent "stimulus" bill.

The biggest heist in history

Here's the official website for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It sounds as though they're actually proud of stealing my money and wasting it on vast ruinous mountains of crap.

A lot of the so-called "stimulus package" goes towards funding federal programs, none of which ever have their budgets cut. This means that future budgets will allocate even more stolen money to continue funding the projects at their inflated "stimulus" levels. The effects of that are seen here, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office.

This whole thing is yet another obscenity produced by the shameless bastards who claim to be our government.

Change! Yes We Can!

Fun hopenchange comes to Japan.

Perhaps the best chocolates in the world

Ruben's Chocolates, right here in central Illinois. They ship worldwide by the usual methods, and via customers. Every time I visited their store in Champaign there was at least one customer stocking up on chocolate gifts before traveling, to be delivered upon arrival to fellow orchestral musicians or relatives or colleagues.

T. S. Eliot on the New English Bible

Lege. Two excerpts:

The age covered by the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I was richer in writers of genius than is our own, and we should not expect a translation made in our time to be a masterpiece of our literature or, as was the Authorized Version of 1611, an exemplar of English prose for successive generations of writers.

We are, however, entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: "What is happening to the English language?"

So long as the New English Bible was used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the twentieth century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.

There may be Ministers of the Gospel who do not realize that the music of the phrase, of the paragraph, of the period is an essential constituent of good English prose, and who fail to understand that the life of a reading of Gospel and Epistle in the liturgy is in this music of the spoken word.