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.

Right libertarian

That's about right (here, via dylan)

My Political Views
I am a right moderate social libertarian
Right: 6.25, Libertarian: 2.72

Political Spectrum Quiz

A handy guide to Michael Hogan's amazing acting eye

Courtesy of my friends and fellow Battlestar Galactica geeks, Dan and Carrie Largent, the Saul Tigh Acting Eye Guide:

//_O The all-purpose Saul Tigh emoticon

'-] = Happy

`-[ = Angry

"-O = Surprised

*-} = Drunk

,-u = Looking in the mirror in the morning

Government smokes

Sp President Obama signed the SCHIP bill yesterday, and the government program has a very special funding source:

The Congressional Budget Office says the bill will enable states to cover more than four million uninsured children by 2013, while continuing coverage for seven million youngsters. The bill will increase tobacco taxes to offset the increase in spending, estimated at more than $32 billion over four and a half years.

It's now your patriotic duty to smoke like a chimney. It's for the kids! And if the feds are smart, they'll start marketing their own line of Patriotic Old Glory Presidential cigarettes:

• cherry-scented Washingtons
  
• Lincolns: 100s and 120s
  
• Nixons: short and crooked
  
• Obamas: with a premium dark wrapper
  

And how about a line of Clinton cigars?

Practically giving it away

Mathematica Home Edition is now available for only $295.00, and it's not some crippled toy version - it's the whole shebang. See http://reference.wolfram.com for the complete language documentation and see http://blog.wolfram.com for neat things you can do with it.

CPR for the 10th Amendment...

...in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, the patient is already dead.

Poets on the Psalms

Via dylan, an exchange of letters by two American poets, Peter O'Leary and Alicia Ostriker, bewildered by the Psalms even as they're drawn to them. I'm grateful for their mention of John Milton's psalm translations and paraphrases, collected here via google:

• paraphrases of Psalms 1-8 and 80-88
  
• Psalm 114 at age 15
  
• Psalm 135
  
• Psalms 80-89
  

When hooligans Bach down

A recent article from Theodore Dalrymple. Incipit:

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.

Have you tried to memorize the Psalms?

Or some of them? Or did you manage to get all of them? Why did you do it? How did it go? Which translation did you use?

The internet, 1969

Look ma - no keyboards!

The Bill Awards

And the winner for best use of background keyboards in a song is... Aimee Mann for her song Phoenix. It's a distillation of Everlast's quiet hip-hop-influenced keyboards and a whole lot of beautiful harmonic exploration. You can get a taste of the keys in the video here, but the performance and mix are much better on the album, @#%&*! Smilers.

Reid Buckley on conservatism

Via Jim Curley of Bethune Catholic, an article by Reid Buckley:

Where are our Friedrich Hayeks of The Road to Serfdom, our Eric Voegelins of The New Science of Politics, our Russell Kirks of The Conservative Mind? Where is our philosopher? Meantime, on the practical front, what can conservatives do? The very first thing is to dissociate from the Republican Party, which has become an albatross around the neck of integrity.

It was just a wee little beastie

The 1981 video is funny enough:


but Nancy Nall, a "news-paper" writer, made it hilarious:

Rotary-dial phones! Those old modems with the cups! You’ll notice one of the participating papers was the Columbus Dispatch — that’s because the service provider for all this was Compuserve, based there. I can still summon the sight of the copy editor whose job it was to handle the upload, and Kirk will remember his name, but I don’t. I sent this to someone this morning, who replied: It’s like a slasher movie; THE INTERNET’S IN THE HOUSE!!!! GET OUT!!!! IT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR PROFESSION. Man, I’ll say.

Fr Neuhaus on Bible translations

Three articles from his magazine First Things in which the good Father rails against our Catholic Newspeak Bible and endorses the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. A tip o' the hat to Dylan, an aficionado of good translations.

• Bible Babel, May 2001
  
• More on Bible Babel, January 2006
  
  • "...it is very difficult to share thoughts when we do not share words."
• 70 or 70x7?, July 27, 2007
  

Noted in passing

Doc Cottle must have brought thousands of cartons of smokes along with him to the dedication of the Battlestar Galactica museum four years ago.

Fr Z's SSPX FAQ

Lege. Basically the only thing that has changed so far is the status of the four SSPX bishops (and perhaps a few hearts). There's a long row to hoe yet.