Gloria, In Excelsis Deo................

Mannheim Steamroller..........Angels We Have Heard On High

On the importance of Rupert Murdock....

......................................to your basic average pro football fan.

Have you hugged a fracker lately........?

If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, maybe a good place to start would be to produce more natural gas.

    via

Seems unlikely..........................

The recovery of truth requires the restoration of trusted authority.  At the moment, that is nowhere in sight.   The question before us is whether the current elite class can ever resume that function.  The crisis of authority, currently at the stage of paralysis, will otherwise continue to warp and fracture the top-down model of liberal democracy long managed by this class.

Martin Gurri,   The Revolt Of The Public

Stuff we never think about...............

     Rush wanted to accomplish just one more thing before leaving Congress.  For some time, he had been lobbying General Washington on the need to inoculate American soldiers against smallpox.   On February 13. 1777, in a formal letter to the general on behalf of the medical committee, he requested that Washington order all his troops to be inoculated.  He suggested that until this was done, the southern troops that were heading up from Virginia to join him in New Jersey and Pennsylvania should not travel through Philadelphia "where the infection now prevails."  Washington agreed.
     By making sure the troops were inoculated, this three-paragraph letter may well have saved more lives than anything else done by Rush or any other physician involved with the Revolutionary War.

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

Fifty years ago.......................

Aretha Franklin.................................The House That Jack Built

Fifty years ago............................

Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart...I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight

Hopes and fears............................

Nat King Cole...................................O Little Town of Bethlehem

Likely this weekend...............

Opening paragraphs...................

     In 49 BCE, with the dramatic proclamation "the die is cast," Julius Caesar made the fateful decision to cross the Rubicon River at the head of his 13th Legion.  The crossing of the Rubicon was momentous because the river demarcated the boundary between Italy and the province of Gaul to the north, where Caesar was serving as governor.  Suspicious of his growing power, the Senate had ordered him to disband his army and return to Rome.  But Caesar, defying the Senate, decided to return not in submission but in rebellion, marching on Rome with his legion.  By crossing into Italian territory with an army, Caesar had irrevocably made himself a traitor.
     For all its notoriety, Caesar's river crossing was a relatively modest affair in which the future ruler and his legionnaires merely waded across a shin-deep stream.  Nonetheless, this act put him in irreconcilable opposition to Rome's Senate, making the expression "crossing the Rubicon" forever synonymous with passing a point of no return.

-General Stanley McChrystal,  Leaders:  Myth and Reality

Gen'l Washington...................

Civilian control over the military has always been an important part of the American experiment:

     John Adams spoke soon afterward, sharing an idea publicly that many in Congress had only whispered about privately;  the fear that overblown patriotism was turning the commander in chief into some kind of superhero - or worse, a newfangled democratic king.  "I have been distressed," Adams said, "to see some members of this house disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molten.  I speak here of the superstitious veneration sometimes paid to Gen'l Washington.  Altho' I honour him for his good qualities . . . in this house I feel myself his superior.  In private life I shall always acknowledge that he is mine."

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

For context, the year in which Adams was speaking was 1777.

Fifty years ago.......................

The Chambers Brothers.......................Time Has Come Today



This eleven minute classic was released in 1967.  It was still high on the music charts in 1968.  Lyrics here.

Maybe it's just me................

..........but I think you'd have to search far and wide to find someone who can string words together better than Camille Paglia:

"We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric."

and while you are at it, do visit Tail Feathers

Shards.................................

“If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God.  And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.” 


-Craig D. Lounsbrough

enlargeable image, and guess at what it is, here

The wisdom of ..........................

..............................................Tom Wilsons:

Let your heart be light.............................

Frank Sinatra................Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

Fifty years ago.......................

Cream....................................................Sunshine Of Your Love

On leading................

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In my Amazon shopping cart.......

“The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse. The technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are a symptom of poverty, not a cause of poverty. This book argues that the cause of poverty is the absence of political and economic rights, the absence of a free political and economic system that would find the technical solutions to the poor’s problems. The dictator whom the experts expect will accomplish the technical fixes to technical problems is not the solution; he is the problem.” 

-William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

On linchpins.....................

Seth Godin responds to a critic here.  I vote with Seth.

"The future is defined by those that change the past. We need you to make a ruckus."