February 18, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

It's time to grow up. Baseball is played by human beings, not by fictional heros.
List of ways to "enhance performance" in baseball (not including Viagra):

1) steal signs
2) steal bases
3) tip off batters as to what pitch is coming.
4) cork bats
5) scuff the ball
6) put vaseline on the ball
7) spit on the ball
8) pretend to tag a runner
9) come off the base to take a throw
10) scuff the ball with sandpaper
11) "Accidentally" throw at the head of the batter
11) cut the ball with a razor blade
12) hidden ball trick
13) pretend to be hit by a pitch
14) amphetamines
!5) steroids
16) anti-depressants
17) booze
18) HGH
19) new designer drugs.
20) Tommy John surgery.

The greatest moment in baseball history, Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" was on a pitch he'd been tipped to expect.

Here's our check on the utopian moralists: ask a group of young athletic physicians if they would take HGH or steroids to give them a chance to play major league baseball, knowing the health consequences. I've done this. If they're honest they'll almost all say 'Yes'.

Here's the great jazz guitarist John Pizarelli doing Take Me Out To The Ballgame.:

February 16, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

The recent beheading of a Muslim wife by her "moderate" Muslim husband prompted us to revisit this essay.It first appeared in The American Thinker in Dec. 2007

Jihadism, Liberalism and Perversion
By Stephen Rittenberg, MD

Our frequent exposure to the exhibitionistic snuff porn of Jihadis has prompted numerous attempts at psychological explanation. Clinicians know how comforting it is to have a diagnostic label. Correct diagnosis can be the first step to cure.

There are problems, however, with psychological diagnosis. In totalitarian states, dissidents are often locked up in ‘mental hospitals' for their ‘crazy' behavior. They are diagnosed as ‘sociopaths' and ‘narcissists', interested in individual freedom rather than behaving like ‘normal' conformists to the system. Shrinkwrapped (Sophisticated Diagnosis) has commented on the various problems with psychiatric diagnosis in our own culture, including its tendency to relieve the ‘sick' person of responsibility for his actions.

Psychological explanations offered for Islamic savagery are useful, as far as they go. However, they can be overly generalized and undynamic when applied as labels to Jihadis. Writers like Dr. Sanity and the Sanity Squad have highlighted the narcissistic insecurities of Islamic males and their defensive need to control women to shore up their own masculinity.

However, clinical experience tells us that many men suffer from the same narcissistic insecurities and don't resort to violence to assuage their deficiencies. Only Islamic clerics sanction the murder of women who have been raped. Only Islamic clerics issue murderous fatwas, celebrate murder of artists, and mobilize sword-wielding men to demand death for a female teacher who allowed children to name a teddy bear 'Mohammed'. Only Islam proudly exhibits videos of throat-cutters torturing helpless victims.

It is the intense pleasure derived from religiously sanctioned murderous lust that makes the jihadis so dangerous. The degree of narcissism matters little; these are not people who can be 'treated' by shoring up their narcissism, and bolstering their self esteem. It is our very civilized, therapeutic culture that makes us flinch from taking the necessary measures needed to deal with such foes. In truth, it may be our own narcissism -- the need to reassure ourselves of our superior civilized nature -- that causes us to obsess about whether necessary measures for waging war, like water boarding, and Guantanamo constitute 'torture'.

In our politically correct age, the word ‘perversion' has been banished from the circles of multicultural academia, literary and journalistic usage. It is, we are instructed, ‘judgmental', tends to unfairly ‘normalize' heterosexuality and is, like the ‘N-word', insulting. It creates hierarchical differences and that is illiberal.

Nevertheless, despite the efforts to remove it from the language and/or because of that effort, it still carries an emotional charge. In a time when gleeful murderous terrorists blow themselves up daily, it behooves us to face the reality that militant Islamic jihadism is a perversion and its practitioners derive a gratification that is more than simply defensive against feeling of inadequacy. It is the pleasurable charge that comes from throwing off all inhibitions on the discharge of murderous rage.

The late Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a French psychoanalyst and holocaust survivor who devoted her clinical efforts to understanding sexual perversions*. She realized there was a connection between individual sexual pathology and political movements.

Her intuitive insight was that Nazism's appeal, on both the individual and mass psychological level, derived from its power as psycho-sexual perversion. (See, for instance, Cabaret and Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood.) Having seen and survived what happened in the heart of civilized Europe, she discovered, through her clinical work, that perversions were not just the sexual kinkiness of a small minority.

She realized that perversions were not even merely ‘sexual' in the narrow behavioral meaning of the word, but that erotic pleasure could be intensified by the discharge of aggressive wishes, including the inflicting of, and submitting to, pain up to the point of death. She broadened our understanding of perversions to include, not just behavior but modes of thinking.

What she found was that perversions are an essential way in which the human mind and psyche rebel against and seek to evade reality. That reality is rooted in biology: the male-female difference. The intolerance and fear of such differences can result in the practices of Wahabbi Islam, wherein women are so feared that they must be hidden and brutalized like beasts of the field. Muslim men's terror of women is undoubtedly accompanied by a high incidence of hidden (not so hidden when they travel to the Riviera) perverse sexuality.

Long before there was a Norman Mailer proclaiming his artistic right to transgress bourgeois laws constraining sex and aggression, there was the Marquis de Sade. Chasseguet-Smirgel wrote about the celebrated French author, and pointed out that in his fantastical world of perversion, (see Mailer's preoccupation with ‘buggery') the incest taboo is violated, and thus the generational boundaries are breached.

Sade celebrates non-genital sex which is celebrated as an outlet for violence (sadism); bodies are dismembered, children are the targets of violent sexual discharge, humans and animals copulate and all differences are obliterated. Sade's work was designed to overturn the biblical injunction against perversion, but also to overturn the differences laid down at the beginning of the Old Testament, between the sexes, the animals, in fact between differentiated life and inanimate chaos.

God brought order out of chaos and Sade wishes to return to chaos. For Sade, the elimination of God means all sexual and aggressive behavior is permitted, including mass murder. Love is repeatedly mocked and dismissed. The release of all constraint on aggression maximizes pleasure.

The most intense Sadean pleasure is sexual murder, since no need exists to protect the object of sexual desire from aggression. Love cannot exist in the Sadean world because it puts limits on the pleasurable indulgence of murderous wishes. Perversion aims at destruction, destruction of difference, of the living order of the universe and its replacement with chaos and deadness. Long before Hitler put Sade's ideas into practice, Sade celebrated mass murder and the erotic pleasure to be gotten from torturing victims.

Chasseguet-Smirgel's insight revealed that, besides perverse behavior there are perverse modes of thinking, with the same aim of erasing distinctions and eliminating systematic thought itself. Thus, for example, Post-Modernism represents perverse thinking in its denial of the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, superior and inferior cultures. When it argues that ‘male' and ‘female' are ‘constructed' identities, it argues against the immutable differences imposed by biological reality.

Socialism is similarly perverse in its radical egalitarianism, denying differences of talent, intelligence, motivation, skill. Liberalism's affirmative action is perverse in its effort to impose an egalitarianism that is unattainable. It seeks to correct the "socially constructed" discriminatory differences. (Under its strictures shouldn't there be affirmative action for white basketball players?) This is perverse thinking. Modern politically correct liberalism is shot through with perversion. Renouncing her early socialist utopianism, Chasseguet-Smirgel became a conservative.

Ideas are perverse when they seek to undermine distinctions that are necessary for thought itself to exist. When such distinctions are eliminated, anything goes. When liberalism asserts that al Qaeda and America are equal threats to the world, it is being perverse. In fact, when liberals argue that modern Christianity and Islam are both ‘religions of peace' they are being perverse.

When language is debased by perverse thinking war becomes peace and all distinctions are rendered meaningless. Socialism embraces perverse thinking when it argues for a utopian egalitarianism that constitutes an assault on human differences, the differences that exist -- of talent, motivation, achievement, skill, and worth. It is perverse in ultimately reducing the vitality of difference in favor of deadening sameness.

Ideas do have consequences. Mass murder, idealized by Sade, became mass murder carried out by Hitler. Civilization is a fragile thing, and once perversion rules, there are no limits to the human imagination. We thought Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were the worst, but now we see Islamic Jihadis strapping bombs to babies and blowing them up. Once again, we are in a struggle between civilization and perversion. Some remain puzzled by the alliance between modern day left-liberalism and jihadism. Perversion explains the puzzle.

To the perverse jihadis who constitute large numbers of Muslims, the existence of the female sex is threatening, hence women are treated as little more than cattle, with fewer rights than some lower animals. Why do Western feminists keep their mouths shut? Because many are themselves leftist utopian perverts, who also cannot tolerate the existence of two sexes and secretly long to submit to the appealing sadism of the jihadis.

One of the great fascinations of the Marquis de Sade was with child murder. In Justine he offers a lengthy argument for why parents should sexually assault, then murder their children. The most primal human bonds exist to be destroyed to the accompaniment of erotic pleasure. Deriving pleasure from sexual assault on and murder of children is the ultimate denial of God, the moral distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between humans and animals. It is ultimately the assertion that man is no different from the lowest form of matter.

What Sade imagined and longed for has come to pass.

In recent years, since the exhibitionistic torture and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the world has been exposed to depravities that would delight the Marquis. Palestinian (Let's give them a state!) children are repeatedly celebrated as little jihadis ready to blow themselves up while murdering Jews.

They are indoctrinated in the erotic pleasures instantly available to mass murderers: all those eager virgins. There has been a strangely muted reaction from the civilized world. We have heard repeated calls for restraint on our part, warnings against "Islamophobia", and we take pride in minimizing casualties when fighting the Sadean jihadis.

Why is it that our media are so reluctant to report such occurrences as the recent successful effort by a jihadi in Pakistan to turn his year old infant into a bomb, killing more than 100 innocent bystanders? Readers of the New York Times would not have known of this ‘martyrdom'. You would have to turn to the Pakistan Tribune to learn the following:

"KARACHI: The Oct 19 bombing on Benazir Bhutto's procession in Karachi which killed over 170 people, was carried out by a person who used a one-year-old child strapped with fatal bombs..."
The very idea of making a living, breathing baby into an inanimate object, a bomb to slaughter hundreds, is straight out of the Sadean universe and the religious system that justifies it is properly called ‘perverse'.

The reason we hear so little condemnation, much less military resolve to annihilate these savage perverts, is Western culture's thralldom to contemporary, politically correct liberalism, which is itself perverse. Post-modern Liberalism shares the mindset of the jihadis and unconsciously enjoys their enactment of liberal fantasies.

Civilization has been built painstakingly on difference: male and female, yes and no, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. There are rules, laws, customs, hard-won scientific knowledge. Civilization is a fragile guardian of reality, which must be defended from the onslaught of barbarians wishing to abolish rules and differences.

In each of our psyches the perverse temptation must be fought, if civilization is to survive. The more advanced the civilization, the more intense the appeal to throw off constraints. Often individual rebels are rewarded with the title of ‘artist', but Sade was an artist whose ideas were realized in Nazism.

When the discharge of polymorphous perversion is united with murderous aggression we get Jihadism. Such perverse ideologies could be more easily fought if not for the politically correct liberal urge to submit to them in their crudest totalitarian form.

*Creativity And Perversion, Janine Chasseguet Smirgel, 1996

To the memory of Mme. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel.

Stephen Rittenberg, MD is a psychoanalyst.

February 14, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A suburban Buffalo man who founded a cable TV station to promote better understanding of Muslims in the U.S. has been arrested on charges he beheaded his wife.

Orchard Park police arrested Muzzammil Hassan, 44, on Thursday for investigation of second-degree murder, The Buffalo News reported.
Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Her body was found at his business, Bridges TV.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for President Obama to unclench his fist, reach out to Islam and recognize that under sharia law Mr. Muzzamil Hassan was simply carrying out his religious obligations. At the same time doing so would bring America into greater congruence with multi-cultural Great Britain, where Muslims freely preach 'death to the Jews' while Geert Wilders is barred from entering the country to warn of Islam's threat.

February 08, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

A-Rod's use of steroids is not surprising to this observer who assumes all professional athletes will take whatever they can to improve their performance and add to their income. What surprises me is the stupidity of Yankee management. The policy of giving long term contracts to aging players is to guaranty long term failure. Alex Rodriguez's immaturity was well known, and unlike another troubled player, Manny Ramirez, A-Rod at bat in the clutch is feared only by Yankee fans. Maybe the Yankees could approach Madonna to buyout A-Rod's contract and start a new League of her own.

I'm not one of those Yankee fans who insists they must win the World Series or the season is a failure. What irked me the most about the Yankees last season was not that they lost but they played with zero intensity, as if they were bored and eager to get back to their celebrity lives after the game.

It's tough to be a Yankee fan these days. This observer is cringing in anticipation of the new Stadium. Will the sound system assault the ears at even higher decibels, instructing fans to "get loud" and "clap"? Do we really need 10 restaurants in the Stadium and bland, barely warm hot dogs that will no doubt sell for $10?

To balance the sense that baseball has become just another branch of the entertainment industry, rather than being the heart and soul of America, here's a clip from Bull Durham, the best baseball movie ever made.

February 06, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Apparently our hope and change President really meant gloom and doom. Despite this, and in the midst of a dreadfully cold winter in the Northeast, real hope arrives with the following bulletin from Boston.

At 2:15 PM Feb 6th Johnny Pesky (age 89) hit the ignition button on equipment truck headed to Fla.
"It's always exciting to go to Spring Training---to see the new kids and all that stuff," said Pesky "I was in Sarasota for my first spring training....with Ted and Bobby and Dom and Jimmie(Foxx)"

Joe Torre's whining third person account of his travails as Yankees manager adds up to less than Casey Stengel's one sentence explanation: "The secret of managing is keeping the 10 guys who hate you away from the 15 who haven't made up their minds."

We now have documentation by the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction of the massive fraud, mismanagement of funds and outright theft during the U.S. Government's efforts to rebuild the Iraqi economy. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in our Government's efforts to rebuild our own economy.

To those of us around his age, learning that Sandy Koufax was one of Madoff's victims was particularly awful news. By comparison with today's players, Koufax pitched for a pittance and had a short career. Let's hope he socked away lots of money from endorsements. It's just too bad that Sandy can't launch a 100mph heater at Madoff's head.

January 27, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Red Eye regularly displays the most creative humor on TV since Ernie Kovacs. Host, Greg Gutfeld dares to ridicule every politically correct target, including Islam--unlike all the liberal comedians whose humor consists in reassuring their audiences that conservatives are evil and stupid. Set your tivos; it's on at 3AM on Fox. Kudos to Roger Ailes for daring to put the program on--though we wish there weren't so many comments 'bleeped' out. After all, it is 3AM.

The steady decline of civilization can be seen in the field of humor (with rare exceptions as per above). Anyone who remembers Jean Shepard knows where Garrison Keilor got his shtick. However, Shepard never had Keilor's smug disdain for his supposed political inferiors.

To this observer, Joe Torre's book is of interest not for its comments about A-Rod, but its account of the clash between the sabermetric approach of Brian Cashman and the subjective appraisal approach of Torre. Torre has many virtues, but he undermines a couple of them with this tell all book: personal loyalty and no finger pointing following defeat. This Yankee fan is not sorry he's gone.

I thought President Obama swore to defend and protect America. His deference to the Jew hating, America hating audience of al Arabiya suggests he has different ideas. Asking a paranoiac to forgive you for implanting commands in his tooth filling, doesn't make him kinder and gentler. Asking a barbaric culture to forgive America is similarly absurd.

January 20, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Horsefeathers has had many problems with the Bush Presidency. However, we also are old enough to know that perfection is only attainable in fantasy. Let the hosannahs erupt for the new President but we suspect that Hegel was right when he said: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk". When dusk falls Bush will do better than his critics expect.

The discordant note in Obama's eye-glazing inaugural speech was his effort to appease the Jihadi world, by asserting that, (by implied contrast to George Bush) he would reach out to the Muslim world. Why? The Muslim world is an 8th century world of Jew hatred and infidel hatred. The only way we should reach out is with our missiles.

A classic psychological study of quarterbacks suggested there were 2 types: sociopaths in the mode of Bobby Lane or Joe Namath, who believed they could never be hurt, and religious true believers, like Fran Tarkenton, who believe nothing can harm them because God will protect them. This super bowl seems to have one of each: Arizona has Kurt Warner, a true believer, and Pittsburgh has Ben Roethlisberger--'nuff said. Horsefeathers puts our money on the sociopath. True believers can afford to lose as part of the theological plan. Pittsburgh will win the super bowl.

Twenty six days until pitchers and catchers report.

We miss Bernie Williams.

January 18, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Reading Maureen Dowd's pathetic last psychobabbling shot at President Bush restores one's faith that Freud's much derided, politically incorrect concept of 'penis envy' remains valid, at least for female NYTimes pundits.

The Obama Sunday Woodstock festival concluded with Stalin's songbird, Pete Seeger warbling Woody Guthrie's socialist anthem about this land belonging to you and me. Pardon me while I barf at the spectacle of an aging banjo strummer who never met a totalitarian dictator he didn't like, hailing our new President.

It must do great things for collective Arab self-esteem to know that their brave Muhajadeen fight by hiding behind the skirts of women and using children as gun fodder. No wonder they welcome death; they're evolution's mistake and should not have been born in the first place.

January 17, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

I'm anticipating a statement by PETA deploring the unnecessary deaths of birds caused by jet planes.

The political leadership in Israel threatens to undo the good work of the IDF vs. Hamas. An Israeli cease fire now, while Hamas is still firing rockets and Gilad Shalit is held hostage will guarantee another round of fighting. Hamas will proclaim a great victory. On the upside, the IDF seems to have corrected many failings after the debacle vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The most important gift Israel could have given the Obama Presidency would have been the annihilation of Hamas along with sufficient collateral damage to instill fear of the Jewish state. So far, that seems not to be in the cards.

Climate science is to science as astrology is to astronomy. It's just as likely that we're entering a new ice age as that global warming is coming. The insanity of spending vast sums of money to insure that the temperature doesn't rise 1/2 degree in the next 50 years is beyond absurd. That money could go to basic research of the kind that led to life saving drugs.

28 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

It's said that President Obama likes jazz. He could correct an injustice by paying tribute to the great white contributors to the history of jazz, like Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Artie Shaw, Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Louis Prima and many others. Here's the great Artie Shaw playing Begin the Beguine:

January 07, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Israel should take as its motto Winston Churchill's comment when asked about his war aims.: "You ask, What is our policy? I will say; "It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy." You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." No temporary cease fires to help the enemy. Israel is up against a monstrous tyrannical barbarism: Jihad Islam. Without victory Israel cannot survive. Is victory possible? Yes. It will require "disproportionate" pain inflicted on the barbarians. Doing so requires Churchillian confidence in the superiority of our system to that of 8th century sharia Islam. If Israel hesitates to bomb to smithereens schools, mosques and apartment buildings that harbor jihadists, then the West can prepare for sharia law and the triumph of Islam.

The cowards of Hamas at work:

Having barely survived this morning's ice storm, would AlGore please speed up global warming. His speeches help immensely.

My bichon, Jeter, sets an example by his customary stoicism following surgery for a growth on his left flank. Will it decrease his range in the field? We'll see.

The older I get, the longer the off season seems. Former loves--basketball, tennis, football---no longer appeal. The modern athlete may be better, but watching 350lb.linemen collide or 300lb. forwards elbow each other is not the art of the game. Only baseball remains. A major consolation is that the old music, the old novels, the old movies seem better and more precious. Let's hope the coming economic hard times produce a comporable level of cultural production.

I'd rather listen to a Harry Warren depression era song than Sondheim's pretentious post-modern irony any day. Here's a classic, with Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler.

January 04, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Perversion and Religion

Houses of worship are generally thought to be places of worship, peace, reflection and holiness. When they are turned into the opposite, arsenals for genocidal fanatics we can call that perversion, since perversions overturn reality, blur distinctions and mock the very notion of social norms. Here's the IAF dealing with one such House of Worship:

January 03, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Sexual perversions are at the heart of utopian ideologies like Nazism, Communism and Islam. Their mass appeal follows from the promise to poitically legitimize transgressions such as child murder, incest pedophilia, torture and killing of innocents, self flagellation, self annihilation--in the name of a higher political 'good'. We shouldn't forget the intense erotic pleasure obtained by overturning civilized norms. (See the writings of Janine Chasseguet Smirgel)

While the MSM report the terrible deeds of the IAF, bombing "religious" buildings in Gaza, we now know that "mosque" is another word for 'weapons storage facility'. Inside those 'religious' centers, plans are made for mass murder of infidels. Could we please call Islam what it is: a totalitarian ideology bent on destroying Western civilization.

Hitler died, but his war against the Jews did not; it now continues under the aegis of a much older Jew hating doctrine--Islam.

Neville Chamberlain died, but his policy of appeasement lives on in Western European "leaders", like Sarkozy, and their scrofulous puppet at the UN, Ban Ki Moon. All of them are worthy of Shakespeare's description: they are as "valiant as the wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse."

Israel is fighting for us! This struggle with barbarism is our struggle. Israel is the first, tempting target for the oil rich barbarians. However, we are all infidels.

Here's Bob Dylan on Israel Alone:

January 01, 2009

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

To understand the Jihadi mind, read the Marquis de Sade. Murdering innocents is a source of savage erotic joy. Some enterprising researcher should investigate the rate and prevalence of perversions in the Jihadi world. Stoning women to death for being raped suggests it's far higher than in the world of infidels.

Jihadis feel big, strong, and potent when murdering and maiming children or beheading infidels. When their victims fight back, they hide behind the sympathies of the Western therapeutic culture.

We are weakened by our own therapeutic approach to the jihad. Were we to destroy the symbols of Islam, they'd be at our feet instead of at our throats.

When sharia law prevails and Bach is banned, somewhere there will remain a hidden version of the single greatest musical piece ever composed, played by the greatest pianist to ever interpret it: Here's a portion of the Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould. Proof, if any more were needed, of the superiority of Western culture. Let's hope 2009 is a year when the West wakes up and vows to defend itself.

December 31, 2008

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

Why is Israel offering "aid" to civilian Gazans while rockets are raining down from Gaza on civilian Israelis? Those Gaza civilians elected Hamas and cheered 9-11. What next, Israel offering medical care to Hamas rocketeers injured by their own blasts?

Apparently one of the qualities required of mainstream journalists is the ability to draw distinctions between the insignificant value of murdered Israeli civilians, and the high value of the savages who murdered them.

The death of Samuel Huntington serves as a reminder that some people understood the bloody and aggressive nature of Islam (not "Islamic radicals") long before it became politically incorrect to state the obvious.

Shouldn't whoever replaced Chad Pennington with Bret Favre be held accountable? Instead the Jets fired the coach.

Yankee predictions: Phil Hughes will win 15+ games for the Yankees and make up for the blown out arm of C.C. Sabathia. Mark Teixera batting third will make A-Rod a 50 home run #4 hitter. The Yankees' big problem will be at catcher. Posada will be a huge defensive liability post-shoulder surgery.

The Red Sox will thrive thanks to their farm system. They'll battle it out with the Yankees in the AL East.

As the snow piles up here's a great musical escape by our pick for the best new band of '08, Old Crow Medicine Show. Some bands are still writing and performing melodies, with wonderful fiddling and banjo picking as well as vocalizing!

December 27, 2008

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT...

The calls for Israeli "restraint" in the face of rockets from Gaza are really calls for Israel's destruction. If the IDF has rediscovered its survival instincts there will be no halt in operations until Hamas is destroyed.

Offering the Palestinians a state makes as much sense as offering to put my Bichon in charge of running the household; and my Bichon doesn't spend time building rockets.

When Joe Louis KO'd Max Schmeling, did the New York Times reproach him for lack of "restraint"?

William Tecumseh Sherman's timeless words should resound in the ears of Israel's leaders: "War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."

Stick it out through the interminable, predictable plot of Slumdog Millionaire. The dance scene at the end makes it all worthwhile. It's really a tribute to Busby Berkeley, Hollywood, and happy endings. Not in a league with a Harry Warren-Berkeley musical, but for our debased age, not bad at all.