Robert Spencer takes "A trip to the nuthouse":
A few days ago you could have checked my biography at Wikipedia and found this:Spencer goes on to debunk numerous other fabrications. As he puts it:Most have discredited Mr. Spencer's views on Islam due to oft-exaggeration. It must also be noted that Mr. Spencer's work is highly biased and influenced by his Jewish Ancestral viewpoints.
Of course, this has happened before. Jihad Watch News Editor Anne Crockett has noted here before that Wikipedia, since anyone can edit it, is absolutely worthless, and here is yet more evidence that she was correct: the Wikipedia editor above assumes that I speak about the roots of jihad violence within Islamic theology solely because I'm Jewish. That might make some small bit of sense except for one little catch: I'm not Jewish.
Reading this latest morsel of Wikipedia baloney made me think that this sunny Sunday afternoon here in Secure Undisclosed Locationville might be a good time for me to do something I have been meaning to do for a long while: answer some critics. Now, these are people whom normally I would consider not worth answering; for the most part they are rather self-evidently nutty and unhinged. But when I was in Holland for the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference last February, I got in a conversation with Daniel Pipes about Internet pests, and he recommended answering them. Otherwise, he said, the charges would remain accessible on the Internet, no answer would be available, and in such cases sometimes the charges are picked up by more reputable sources, circulate into cleaner and better-lighted corners of the Internet, and take on a life of their own. Thus, he said, it was better to have the truth on record.
The American Thinker reminds us that today is the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon in an essay that's well worth reading in its entirety. Don't miss the quotes from a 1995 Wall Street Journal interview with Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese Colonel who accepted the surrender of South Vietnam’s last president, Gen. Duong Van Minh, 31 years ago on this date.
(Via Ronald Barbour.)
Well, Hillary might at least. Her husband needed a third party candidate to siphon off angry conservative voters to allow him to win an election with less than a plurality of the vote. Is Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, about to become the next Ross Perot?
I remember reading about this concept in Wired (back when Wired really was Wired) in the mid-1990s; it sounds like it's finally coming to fruition, according to Dave Johnston:
The California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan on Thursday allowing providers of high-speed Internet services to test using electricity lines to deliver online access throughout the state.Dave has also started a health and exercise-oriented blog, called The Crisper. Stop on by there, today!CPUC commissioner Rachelle Chong, who drafted the plan, said broadband over power lines, or BPL, could become a new competitor to Internet services delivered via telephone, cable and satellites and help reduce prices for consumers.
BPL uses existing utility lines delivering power to neighborhoods to carry broadband signals into homes.
Byron York returns from last night's White House Correspondents' Dinner and writes, "Conspiracy theorists, take it away":
And by the way, has anyone commented on what was perhaps the weirdest sight of the night, or maybe of any other night: former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, the former CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson, chatting with Lyndon LaRouche? It happened at the receptions prior to the dinner and left more than one onlooker shaking his head at the strangeness of it all.It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!
(Of course, maybe the Wilsons were simply chatting LaRouche up for his opinions on the source of the Danish Mohammed cartoons...)
In the late 1970s, Jimmy Page was once accused of "stealing from himself" by a music critic, who thought he did little more than recycle so many of his old licks and riffs over and over again. And it goes without saying that we writers aren't immune from such practices, either...
I tend to think of Tim Russert as being smarter than this--unless he was simply trying to toss a softball:
Watching Meet the Press roundtable on the gas price kerfuffle.On Friday's Pajamas Podcast, Tammy Bruce did a terrific job of defending the profits made by oil companies, reminding listeners that millions of individual investors also benefit from them. Meanwhile,Thomas Bray notes they're much a smaller margin than many who seek to demonize oil companies--and business in general--assume:Russert, challenging Energy Secretary Sam Bodman: "Oil demand is up. Supply is down. So why are prices rising?"
Er...........
"From 1986 to 2003, using 2004 dollars, the real national annual average price for gasoline, including taxes, generally has been below $2 per gallon," noted the Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 report absolving the industry of collusion. "By contrast, between 1919 and 1985, real national annual average retail gasoline prices were above $2 per gallon more often than not."The Professor adds, "As I've noted before, a lot of the people commenting on this stuff need some remedial education.In other words, gasoline prices were lower than at anytime since 1919 for much of recent history. Some conspiracy! Maybe somebody should have been investigating consumers for "gouging" the oil companies.
And just who is the profiteer here? While the average profit on the sale of a gallon of gasoline is nine cents, the average state and federal tax on that same gallon of gasoline is about 45 cents (and 52 cents in Michigan). And if we must have an investigation, how about investigating the extent to which government regulations drive up prices and block new production?
Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, with his usual drollery, that profit is "whatever government lets a company keep." But most folks have a vastly inflated view of corporate profits. One regular survey of Americans found that the majority believes the average corporate profit is between 30 percent and 40 percent of sales, while the real figure is closer to 4 percent.
Not the least of which is this fellow.
Update: A Wall Street Journal op-ed asks, "Don't liberals like sky-high fuel prices?". Well, a lot of them do:
The dirty little secret about oil politics is that today's high gas price is precisely the policy result that Mr. Schumer and other liberals have long desired. High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases. "Why isn't the left dancing in the streets over $3 a gallon gas?" asks Sam Kazman, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who's followed the gasoline wars for years.Or as Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt this past week:Scan the Web sites of the major environmental groups and you will find long tracts on the evils of fossil fuels and how wonderful it would be if only selfish Americans were more like the enlightened and eco-friendly Europeans. You will find plenty of articles with titles such as: "More Taxes Please: Why the Price of Gas Is too Low." Just last weekend Tia Nelson, the daughter of the founder of Earth Day, declared that even at $3 a gallon she wants gas prices to go higher.
At least Ms. Nelson is honest about wanting European-level gas taxes. We doubt that many American voters would be as enthusiastic. If you think $3 a gallon is pinching your pocketbook, fill up in Paris or Amsterdam, where motorists have the high privilege of paying nearly $6 a gallon thanks to these nations' "progressive" energy policies. (See nearby chart.)
However, you can be sure you won't hear that from Democrats or Northeastern Republicans on Capitol Hill--at least not in public. Far from it. They're suddenly all for cutting gasoline prices, just as long as that doesn't require producing a single additional barrel of oil. We haven't seen this much insincerity since the last Major League Baseball meeting on steroid abuse.
I thought the Senate bill, that the Senate Republicans proposed on energy, is completely preposterous. If the Republicans cave in on energy, which is a national security issue, and which is something where the Democrats are even more witless than usual, because they're not in favor of any kind of energy. If you were to say we should all go back to wood-fired steam trains on the Atchison, Topeka and the Sante Fe, they'd say oh, no, sorry. We're opposed to logging. We can't even have that.
Mark Steyn explores the textual stylings of a once and future presidential candidate:
John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."Fortunately, some of us have computers. We can fact check your pompadour.With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?
Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, at least until May 15, when I have a windsurfing engagement off Nantucket."
Actually, no. He got it from Thomas Jefferson. "This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation," warned Sen. Kerry, placing his courage in the broader historical context. "No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: 'Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.' "
Close enough. According to the Jefferson Library: "There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson's correspondence or other writings; in such cases, Jefferson should not be cited as the source. Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes are: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "
Did Kerry's speechwriter endeavor to point that out? "Hey, boss, diss ain't a Jefferson quote."
"Yeah, that's right. Dissent -- a Jefferson quote. Shove one in around the fifth paragraph, but snap it up, will you? I got a fitting for my new even-more-buttock-hugging yellow lycra cycling shorts in 20 minutes."
It was the Aussie pundit Tim Blair who noted the Thomas Jeffefakery. American commentators were apparently too busy cooing that "Kerry may be reflecting a new boldness on the part of liberals to come out and say what they believe and to reclaim the moral high ground on patriotism" (CBS News) to complain that KERRY LIED!! SCHOLARLY ATTRIBUTION DIED!!! Instead, KERRY MISQUOTED!! MEDIA DOTED!!!
Update: In his essay, Steyn believes that Nadine Strosser of the ACLU is the source of the bogus Jefferson quote; Betsy Nemark suggests that it was Howard Zinn.
Another Update: Actually, it seems to be Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson, World War II-era pacifist:
From my research on Lexis and Westlaw, it appears that Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and ACLU head Nadine Strossen are quoting views on dissent, not of Jefferson, but of Dorothy Hewitt Hutchinson, a dissenter and strict pacifist who opposed World War II as immoral, but who made a point of ignoring dissent when it was directed toward herself. To her critics and those who dissented from her views, Hutchinson's response was not to "budge one inch."But I thought dissent was...well, you know.
Top-down, central planning-oriented economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the very definition of the latter half of Virginia Postrel's terminology of dynamists and stasists, passed away on Saturday at age 97, UPI reports:
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 29 (UPI) — John Kenneth Galbraith, whose popular books made him one of the most famous economists in the United States, died Saturday at 97.A breezy 1999 Reason review of one of Galbraith's more recent books provides a pretty good capsule summary of his life and worldview:Galbraith's son confirmed his father's death at a hospital in Cambridge, Massa., where he lived, The New York Times reported.
In addition to his years as a Harvard professor and his books, Galbraith served as an adviser to Democratic political candidates and presidents -- notably Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Kennedy named him ambassador to India.
In books like "The Affluent Society" and "The New Industrial State," Galbraith argued that large corporations -- because of their size and ability to plan -- were not governed by the free market.
Galbraith was born on a farm in Dunwich Township, Ontario, and studied at Ontario Agricultural College before transferring to the University of Toronto. He received a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1934 and was hired by Harvard the same year as an instructor.
After a brief stint at Princeton, Galbraith spent the World War II years and immediate post-war period in a series of government jobs and a stretch at Fortune Magazine. He returned to Harvard in 1949.
There's a right way to be wrong and a wrong way to be wrong. Some supporters of big, intrusive government manage to be witty, erudite, and tolerant of opposing views. If we must have statists, they're the ones to have. Alas, too many others are crabby, smug, and dogmatic--the kind who'd serve as the bad guys in an Ayn Rand novel.This past February, former Federal Reserve Board economist Arnold Kling called Galbraith "the quintessential statist":John Kenneth Galbraith is of the first type, a sterling model of how to err in style. At the age of 91, he can look back on a rewarding life as a university professor, political adviser, ambassador to India, and debating partner of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. Though he's seldom been right, he's always been a gentleman.
* * * Although Galbraith is wrong in the right way, he is still wrong. He acknowledges JFK's health problems and extramarital affairs but dismisses them as irrelevant to his presidency. Many historians would disagree. Before his 1961 summit with Khrushchev, JFK took medications that may have impaired his judgment. And his personal misbehavior constituted a wild security risk, exposing him to tacit blackmail by J. Edgar Hoover. He may have been just as charming as Galbraith describes, but charm is no excuse for recklessness.
There is a quaint frozen-in-time quality to Galbraith's thought--sort of Austin Powers without the bad teeth and mojo. Looking at Great Society welfare programs, he maintains that the solution to poverty is simply to give money to poor people, without necessarily expecting them to do work. In the decades since LBJ's War on Poverty, all but the staunchest statists have surrendered to reality and abandoned such notions. Oddly, Galbraith vents inordinate anger about America's effort to defeat Soviet communism in the Cold War. Austin--I mean, Mr. Galbraith...we won.
If we were literally stuck on 1968, then Galbraith's The New Industrial State would still be on the best-seller list. In that work, Galbraith correctly pointed out that bureaucratic organizations are averse to risk and uncertainty. However, nearly every other major thesis in his book was wrong. Yet his view of the economy, like much of the conventional wisdom of 1968, has remained embedded in the folk beliefs of the Left.Galbraith will be wildly praised in the coming weeks by an ideologically similar legacy media, seemingly equally resistant to change. In terms of his long life and center stage career, he certainly deserves it.For Galbraith, the concept of an entrepreneur was a quaint myth. As he saw it, all of the important economic activity takes place within giant corporations. Their challenge is to manage large capital investments in complex projects, like a nuclear power plant or a new passenger jet. This in turn requires a thick bureaucracy, which Galbraith dubbed the "technostructure."
Propositions that followed from this thesis include:
-- The United States is not really a market economy, but a planned economy.
-- Wages and prices are artificial, so that the government is right to intervene to control them.
-- Because we are a planned economy, the ideology of free enterprise serves only to "starve" the public sector, which could invest resources more wisely.
-- Consumers are passively manipulated by the "technostructure" into serving the needs of big corporations, rather than the other way around.
-- The classical economic concept of competitive struggle is an anachronism, because firms control their environment and are immune to competitive pressure.The Internet Revival
The death of the entrepreneur was greatly exaggerated. Over the past two decades, the strength of entrepreneurialism has been unmistakable. The economy has been much more dynamic than Galbraith would have predicted. Many of the industrial giants, which in Galbraith's view were self-perpetuating, have fallen. The steel companies, chemical firms, and aerospace firms of yesteryear have shrunk, with most of them merged out of existence. On the other hand, companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Wal-Mart, which were not part of the economic landscape in 1968, are now more important than the old industrial base.
More important, the Internet has brought about the revival of the entrepreneur. Mixing metaphors with abandon, the Net has fostered a Free Agent Nation, in which an Army of Davids representing The Long Tail is operating Under the Radar.
And not coincidentally, as outmoded as Galbraith's actual theories were, long before he passed away, they will be taught widely in the academy for decades to come. As Alvin Toffler notes in Revolutionary Wealth, the rate of change moves at radically different speeds these days: for entrepreneurs--and business in general--change moves much faster than Galbraith could have ever predicted. For government, traditional media and schools, change comes at a much, much slower pace--sometimes, seemingly, never at all.
Update: Orrin Judd dubs Galbraith the Anti-Jane Jacobs.
Another Update: Pajamas has more reaction from the Blogosphere
Asked to give a speech by The Harlem Studio of Art, Roger Kimball responded:
It was Andy Warhol, I think, who, when asked to define art, said that "Art is what you can get away with." Warhol's own career, and, indeed, a large part part of the contemporary art world testify to the power--if not the truth--of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only be put forward but also and accepted and celebrated as a work of art. I won't bother to rehearse examples: everyone here knows what I am talking about: Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethore, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Matthew Barney: the very names conjure up a cultural disaster zone.G.K. Chesterton is credited with saying, "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything". And (with notable exceptions) willing to create anything, and call it art, as well.The question is: How did did we get here? Well, that is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word "beauty": What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty.
I know that this is both vague and portentous. But surely we are in a very curious situation. Traditionally, the goal or end of fine art was to make beautiful objects. Beauty itself came with a lot of Platonic and Christian metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even positively hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.
Read the rest of Kimball's speech.
When do Charitable Donations Become a Negative?Read the whole thing.
When it is Dick Cheney doing the giving.
Ever wonder what it would look like if a bunch of Columbia B-School students decided to create a parody of the classic black & white music video of The Police's "Every Breath You Take", to parody their dean being turned down as Alan Greenspan's replacement?
No, of course you didn't. At least, I hope you never did. And neither did I.
But as Michelle Malkin notes, this is the "Best take-off of The Police’s 'Every Breath You Take.' Ever". In other words, just Press To Play.
(That's Paul McCartney--and nowhere near as good a video, either--Ed. Hey, same era....)
Tammy Bruce, who as usual, was great on yesterday's Pajamas Podcast, noted earlier this week on her blog that construction--finally!--has begun on Freedom Tower, the sucessor to the World Trade Center:
Send your prayers and good vibes to the construction crews, the people of New York, and the buildings themselves. Landmarks like this are physical manifestations of the greatness of America, our ingenuity, courage, skill, and hope for the future. Yea for the Freedom Tower!I only hope this isn't another false start.
Beginning with some very sound advice for the yutes of America--"The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks"--John Scalzi posits "10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing".
For those seeking a career from their words, pay particular attention to items #7 and #8.
Hosting Matters, which services a number of prominent blogs (including Insta- and VodkaPundit, Little Green Footballs, and numerous others) has had at least two large scale denial of service attacks today, apparently originating from Saudi Arabia.
Until further clues as to the reason become known, Mary Catherine Ham's theory as to the cause is probably as good as any...
The L.A. Times obviously knows the best time to release bad news, which is why they chose today to reveal that they're suspending Michael Hiltzik for his recurring quadrophenia. Hugh Hewitt notes:
Isn't it at least a little ironic that the Times releases this information on a Friday afternoon, traditional burial ground of bad news-- in an obvious effort to have the story pass with as little attention as possible? So much for transparency.I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for real, systemic change from most legacy media organs. At least not until 2014 or so.Michael Hiltzik is just one of hundreds of examples of ideologicially blinkered agenda journalists at the Times. He just got caught.
The Times concludes "an internal inquiry found no inaccurate reporting."
Yeah. Right. Very believable. Hiltzik may become an invisible presence at the paper, the Pulitzer Prize winner at the copy desk, or he may quit, but he'll no doubt haunt message boards.
But the culture at the Times that produced him quite obviously stays the same.
Update: Not surprisingly, Patterico, Hiltzik's bête noire, has a full-round up of blog coverage (including our brief post).
Sorry for the lack of posting today--I spent the morning putting the latest "Blog Week In Review" together--Austin Bay, Tammy Bruce, Eric Umansky and special guest Michael Ledeen had a great discussion of topics ranging from gas prices to Tony Snow to Iran to United 93. Click on over to Pajamas HQ to listen in!
Libertas notes that Bush-bashing Hollywood "satire" American Dreamz (sic) tanked at the box office this past weekend (I certainly didn't see it--I was too busy looking at aisles and aisles of beautiful vintage guitars in Dallas. But more on that later.):
I’d like to mention something else about last week’s LIBERTAS media appearances on this issue. On each occasion I emphasized (whether or not this appeared in the reports) my own enjoyment of political satire, and that it is perfectly healthy - and indeed, necesssary - in a democracy that we satirize our leaders, whomever they may be.Of course they do.The real issue here was variety, or what one might term ‘diversity’ in Hollywood’s approach toward satire. Where, I asked, were the pungent satires of Democrats or liberals (aside from Team America from two years ago)? Where, for example, are Hollywood’s biting Hillary Clinton satires, or slapstick farces about Howard Dean?
I’ve noticed a general tendency in the media to frame this matter as a question of ‘whether it’s OK to satirize President Bush’ - which really isn’t the issue. The issue is whether it’s OK or healthy for Hollywood to confine its satire to Republicans, conservatives, Christians, supporters of the War on Terror, etc. I’m still waiting to hear a response to that point from our friends on the cultural Left - who all believe in ‘diversity’ of speech, right?
IMAO looks at some of the other Tonys that President Bush could have nominated for press secretary.
(Back from Texas. Watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow.)
There have been so many false starts on shooting the film version of this title, that I'll believe there's actually a movie of Atlas Shrugged when I see it. But Robert Bidinotto says "Okay, boys and girls, it is getting official".
Update: Steve Green has casting suggestions.
15 or so years ago, back in his lefty days, Dennis Miller used to refer to Dan Quayle as "the Rosetta Stone of comedy".
Given the passage of time and the former veep's low profile these days, it's safe to say that a successor has emerged to the grab the title Quayle once held.
Robert Bidinotto bids addio to Alida Valli, the beautiful brunette caught between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton's characters in 1949's brilliant The Third Man, one of the great noir mysteries of all time. Valli died this week at age 84. As Robert notes, she also starred, rather bravely, in a 1942 production of Ayn Rand's We The Living, shot right under Mussilini's nose in fascist Italy.
One of Jim Geraghty's readers asks, “Why is the Bush administration not making more out of the documents found by the Iraq Survey Team that Stephen Hayes and the bloggers have been talking about?” Jim responds:
It’s worth noting that deposing Saddam was a bipartisan aim of U.S. foreign policy for at least a decade, and that some of those complaining the most about our presence in Iraq are those who were calling for it for a long time.Jim has some key instructions for Tony Snow: "bring your A game and eat your Wheaties!"Deposing Saddam was, like cleaning out the gutters, a chore we kept saying we would do but never seemed to get around to it. It was, however, very easy and convenient to lament that President George H.W. Bush should have done it years back.
Had the first President Bush sent the troops in to Baghdad and toppled Saddam, we probably would be in the exact same situation – a messy occupation, violence between the Shia and Sunnis, a cacophony of discordant voices hindering political consensus, etc. - in 1994 that we are in 2006.
I suspect one of the big reasons the President is in trouble is that his defenders are tired. We see these examples, we remember these examples, we blog about these arguments – but the White House press operation itself too often seems quiet, muted, defensive and milquetoast.
We concur.
For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together, over at Pajamas Theater 3000.
Update (9/15/06): Post now found here.
For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I thought I’d explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together.
The first step was booting up Cakewalk Sonar, my primary recording program. I then began to fire up various software synth applets and started experimenting.
A couple of months ago, Cakewalk introduced their Rapture software synthesizer, which contained a variety of sequencer patterns. These are pre-programmed riffs designed to unfold as the musician holds the key or keys down. Play one note and get ten--or a hundred. That certainly appeals to me!
Apparently, one of the programmers at Cakewalk is a big Blade Runner fan, as both Rapture and Project 5 Rev 2 have contained patches strongly reminiscent of the sound Vangelis invented for that seminal movie. In the case of Rapture, there was a sequence patch inspired by the Vangelis’ sequencer on the film’s end titles. I knew I wanted to start with that as the “music concrete” to build the theme around, so the first step was experimenting to find a tempo that the patch sounded best at (about 110 beats per minute).
The next was to find a drum pattern that sounded nice against the sequencer. I have a collection of various drum loops, mostly from Sony’s Acid Loops series. One of their more offbeat (heh) drum collections is called “Zero Gravity Beats”, and a pattern from that disc matched up nicely with the Blade Runner sequencer.
I knew the theme wasn’t going to be much longer than 30 second at most, so I laid down 30 seconds of the Blade Runner sequencer in A--which meant programming one long A note, and the sequencer would automatically chug up and down in its pattern, always returning to that note.
I then decided to craft a simple chord sequence in that key, and found another sequencer pattern in Rapture that sounds great as a sustained chord. It would hold the chord for almost a bar, and then play a sequence of notes as it trailed it off. So I played a series of simple acending chords in the key of A: A major, B major, C#minor, D major, E major, returning to A.
With two layers of synths burbling away, I figured some electric guitar would sound great for contrast, so I dusted off my Gibson 1959 Les Paul reissue, and fired up Line6’s aging but still very functional GuitarPort, which allows me to plug in an electric guitar’s standard quarter-inch guitar cable via its floor pedal into the computer’s USB port.
I chose GuitarPort’s “Brit Hi-Gain” patch, which convincingly models a late 1960s Marshall stack--the perfect amp for a fluid, lightly distorted Les Paul lead sound.
I then improvised a few melody ideas on the Les Paul and eventually, started recording them. The final lead line is the best of two takes spliced seamlessly together.
I then edited the drum loops, pasting in various drum rolls and cymbal crashes to the give the aural impression of a drummer reacting in sympathy with the lead guitarist.
Sometimes ideas that are clichés are useful because they just can’t be beat, so I launched Zero-G’s Nostalgia software synthesizer and found its recreation of the infamous Fairlight “Orchestra 5” patch. I say “infamous” because it seemed that every recording MTV ran in the mid-1980s had one or twenty orchestra hits from this patch. Frankie Goes To Hollywood seemed to have based their career on it.
But that was twenty years ago, and orchestra hits seemed like a useful way to kick off and end the song, so I dropped in a few hits: one at the start, and a couple at the end.
Then I added a simple Fender bass part using another software synthesizer. I chose a very conventional bass sound to contrast with all of the non-conventional synth sounds in the frequencies above it.
Since it was the lead instrument and would feature prominently in the mix, I wanted to give the Les Paul a slightly more fluid, modern sound, so I fired up Izotope’s Spectron processing applet, and ran the guitar their “Sweet & Sour” patch, which processed the guitar with a light combination of delay, filtering and smearing, that’s a tad more exotic than the typical chorus or flanger patch.
Izotope’s effects typically sound great, but are very processor-intensive. So a track with one of their treatments on it usually won’t play in time with the rest of instruments. To offset this, I first cloned the original Les Paul track and then muted its original version. Next I processed the cloned track with Spectron. I used the original track as a guide to visually slide the new version backwards in time so that it lined up with the old track.
The song was beginning to take shape, but it didn’t seem quite done yet.
the chord sequencer part served as a nice counterpoint to the start of the lead guitar part. But as the piece progressed, I decided to introduce a second guitar part to add a little additional excitement. So I took off the Les Paul and plugged my Fender 1952 Telecaster reissue into the same GuitarPort patch and played some simple licks, in a higher register than the Les Paul’s lines. It was also on the Tele that I played the bent, heavily vibrato-ed A note that i mixed in under the first orchestra hit.
After listening to the track as it stood, I wanted some interesting noise or effect to subtly begin the tune before the first orchestra hit went “boom!”. I rifled through my collection of Acid Loops from Bill Laswell’s collections, and found a nifty tape rewinding effect--it was part of a collection of DJs scratching records and creating other hip-hop/techno licks. The symbolism of the podcast starting with a tape rewinding seemed irresistible, and even if nobody “got” the effect, it at least added some subliminal ambient weirdness to create some subtle initial tension, resolved when the actual instruments enter.
Finally, I mixed everything down to a stereo .Wav file adding some subtle reverb on most of the instruments to bind them together, and processed the entire track with Izotope’s Ozone mastering applet, to give it all a nice professional sheen.
If that sounds like a lot of work, well, a lot of it is based on tried and true techniques I’ve either learned or developed over several years. The whole thing from start to finish took an evening--a very pleasant evening indeed, as I find music recording to be an extremely rewarding hobby.
Hope you liked the finished result--please tune in each week to the podcast it was created for!
Jane Jacobs, who wrote the hugely influental The Death and Life of Great American Cities (see our posts here and here for more) in 1961 has passed away at age 89. Orrin Judd has an extensive write-up of her life and career.
AP reports that Ricky Williams will sit out another NFL season, after violating the NFL's substance abuse policy for the fourth time:
The suspension represents a financial blow for Williams, who owes the Dolphins $8.6 million for breaching his contract when he retired in 2004. His return last season was motivated partly by the need for a paycheck, and that may be a reason for him to return in 2007.Drugs versus millions of dollars and superstardom. It would seem like an easy tradeoff for most men, but Ricky apparently can't put the demon weed (and/or other substanced banned by the NFL) on hold until he retires.
Wrong side of the aisle, but otherwise, this was an easy prediction:
While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.And here's the first!
Seriously though, assuming all the rumors are true, it's going to fun--I think--watching Snow sparring with the White House press corps. As a journalist himself, hopefully he'll know what not to say, which is half the job's role.
Update: John Hinderaker writes, "It's Tony Snow!":
The White House announced tonight that Fox News radio host Tony Snow will be the new White House press secretary, replacing Scott McClellan.I think he might. Even a few nice, "You don't really mean that, do you Helen?" sort of jibes of the type that Ari Fleischer was a master at, might be enough to begin to (a) shake up the White House press corps again and (b) make them look even more like highly-partisan fools with a lead pipe tone when they react by sticking their claws into Snow and his classic nice guy Teflon delivery.Tony is one of the world's nice people. He is also a close student of the news, and I think he's been known to read our site from time to time. His congeniality and media background will buy him some popularity with the reporters who cover the White House. But essentially all of them are partisan Democrats, so that good will will last for about a week. What the White House really needs is someone who can push back aggressively against the liberal tilt of the media, and make the administration's case directly to the people. Tony Snow is equipped to do this, I think; the question is, will he?
Such gestures will also continue, and ideally, accelerate the pattern of The Bush Thesis of legacy media decertification that Jay Rosen first named back in 2004. As Rosen described it, it was a wildly postmodern theory: deliberately turning the rapacious instincts of the press back onto themselves to discredit a hostile liberal media, and provide endless material for conservative pundits and the Blogosphere, all of which--on paper, at least--makes the president look better in the process. (It helps to have coherent, logical policies popular with your base of voters, of course.) And unlike his ineffectual immediate predecessor, Snow seems to be ideally suited to resuming the strategery, increasingly important as mid-term elections loom closer.
Found via Power Line, Thomas Joscelyn lists the top ten reasons behind what he calls "The New McCarthyism":
My new Daily Standard column, which builds on my blog posts concerning the whole Mary McCarthy matter, is now up. While there is some doubt surrounding the exact reasons for the CIA's termination of Mary McCarthy at this point, there is no doubt that the media has been quick to lionize her. On Sunday, for example, The New York Times ran a ridiculous piece that argued McCarthy had an "independent streak" because she challenged the Clinton administration on its decision to destroy a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant named al-Shifa.Here's but one item on Joscelyn's list:I say that the Times piece was ridiculous because the Old Grey Lady left out or spun nearly every salient fact surrounding the matter. Now, I realize that the strike on al-Shifa was controversial. Many public commentators to this day insist that the strike was a mistake. Christopher Hitchens made this argument for Slate yesterday. But, as I point out in my Daily Standard piece, the public discussion of the events in August 1998 has been quite lacking. The New York Times, in particular, has made no real attempt to understand the facts of the matter.
Much of the criticism of the al-Shifa strike centers on a soil sample taken outside the facility that purportedly contained traces of EMPTA, a precursor used in the production of VX nerve gas, which is a particularly nasty weapon. If you read the Times account you would think that this was the strongest, or even the only, piece of evidence used to justify the strike.As Joscelyn concludes:That's not the case. As I recount in my piece, President Clinton authorized the intelligence community to discuss the multiple threads of evidence used to justify the strike. One thread, in particular, was more important than the others. The NSA intercepted communications between the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program, Emad Al Ani, and the plant's management. Thus, the soil sample was not the only, nor even the strongest piece of evidence used.
These are 10 quick facts concerning August 1998. There are dozens more. It takes willful ignorance to pretend that none of this happened.Read the rest.
Jim Geraghty is right on the money:
Dear Republican lawmakers,Hugh Hewitt also agrees that this is an idea that truly needs to be implemented--let's see the left put their cards on the table.Please take this idea (eliminating the federal tax on gas and diesel for sixty days) and run with it. Take the support of Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and argue that this is bipartisan and make the Democrats vote for or against temporary tax relief for American drivers. If everyone votes for it, then great. Let the Democrats argue that they thought of it first. All the voters will remember in November is that gas prices dropped 18 cents a gallon (unleaded) and 24 cents a gallon (leaded) and that a GOP Congress and a GOP president got it done.
Just some free advice.
Spain apparently isn't content to merely rent Planet of the Apes on DVD; they want to live it out in real life:
The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.It's a mad house. A mad house!The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”
According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”
Theodore Dalrymple recently explored the boorish behavior of modern Londoners:
The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.As Glenn Reynolds notes in his rejoinder to Daniel Henninger in TCS Daily, the absence of manners in today's society impacts the Web as well (how could it not?) and it's been a long time coming:Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality—of the actual rather than the formal kind—has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.
What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.
In Britain, this has led in short order to the rejection of the most elementary of social rules. Young Britons now appear to think, for example, that the function of empty seats on trains is as a receptacle for their feet. (Why they should be the footweariest generation in history is a mystery, unless their behavior is considered as a deliberate challenge to convention.) A passenger who draws the attention of a young adult to the anti-social presence of his feet upon a seat will be met either by a torrent of abuse or, if the person doing it is better-educated, by moral self-justification. The last time I said anything about it, the young woman in question, by no means unpleasant, pointed out that her feet were clean, she having first removed her shoes, and that therefore she was within her rights. I was left searching for a Cartesian point from which to prove beyond all possible doubt that putting your feet up on seats in trains was wrong. It is a wearisome business trying to prove from first epistemological principles in every instance of minor public misconduct that it is morally wrong, especially when every failure to make the case is a justification for further such misconduct. It is strange how egalitarianism results in a rabid form of individualism, an angry individualism without worthwhile individuality.
Young women patients of mine who came from middle-class homes would routinely put their feet on the chair in which they were sitting in my consulting room. Patients chewed gum while speaking to me or ate snacks and drank soft drinks from cans (leaving them on the floor beside the chair when they had finished) as I inquired about their medical histories. A friend of mine, a doctor, told me how one of his patients had made her social arrangements for the evening on her cell phone while he was performing a gynecological examination on her.
This excess of informality is very undignified and unattractive and results in a society constantly on edge, even in the smallest of interactions.
The "let it all hang out" ethos predates TCP/IP. And cable TV and hip-hop were around long before the Internet had much effect on American culture. And the truly defining moments of culture-shift are pretty old, too: Black-power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, the appearance of televised cursing on Norman Lear's All in the Family, the abandonment of court decorum at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. And it seems to me that it's pretty hard to blame the Internet for what's on TV now, too. Instead, it seems to be a general cultural phenomenon -- the same thing that has people attending church, or dining out, in shorts and flip-flops. Disinhibition isn't just for the Internet. It has become general, and the notion of behaving better when in the public eye has taken quite a beating. Henninger's focus on the Internet misses the point: His own examples suggest that if people are behaving badly on the Internet, it's because they're behaving badly everywhere.IndeedTM.Henninger seems -- like a lot of newspaper people these days -- to be focusing on problems with the Internet not so much because the Internet is a problem, generally, as because it's a problem for, well, newspaper people. The newspaper industry is sinking financially, and the Internet is getting blamed not only for that, but for anything else that's handy. That's too bad, though, because once you strip away the paranoia and FUD-spreading, Henninger has something of a point. Political discourse, of course, has been going downhill since, well, about 1968 too. (Or maybe 1967, with Barbara Garson's scurrilous play, MacBird, which featured a necrophile LBJ exulting over JFK's assassination.) Not that we ever enjoyed the kind of golden age that some social critics today might imply, but people certainly did, in general, maintain a degree of decorum, or respect for office, that vanished with the generalized hatred of LBJ and Richard Nixon. And things have certainly gone downhill since, if that's possible.
In my own corner of the media world, the blogosphere, things seem to have gone downhill too, with personal attacks, efforts (sometimes successful) to get people fired, and worse becoming more common. It's reached the point, in fact, that bloggers on the left and right are actually talking about how to raise the tone.
I'm very much behind that effort. Name-calling isn't argument, and in fact personal attacks get in the way of actual argument. They encourage division and ideological cocooning: You might not mind a site that calls your ideas wrong or dumb, but you probably won't spend much time visiting sites that call you, personally, evil.
But you don't get over name-calling by engaging in name-calling, and that's basically what Henninger is doing. Things were better before those unwashed types got to share in the public square. Bloggers, Henninger implies, are unfit for public discourse. But there's another name for bloggers: readers. And more-than-usually interested readers, too. Newspapers are losing readers while dissing bloggers. Or, more accurately, newspapers are losing readers while dissing readers. Go figure.
CNN is reporting that Tony Snow "is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan".
Jay Stephenson has some thoughts. While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.
If Hillary gets in, can we expect Larry King to be offered the same gig in 2009? And while we ponder that, here's an example of staggeringly bad political press management.
An interview is just an interview. But a good cigarette is a smoke.
David Mastio links to Arthur Schlesinger Jr's op-ed in the Washington Post yeasterday and asks, "Which source is a more reliable repository for historical fact":
A) An op-ed in the Pulitzer-winning Washington Post written by noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.Of course, Schlesinger's done far greater buffings of reputations from time to time.or
B) The Wikipedia written by some guys on the Internet
For a dead-tree guy like me, it is surprisingly debatable.
In an op-ed attacking President Bush published in today’s Washington Post, Schlesinger states, “However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe.”
Ahem, while it is true that President Truman fought bravely in Europe during World War I. Not only did Eisenhower never fire a shot in anger during the war to end all wars, he spent the war assigned in the states.
If the Washington Post and Schlesinger want to stick by the claim that Eisenhower is a World War I veteran, then our current President Bush is a Vietnam veteran. Just like Ike, Bush was assigned in the states during Vietnam and just like Ike President Bush volunteered to go.
If I were one of those guys who's always going on about media bias, I might note how odd it is that Schlesinger and the Post would feel the need to buff the military credentials of Eisenhower in order to make President Bush look bad.
In the middle of defending Michael Hiltzik's cover version of The Who's Quadrophenia ("Is it me, for a moment?"), fellow L.A. Timesman Tim Ruttten writes of Hiltzik's critics:
They don't want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias.What unbiased news media is that? Tim apparently never got the memo in 2004.
Update: Writing in the Philadelphy Inquirer, Hugh Hewitt, who was mentioned, along with other conservative commentators by Rutten in the above linked piece, (and has had at least one on-air run-in with Hiltzik) notes:
Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.Shouldn't journalists like Hiltzik and Rutten look for the root cause of their readers' frustration and ponder seriously, "why do they hate us?", before lashing out?
After all, one man's blogger is merely another man's freedom of information fighter.
Earth Day is a solemn occasion for most Bobos in search of Gaia's paradise--which means it's absolutely made for Mark Steyn to point out that the emperor is bereft of (hemp-made, PETA-friendly non-animal fiber) clothes:
Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself -- and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he's taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity. [Spot on--Ed.]Read the whole thing, for it is terrific.Oh, and here's my favorite -- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian:
"In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.
"Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example."
Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed" -- Al Gore, the guy from the New Yorker, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once-fashionable eateries.
Meanwhile, Power Line shares the thoughts of climate scientist Fred Singer on Vanity Fair's Green issue:
Today is Earth Day – and also the anniversary of Lenin’s birth. How appropriate! The Reds have morphed into Greens. In the old days of Marx and Lenin, capitalism used to oppress the working class; now it despoils nature. The new religion of environmentalism is on full display in the “Green” issue of Vanity Fair (May 2006), the magazine of conspicuous consumption. So amidst the ads for diamond-studded $10,000 watches and super-powered $100,000 SUVs you find paeans of praise for the moneyed “defenders of the environment.” The irony of it all seems to have escaped the editors.Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, I'm shocked; shocked!
Update: Tim Blair goes in search of species that are abso-farging-lutely guaranteed never to become extinct--pious celebrities and media elites. Here's a sample:
Over to you, Annie Leibovitz:Heh, Indeed. Read the whole thing.TMI wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.So do I. Especially using the megalitres of chemicals that Leibovitz must have churned through during her photographic career. So natural!
Or least one small critter.
I'm sure I'll be alienating Cosmo Goldberg and Jasper Lileks next too...