I’ve been saving this for a BG’s post, but it’s been a long time since the last one.

https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-07-at-11.07.19-AM.png?w=1012&ssl=1

From the Times Union (Albany)

The Congressional Budget Office says that the federal budget deficit will again hit $3 trillion this year, $745 billion more than its estimate five months ago, as it takes into account the cost of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue plan.

In an updated forecast Thursday, the CBO said the deficit for the current 2021 budget year, which ends Sept. 30, will be the second-largest in history, coming in shy of last year’s record shortfall of $3.13 trillion.

Images of hell and handbaskets spring to mind.

Sorry, I’m trying to learn/do quickly everything on the fly (within the 5 minutes), rather than compose exactly, or elsewhere first.

Not that I have been, but won’t try correct everything in the future.

Happy 4th everyone!

Ella singing a love song;

https://youtu.be/uUH7MLLMkL4

Thank you for the duet with Karen Carpenter.

A new Tablet article, via Scott Johnson at Powerline
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/the-soul-of-sowell.php

“The title and subtitle of the Tablet article linked there–
The ‘Nobel Lies’ of the New Race Politics:
Individual and group differences are real. So is inequality. The contrarian Black intellectual Thomas Sowell, who turns 91 today, showed us the way to understand and to remedy both.”

And from Daniel J. Flynn at American Spectator (an excerpt)
https://spectator.org/thomas-sowell-biography-jason-riley/

Sowell, putting his own spin on the nature-nurture dichotomy, invokes culture as a great determinant in group patterns in the face of diverse environments. Another theme finds Sowell charging intellectuals with harboring self-interest in falling for and advancing schemes that ultimately put them in roles directing society. He focuses on black behavior rather than white behavior to explain outcomes for African Americans. He rejects the demand for equality of results between disparate groups as an absurdity found between no two groups anywhere. The overarching macro theme uniting these and other micro themes centers on a general questioning of accepted knowledge within scholarly circles. …

I went to this site for some examples of her younger work. The duet with Louis Armstrong is great. They trade scat singing bits, which always fascinates me.

https://debatepost.com/music/2021/07/01/on-a-day-like-today-the-unmistakable-voice-of-jazz-was-born-ella-fitzgerald/

This website does something I’ve noticed on other sites run by younger people — flipping gender pronouns around arbitrarily. Thus for Fitzgerald’s early life:
_________________________________________

At the age of 17 he made his debut, by chance, as a singer in the Harlem Apollo Theater in New York, winning the Amateur Night Shows contest. Her dream was to be a dancer but she went on stage and when she saw all the people she had a nervous breakdown and then she tried to sing.

On 1935 began singing with the Chick Webb band at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and rose to fame with his version of the lullaby “A Tisket a Tasket” in 1938. In 1941 he began his solo career and by 1946 he adopted the bebop musical style, approaching jazz.
_________________________________________

Bizarre.