More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains ”“ lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti. It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries.
“All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus’ famous flagship, the Santa Maria,” said the leader of a recent reconnaissance expedition to the site, one of America’s top underwater archaeological investigators, Barry Clifford.
Why, who would have thought it? But don’t worry, what you hated in the 90s you’ll love in the twenty-teens. Because you’ll have to.
And because we’ll break you of the choice habit. Sort of like quitting smoking, it’ll be good for you:
“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”
That foolish “choice habit”—which has been extremely important to me my entire life, and for which I’ve always been willing to pay extra if need be—who knew it was such a bad one?
Oh, and you can keep your doc…that is, you can keep your something-or-other. You can keep something, right?
Here’s another quote that I love:
People “are weighing affordability and breadth of network,” said Karen Ignagni, the chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group. “What we’re finding is individuals are experiencing a preference for affordability,” she said.
Funny thing, but elsewhere in the article it concedes that people have no idea what the networks for each plan actually are when they’re buying. They’re just guessing—something we already knew here, because we’ve been discussing it ever since the rollout. Of course people are preferring affordability—because they haven’t a clue what sort of clunker they’re buying, and it’s nearly impossible to find out.
We’ve become familiar with those “Fill-In-the-Blank-Country’s Got Talent” videos that feature an unlikely person—shy, young, fat, or weird, or sometimes several of those characteristics—belting out a song. The style is usually either diva-esque, operatic, or rock. The judges look stunned and the audience goes wild.
Susan Boyle was probably the most famous of the genre, but quite a few of these singers are children. Now there’s another child singer in a competition who’s getting a lot of press, a lovely seven-year-old (now newly-turned eight) from Norway named Angelina Jordan who works a whole different angle on it—and not just because she sings barefoot, but because she sings a very different kind of song. As one of the judges told her not long after first hearing her, “You sing in a way that we believe you have to be old, or even very old to be able to do.”
It’s not that Anglina has such a great voice in the technical sense. She doesn’t. Like many of the other child stars on these shows she is a sort of parrot, very good at mimicking the voice quality of others (even though her English diction is somewhat sketchy). In her case, the listeners’ amazement comes from who it is she’s chosen to channel and what type of song she’s chosen to sing.
The judge’s surprise in the case of Angelina seems real. It’s not a frenzied, excited amazement; it’s quiet and solemn, and borders on awe (when you watch the video, you should be able to see English captions to understand their remarks).
Reincarnation, anyone?
Here’s the original and still the greatest:
The song—with which I was heretofore unfamiliar—has an unusual pedigree. It was originally Hungarian, written in 1933 by RezsÅ‘ Seress, who composed the first set of lyrics, which were about the very gloomy state of the world:
It is autumn and the leaves are falling
All love has died on earth
The wind is weeping with sorrowful tears
My heart will never hope for a new spring again
My tears and my sorrows are all in vain
People are heartless, greedy and wicked…
Love has died!
The world has come to its end, hope has ceased to have a meaning
Cities are being wiped out, shrapnel is making music
Meadows are coloured red with human blood
There are dead people on the streets everywhere
I will say another quiet prayer:
People are sinners, Lord, they make mistakes…
The world has ended!
An alternate theory has the lyric as having been written during or immediately after WWII. Whichever it is, these were not the lyrics that became part of the song when it was released in 1933. The 1933 lyrics were by poet Lé¡szlé³ Jé¡vor, and in translation they read something like the Billie Holliday lyrics:
On a sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers, I was waiting for you, my dear, with a church prayer, That dream-chasing Sunday morning, The chariot of my sadness returned without you.
Ever since then, Sundays are always sad, tears are my drink, and sorrow is my bread… Sad Sunday.
Last Sunday, my dear, please come along, There will even be priest, coffin, catafalque, hearse-cloth. Even then flowers will be awaiting you, flowers and coffin. Under blossoming (flowering in Hungarian) trees my journey shall be the last.
My eyes will be open, so that I can see you one more time, Do not be afraid of my eyes as I am blessing you even in my death… Last Sunday.
The lyrics Billie Holiday—and Angelina Jordan—used were a 1935 translation by Sam M. Lewis. Holiday recorded the song in 1941, and it is overtly about suicide. She sang all the verses; Angelina left out the second one:
Sunday is gloomy,
My hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows
I live with are numberless
Little white flowers
Will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of
Sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought
Of ever returning you
Would they be angry
If I thought of joining you?
Gloomy Sunday
Gloomy is Sunday,
With shadows I spend it all
My heart and I
Have decided to end it all
Soon there’ll be candles
And prayers that are said I know
Let them not weep
Let them know that I’m glad to go
Death is no dream
For in death I’m caressin’ you
With the last breath of my soul
I’ll be blessin’ you
Gloomy Sunday
Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep
In the deep of my heart, dear
Darling I hope
That my dream never haunted you
My heart is tellin’ you
How much I wanted you
Gloomy Sunday
There are all sorts of legends about people committing suicide because of listening to the song, but none verified. I wouldn’t doubt that some people already intent on suicide might listen to it before committing the act, though. However, the original composer, RezsÅ‘ Seressk, did commit suicide in 1968.
This fact continually gets lost in discussions of Obamacare, which was supposed to improve both but may end up improving neither in any substantial way. In fact, as this piece points out, it may actually decrease the former while only effecting a very slight increase in the latter. The author of the piece I linked, Nancy Pfotenhauer, points out not only that “universal health insurance is profoundly different from better healthcare,” but that the two might be inversely related.
One doesn’t have to go back so far in history to get to a time when neither health care nor health insurance was considered to be within the proper purview of the federal government. But government regulation of the insurance business has been in place for a long long time, and now the real argument about health insurance regulation by government is over how much of it we need and whether federal or state government should lead, with the usual conservative/liberal split.
The trend even before Obamacare had been to greater and greater government regulation, but Obamacare represents an enormous leap in that direction, so large a jump that we could start to use the word “control” rather than mere “regulation” at this point. As such, Obamacare has reduced choice more and more rather than maximizing it, as federal government control is everywhere wont to do.
We on the right condemned Hillary Clinton back when she issued the outrageous statement “What difference, at this point, does it make?” when being questioned in Congress about Benghazi. But it seemed to me even back then that Hillary had a point; just not the point she appeared to be making:
…If the public doesn’t care about a certain tree falling in the forest, does it actually make a sound, even if the right is fussing about it?
…If the public doesn’t expect integrity or truth from what used to be called our public servants (what a quaint phrase!), then lies and strategic stonewalling will not bother most people at all. What matters is what those public servants can get for you, and what they can scare you into thinking the opposition will take away from you.
This same issue came up here recently in the comments section of a post of mine on Benghazi. The relevant part begins with my addressing commenter “Eric,” here (his reply is here, and my further response here).
Benghazi seems small [to some people] because it only involves “four people”…That’s the kind of thinking I’ve encountered.
So Iraq is much bigger because so many more people died. It makes sense to reason that way if you believe both presidents lied for political reasons. Why people in Iraq died, whether Bush really lied, who and what Saddam was – none of this is relevant to them and they will never never never be convinced he didn’t lie to get us into Iraq, either. Never.
A few hours later I happened across a Slate article defending the administration on Obama, and bingo! In the comment section there I found a host of nearly perfect exemplars of what I was writing about. Here are just a few:
I gotta admit..I’m no fan of the president, but I have a hard time caring about Benghazi.
Not to sound callous but four people aren’t terribly important in the grand scheme of things, they knew the risks involved in their dangerous foreign posting, and Al Qaeda–given sufficient time and husbanding of resources–is going to kill Americans somewhere. It’s inevitable…[Benghazi is] a city on the marches of civilization with very little strategic value anymore, and it’s kind of silly to expect our security apparatus to be at 100% there.
I feel similarly. It’s not callous when talking about security and national interests. More death is worse than less death; strategic locations are more important than less strategic locations.
I’ve never quite understood what the “crime” is w/r/t Benghazi and the administration… So they put spin on the situation at the start. what else is new? What is the so-called failed policy that caused the attack? Radical muslims were there long before Khaddafy fell, there now, and will be there for a long long time after we’re gone – and they will do anything they can to attack anytime — especially on the anniversary of 9/11. Those killed knew the danger in their situation far, far better than anyone in Washington, and they put themselves into the un-guarded situation knowingly. Does someone think Obama ordered them to go on a suicide mission? Does anyone think the president has a role at that low a level?
My main objection to it at the time was Hillary Clinton’s pretty weak response to it as sec state (i.e. basically apologizing for the inflammatory video), but I kind of stopped caring about that a year ago or whenever it was.
I think spin is standard and I have long since stopped being upset by it. Politicians always try to shape public perception of events in ways that help their political fortunes. I can understand why someone might be bothered by that, but it’s so incredibly normal that I find it difficult to get upset over any particular incident.
Somehow “Obama spun the CIA’s talking points” doesn’t have the ring that “Obama killed Ambassador Stevens” did. This scandal keeps getting less and less scandalous.
What percentage of the comments to the Slate article are of this type? Since there are now over 1200 comments, I’m not going to do the research to find out. Let’s just say they were common enough that it was no trouble at all to find them.
This sort of cynicism and weariness is what leftists such as Obama are fully aware of, and count on and exploit. Clinton knew what she was doing as well. The people writing those comments may or may not be leftists themselves, or they may just be useful idiots. But they are politically aware enough to be frequenting and participating in the comments sections of political articles. I think their ranks are more numerous than we know.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]
Okay, who are these three dark beauties?
A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.
My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.
Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.
The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.
Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.
We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).
My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.
I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.
So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?
Linda Ronstadt’s still alive and kicking. But at the age of 67 she can’t sing anymore due to Parkinson’s.
But nothing can still her voice on YouTube. You can find tons of her appearances and recordings there, almost countless songs and performances from the peak of her fame and richness of voice.
And yet, when I was going through a Linda Ronstadt jag there the other evening, it was Ronstadt’s duet version of the old standard “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” with the Muppet Kermit the Frog (aka Jim Henson) that ended up being the ONE I just had to put up here.
The YouTube blurb for the video says that Ronstadt herself said it was the best she’d ever sung this song.
Maybe it’s the best anyone ever sang this song:
Fortunately, Ronstadt’s voice doesn’t have to live only in our hearts, it can live on YouTube.
And if I had to put just one more Ronstadt selection up there, it would have to be this:
I’m not usually a conspiracist, but I vote “yes” on this one by Edward Jay Epstein:
Edward Snowden’s massive misappropriations of classified documents from the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence is mainly presented by the media as a whistleblowing story. In this narrative””designed by Mr. Snowden himself””he is portrayed as a disgruntled contractor for the National Security Agency, acting alone, who heroically exposed the evils of government surveillance beginning in 2013.
The other way of looking at it””based on the number and nature of documents Mr. Snowden took, and the dates when they were taken””is that only a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation…
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2014, that “The vast majority of the documents that Snowden . . . exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities.” Time magazine on April 3 quoted Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, as saying Mr. Snowden was “definitely under the influence of Russian officials.”
On June 10, 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Mr. Snowden’s theft of documents as “an act of treason.” A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.
Mr. Snowden’s critics regard the whistleblowing narrative as at best incomplete, at worst fodder for the naé¯ve. They do not believe that it explains the unprecedented size and complexity of the penetration of NSA files and records. For one thing, many of his critics have intelligence clearance. They have been privy to the results of an NSA investigation that established the chronology of the copying of 1.7 million documents that were stolen from the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii. The documents were taken from at least 24 supersecret compartments that stored them on computers, each of which required a password that a perpetrator had to steal or borrow, or forge an encryption key to bypass.
Once Mr. Snowden breached security at the Hawaii facility, in mid-April of 2013, he planted robotic programs called “spiders” to “scrape” specifically targeted documents. According to Gen. Dempsey, “The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures.”
[NOTE: From the very beginning of the Snowden saga I’ve been highly suspicious of him, his motives, his version of the story, and the timeline (see this).]
The Monica Lewinsky confessional in Vanity Fair brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal. Remember them? Treacherous thatched-roof-haired drag-queen Linda Tripp, with those dress-for-success shoulder pads? Cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg, mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr””the whole buzzing swarm of legal, congressional and gossip industry flesh flies, feasting on the entrails. And, of course, hitting “send” on each new revelation that no one else would publish, the solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge, operating in pallid obsession out of his sock-like apartment in Miami.
A once-in-a-lifetime cast! Or so we all thought. But what we didn’t know at the time is that they were not some passing cultural excrescence. They were the face of the future. The things that shocked us then””the illicitly taped conversations, the wholesale violations of elementary privacy, the globally broadcast sexual embarrassments, all the low-life disseminated malice””is now the communications industry as it operates every minute of every day.
At Vanity Fair, Brown’s editorial philosophy was informed by two insights: first, that celebrities are intrinsically worth knowing about no matter what they’re like, and, second, that American celebrities take themselves very seriously. That means they must be praised with great earnestness or smeared with all available dirt, with the intensity due to people of their station.
I guess Brown doesn’t believe that Clinton was one of those who should have been “smeared with all available dirt”—after all, he was a Democrat, not a Republican. But there’s no doubt that if anyone was going to sling dirt on anyone, it should have been the lovely Brown rather than such unbeautiful “tabloid gargoyles” as the “thatched-roof-haired drag-queen” Tripp, the “cackling…hack” Goldberg, and “pallid” Drudge in his teeny-weeny apartment. The nerve of them, scooping a press that refused for political reasons to report on a big big story!
Brown alternates between sympathy for Monica Lewinsky and approbation, although she leans more to the sympathy side. That’s not surprising, since there are some interesting parallels between Brown’s and Lewinsky’s career, although the British Brown was tremendously much more successful with her own sexual escapades as a young woman. It helped that, at least for quite a while, she was also quite good at the publishing business, specializing in making cold properties hot. But it’s also the case that she got her start by being taken up in her early 20s by literary lights with whom she’d slept.
A tiny bit later on, one of them turned out to be the publisher of the British Sunday Times Harold Evans, who left his wife and three kids for Brown in the mid-70s. They married in 1981 and are still together, so their relationship seems to have stood the test of time, unlike that of the much-more-ill-fated Lewinsky and her married paramour. But at the beginning there were more parallels with Lewinsky than the mere fact that Brown had an affair with a married man: Evans was Brown’s powerful boss, and she was about twenty-five while he was about fifty years old. It’s not such a stretch to imagine that, when Brown writes, “Other women can often be the worst at cutting any slack towards the love interest in a sex scandal” she might be thinking of her own experience.
But there’s virtually no doubt at all that, for Brown, this represents something up close and personal:
The press was at the height of its power when the Monica story began and Drudge was its underbelly.
The ascendant media that looked down on him has been pretty much destroyed…
That too, is a story of humiliation. And not just hers.
That “ascendant media” of the time and its subsequent “humiliation” included Tina Brown. She’d been ascending for quite some time and her star has fallen in recent years, a fact for which she almost certainly blames Drudge and his low-life internet companions.
Andrew C. McCarthy lays out the case for letting Lois Lerner off the prosecutor’s hook and putting her on the Congressional hearings’ hook by granting her immunity from prosecution for her testimony. Whether you believe that would be a good idea or not depends to a large extent on whether you think it’s more important to get her testimony or more important to send her to prison. In a perfectly just world, if she turns out to be guilty (and the evidence so far is that she is) then both would be nice. But we all know the world isn’t perfectly just, and so we may have to settle for either one or the other.
Or for neither, because if she’s not granted immunity she probably won’t be prosecuted either, since that would most likely be up to Eric Holder.
And so I’m with McCarthy on this, although reluctantly so because I’m one of those people who do care whether Lerner “ever sees the inside of a jail cell.” I just don’t think she ever will no matter what happens, so I’d settle for her testimony:
When officials prove unfit for government power, taking that power away is the highest public interest. Even if you’ve deluded yourself into thinking the Obama Justice Department would lift a finger to prosecute Lois Lerner, who cares if she ever sees the inside of a jail cell? What matters is laying bare the entirety of the scheme and finding out how high it goes: Who and what induced her to orchestrate the harassment of conservative groups? Why was the government’s fearsome tax agency placed in the service of the Democratic party’s political needs?
To get the answers to those questions, you need Ms. Lerner to testify. …
“But wait,” you say, “if we immunize her, we can’t prosecute her.” My first impulse is to say, “So what?” If she testifies truthfully and gives a full account of what happened, we’ll be a lot more interested in pursuing the officials who instigated the scheme than in prosecuting those who carried it out. But if “Who is going to jail!” is really your big concern, immunity for Ms. Lerner does not protect her if she lies or obstructs the investigation. The statute of limitations on such crimes will not have run out when a new administration takes over in 2017. She could still be prosecuted, and the penalties for those crimes are more severe than whatever her actions at the IRS could have earned her.
I also think that, even if “the scheme” for the IRS targeting of conservative groups didn’t originate with Lerner herself (which it may have; there’s a possibility she might have merely intuited that it would please the higher-ups and begun it on her own), she still isn’t likely to give us the names of those officials who did instigate it. I also doubt (although I could be very wrong about this) that the investigation will uncover any evidence in the form of emails and the like implicating those higher-ups, and that therefore learning their identities would rest on Lerner’s ratting on them. And then, if the effort to get her to spill the beans doesn’t succeed, and she’s been given immunity for testifying, there’s no one left to punish for what was probably the worst excess of IRS power in US history.
Lesley Stahl interviews her mother. How old do you think her mother is?:
She’s 95. Astounding. What a lovely woman!
My mother, born a few years earlier than Ruthy Stahl, also called the refrigerator the icebox. And I, quite a few years younger than both, remember when most of our groceries were delivered to the house: fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, milk, and bread, all from different sources.
The bread came regularly; the milk likewise, left by the milkman in a little wooden box outside the kitchen door. The meat and fish my mother ordered over the telephone from the butcher and the fish guy. But the fruits and vegetables were the best, delivered by a man who came a couple of times a week in a large truck that was a traveling fruit and vegetable stand where you could go outside and see the display. One side could be lifted up, and underneath were open bins of fruits and vegetables like in a grocery store.
He’d come inside the house and sit down at the kitchen table and schmooze, telling us what was best that day and freshest in the fruit and vegetable line. He knew I loved red peppers, and in those days they weren’t always available, but he’d give me one as a special treat whenever they were. I still remember how good they tasted.
Fact-checker Glenn Kessler at the WaPosays that Obama’s gone and lied again [emphasis mine]:
In addressing a dinner of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Los Angeles, President Obama made a rather striking claim ”” that Senate Republicans have filibustered “500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class.”
Regular readers knows that The Fact Checker has objected to the way that Senate Democrats tally these figures, but the president’s claim makes little sense no matter how you do the numbers…
Indeed, when you go through the numbers, there have just been 133 successful filibusters ”” meaning a final vote could not take place ”” since 2007.
But, even if you accept the way Senate Democrats like to frame the issue, the president is still wrong. He referred to “legislation” ”” and most of these cloture motions concerned judicial and executive branch nominations. In the 113th Congress, for instance, 83 of the 136 cloture motions so far have concerned nominations, not legislation.
Even then, while Obama referred to “500 pieces of legislation,” the same bill can be subject to as many as three cloture motions, further inflating the numbers. For instance, there may be cloture to get on the bill, cloture on the substitute bill (if lawmakers are simply using an unrelated bill as a vehicle for passage), and cloture on the underlying bill. All of these votes might take place on the same day, but it creates the illusion of the same bill being “filibustered” three times. It certainly does not mean there were three pieces of legislation. So far in the 113th Congress, 36 pieces of legislation were subject to a cloture motion ”” and 12 were actually filibustered. That’s a far cry from the 136 that Obama is counting in order to tally up 500.
Obama’s count also includes at least a half-dozen instances when Republicans were blocked by Democrats through use of the filibuster. In fact, in the biggest oddity, the president reached back to 2007 in making his claim, so he includes two years when he was still a senator. On eight occasions, he voted against ending debate ”” the very thing he decried in his remarks.
Obama is no ordinary political liar. He’s an Orwellian political liar.
And even Kessler at the WaPo knows it:
On just about every level, this claim is ridiculous.
We realize that Senate rules are complex and difficult to understand, but the president did serve in the Senate and should be familiar with its terms and procedures. Looking at the numbers, he might have been able to make a case that Republicans have blocked about 50 bills that he had wanted passed, such as an increase in the minimum wage. But instead, he inflated the numbers to such an extent that he even included votes in which he, as senator, supported a filibuster.
