Celiac disease is real. But short of that, the burgeoning industry that caters to those who claim gluten sensitivity is probably based on a fantasy.
That sort of thing is always tricky, though. If people believe that gluten makes them ill, they probably will feel ill if they know they’ve eaten gluten. So I predict that those who make gluten-free products have nothing to fear.
Well, it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much to make them smarter these days. Or rather than “smarter,” let’s say more well-informed and better able to think clearly.
And I strongly believe that this is purposeful. The majority of educators now see their job as indoctrinating students in right (that is, left) thinking/feeling, and countering whatever faulty programs may have gotten there first. So education has become one big re-education camp, telling students that they are privileged (white, of course), racist (white, of course), sexist (male, of course), and how they might redeem themselves.
And it doesn’t just start with college. By now, entering students have been programmed enough earlier on that there isn’t quite as much to re-educate. And yet there’s always room for improvement, isn’t there? And it’s always necessary to bar other points of view from getting through.
This NY Times article is about the contest by which Newark, New Jersey elected its new mayor, Councilman Ras Baraka, who according to the Times is “the fiery scion of a militant poet.”
The contest—between two black Democrats—was both expensive and bitter, pitting a union-supported Newark insider (Baraka) against a man perceived as a power-broker outsider (Jeffries). And the city, Newark—which I knew as a different place in my youth, when we used to go to visit elderly relatives who still lived there—has been plagued with seemingly intractable problems for many a long decade.
The most recent mayor, Cory A. Booker, used his position as a springing-off spot for his current office of US Senator, but Baraka won by running as a Newark insider against the Booker administration, of which Jeffries was seen as a continuation. The article mentions Baraka’s family several times,saying that “Mr. Baraka relied on his family’s name” among other things, and that both candidates lived in Newark’s South Ward, “which has long been the Baraka family’s base of support.” In addition, we have this:
Mr. Baraka, 44, benefited from high name recognition. His father, Amiri Baraka, who died in January, was a leader of Newark’s cultural and political life after the riots of 1967.
So it appears that family, particularly Baraka’s father, and name recognition played a large part in Baraka’s victory. But in the entire 1000-word article, the Times somehow neglects to mention something I’d consider rather important about that family name, something that readers of a certain age (my age, to be exact) remember and that would enable newer readers to place Baraka’s father and understand who he was, and that’s his birth name, Leroi Jones, the name by which he first became famous as a “militant poet.”
The Times probably has good reason to leave this sort of thing out:
Within the African-American community, some compare [Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones] to James Baldwin and call Baraka one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Baraka’s brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002 – 03), involved controversy over a public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” and accusations of anti-semitism, and some negative attention from critics, and politicians.
If you follow the link to the poem you’ll find those accusations are hardly made-up, and you’ll find other examples on Baraka’s Wiki page to show that he was an equal-opportunity hater of almost everyone except black people, with “his advocacy of rape and violence towards, at various times, women, gay people, white people, and Jews.”
And what does “militant poet” mean? In Amiri Baraka’s case, it meant something like this:
After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. Now a “black cultural nationalist,” he broke away from the predominantly white Beats and became very critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights movement. His revolutionary poetry now became more controversial. A poem such as “Black Art” (1965), according to academic Werner Sollors from Harvard University, expressed his need to commit the violence required to “establish a Black World.” “Black Art” quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement and in it, Jones declaimed “we want poems that kill,” which coincided with the rise of armed self-defense and slogans such as “Arm yourself or harm yourself” that promoted confrontation with the white power structure. Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action. His poetry demanded violence against those he felt were responsible for an unjust society.
Jones changed his name in 1970, when he was 36 years old and already very famous. He became a Marxist in the mid-70s (officially, that is), and in the 80s found a home in academia, settling into a professorship at Stonybrook.
I have no idea how far the Ras Baraka acorn falls from the parental tree, or how many of these views of the father the son shares today. But my guess is that dad had a pretty big influence on him. And the Times, of course, has done a bang-up job of obfuscating the truth about who Baraka’s father was as best it can. While not ignoring him entirely, the article makes him sound like some kindly old Newark patriarch and patron of the arts.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s some background on one of the bitter disputes that were part of the Newark mayoral race. Sounds like Baraka’s election bodes ill for Newark, which has already seen plenty of ill, and for its children’s eduction:
The mayor’s race pits radical Councilman Ras Baraka, who was principal of low-performing Central High, against Shavar Jeffries, a former assistant state attorney general who helped start a successful charter school.
The Newark backlash could have been avoided, says Jeffries. Too often, he said, “education reform . . . comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.” Reformers “have to build coalitions and educate and advocate,” says Jeffries. “You have to persuade people.”
Baraka won the election.]
Eugene Robinson demonstrates his command of the popular Democrat and MSM (but I repeat myself) meme du jour when he calls the upcoming Benghazi Select Committee hearings a “show trial” and a “farce,” and the Republican Congressmen “inquisitors.” He then adds another common accusation:
It’s impossible to take seriously a House select committee investigation designed not to unearth relevant new facts but to achieve nakedly political goals: rousing the GOP base for the fall election and sullying Hillary Clinton’s record in case she runs for president.
It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this a new low, and the fact that the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans is scant consolation.
Robinson seems to lack a sense of irony. But when he asks, “What’s the point…that Republicans are trying to prove?” the answer is that they strongly suspect the Obama administration was trying “to achieve nakedly political goals” through its handling of Benghazi security and in the aftermath of the attack. And yes, “It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner.” But there is every reason to believe that it was—by the Obama administration.
The Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper, who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1930s (when he was in his late 30s) and then to London, had flirted with Communism in his youth. Actually, he more than flirted with it, although it was a whirlwind romance that lasted only a few months, came to a bad end, and had a profound effect on his life and his thinking thereafter:
[Popper] remembers that, although he was obviously dissatisfied with the society of its times, he was uneasy because the party obviously promoted a kind of murderous instinct against class-enemies: he was told, however, that this was necessary and that, in any case, it was not meant too seriously; also that in a revolution only victory can serve; and finally that under capitalism there are every day more victims than in the entire revolution. Popper notes that he agreed reluctantly, with the feeling that he had to pay a high price regarding his morality. Something similar happened regarding lies, as the leaders sometimes said one day white and the following day black; this would happen whenever they received a telegram from Moscow with the corresponding indications. When Popper protested, he was told that those contradictions were necessary and should not be criticized, as the unity of the party was essential for the triumph of revolution: although it was possible to commit mistakes, it was not allowed to criticize them openly, because only the discipline of the party could carry a fast victory. Popper remembers again that, although he reluctantly accepted this, he felt that he was sacrificing his personal integrity to the party, and that, when he realized that the leaders were disposed to contradict themselves at any moment, his attitude towards communism suffered a crisis
This is familiar, isn’t it? The slavish devotion to the Party over all, including rationality, was required. Young as he was at the time (age 17), Popper had trouble believing that 2 + 2 = 5, even when the Party demanded it.
The incident that was Popper’s turning point was a demonstration organized by the Communists, in which he took part and where quite a few people were killed by the police. He later wrote:
“I felt that as a Marxist I bore part of the responsibility for the tragedy -at least in principle. Marxist theory demands that the class struggle be intensified, in order to speed up the coming of socialism…”
…[T]he people dead, at least some of them, were young workers: Popper thought that other people who, like himself, were students or intellectuals, had special responsibility for those workers, who relied on the intellectuals. The other is that, as he said many years later, he had approved of the demonstration because it was supported by the communist party; he perhaps had even encouraged the participation of other people; and perhaps some of them were among the dead.
He was also upset by the attitude of the communist leaders. He asked himself whether he had discussed seriously and critically the Marxist theory which served as the basis for the sacrifice of human lives, and he recognized that he had not done it. However, when he arrived at the headquarters of the communist party, he realized that the leaders had an entirely different attitude: revolution made unavoidable the existence of such a type of victims, and furthermore this meant a kind of progress because workers would become every time more angry against the police and so they would become more and more aware of their real class-enemies. Popper’s reaction was clear: he never returned there, and this way, as he commented later, he escaped the Marxist trap…
…[H]e described it in his autobiography this way:
“I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but I had also actually noticed quite a bit that was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism, but had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to “the cause”, and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one’s intellectual conscience over a minor point one does not wish to give up too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that may be required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one’s moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It is like being eager to throw good money after bad. I also saw how this mechanism had been working in my case, and I was horrified.”
I don’t think I’ve come across a better description of the thought process of one type of person who is often attracted to leftism: the idealist. Popper, a supremely rational man, also hated war and was attracted to what he perceived as the pacifism of the Communists (they weren’t really pacifists, but he didn’t know that at the time). For a while, then, as a teenaged activist, his desire to believe he was joining in a good cause trumped his rationality and his ethics, but soon both asserted themselves because they were so strong within him.
But it’s easy to see how other idealists, less rational and less ethical, could keep going for a long time in the Communist cause. And of course idealists are not the only people attracted to the left—there’s an entire group, among them usually the leaders, who are attracted not in spite of the cruelty and power but because of it.
The experience formed the basis of what became Popper’s life work:
This sufficed to make of Popper a fallibilist, strongly suspicious of pseudo-scientific creeds: the Marxist pseudo-scientific prediction of a necessary course of history was very dangerous, and the first condition that Popper would require in the future to any allegedly scientific theory was that it should be held with an attitude of intellectual modesty, namely an attitude that recognizes the magnitude of our ignorance and never forgets that our theories are always tentative and partial trials to progress. Scientific certainty had showed itself deceptive and should be replaced by an attitude of learning through our unavoidable mistakes. Now, mistakes would begin to be considered not as an evil, but as the way which prepares real progress.
Wouldn’t this be exciting if it were true?:
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.
Says this article in the NY Times.
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’ youGloomy 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.
…are not one and the same.
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).
I wrote:
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: