October and November Quotes and Links

If Vulcans had a Church...

they would be Catholics:  John C. Wright, Sci-Fi writer

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Are you sick and tired of going to pubs and listening to the same old stories, to people telling you all about themselves, to people telling you almost immediately about their bigotries, to self-appointed experts, to people justifying their creepiness and barbarity, and to sheer ignorance?  

Are you sick and tired of watching creeps hitting on any local thing with legs that can pee by herself?

Have you gone the local DVD shop and felt despair because there was nothing to watch?

Are you sick of being stared at or being bothered by the local sharpies?

Than maybe you should listen to pod casts. You can escape and listen to great radio at a time of your choosing.  I load my pod casts  on my mobile phone.  

The podcast, linked in the headline above has drawn me away from my DVD collection (This is the podcast I mentioned in a previous entry).  It is extremely addictive and full of interesting facts.  Carlin puts unforgettable mental images in your mind.  He sounds completely authoritative.  Carlin puts history in perspective.  You can get Hardcore History on I-tunes.  Currently, Carlin is doing a long series about the war between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

The Talmud

"Regard as trifling the great good you did to others, and as enormous the little good others did to you."

Ecclesiasticus 3: 21, 24-26, 28

Do not pry into things too hard for you

Or investigate what is beyond your reach.

Many have been led astray by their theorizing,

And evil imaginings have impaired their judgments.

Stubbornness will come to a bad end,

And he who flirts with danger will lose his life.

When calamity befalls the arrogant, there is no cure;

Wickedness is too deeply rooted in them.

                   

Obama is too busy playing Hamlet with himself

I bring to your attention yet another column from David Warren.  In this one Warren, with properly righteous indignation, jumps all over Obama's stupid and glib statement made to the military, about Afghanistan, where he said he would not  "rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way."  The comment shows how clearly how unfit Obama is to be President and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Military.  The U.S. Military is being forced to hear this strange man in Washington, playing Hamlet with himself, dramatizing his own role in what should be a clear-headed and quick, unemotional decision-making process. 

Obama has a left-liberal mindset that despises the military and hence doesn't understand it.  If he was in the military at a lower level, his dithering would see him stripped of command.  A private or officer-cadet trying to display Obama's "solemnity" would soon have the desire trained out of him.

The U.S. military loved Bush and he got the majority of their vote in the 2 presidential elections.  Why?  Bush showed he was able to make decisions.

Edmund Burke

There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men. 

(They say Obama knows all about Burke.  How did he miss this quote?)

 

The Worst Song of All-Time

It always grates me when I hear people talk about Sinatra and immediately mention that song "My Way".  Sinatra sang a thousand better songs than that and yet the popular imagination thinks of "My Way" as his signature tune.

 

I feel the same way about John Lennon and "Imagine".  I had a Chinese student recently tell me that her favorite Beatles** song was "Imagine".  I forgive her for the mistake, but still it does show that Lennon's signature song is popularly thought of as being "Imagine".  "Imagine" is basically the Communist Manifesto set to music.  Its' lyrics are thoroughly idiotic drivel and so the song has to rank as once of the worst "popular songs" of all time because it has come to be seen as an anthem of idealism.  Lennon wrote many songs, with the Beatles and as a solo artist, that are much better candidates for being his signature song -- for example, In my Life and Mother.  (I played In my Life in one of my Wuxi Jenny pregnancy videos -- here is the youku link and the youtube link. )

 

The Link above does say some good things about Husker Du and the Clash  -- bands I have liked.

**I have seen many students wear Beatles t-shirts bearing images from some of their albums.  Initial enthusiasm about this quickly turns to disappointment when you ask the students and see they really have no idea who the Beatles are.  They often buy the t-shirts because they like the imagery.

F.A. Hayek

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

David Horowitz and G. Gordon Liddy

How to deal with the Leftists in your life?  David Horowitz, a left-wing apostate turned outspoken conservative activist, had this problem when dealing with his daughter, now deceased.  Horowitz talks about this is his relationship with his daughter in a book called A Cracking of the Heart.  More importantly however, Horowitz talked about dealing with the death of the daughter.

Having Tony, my biggest fear is losing him.  This happened to Horowitz with the death of his daughter.  Compounding the death was the memory of the divide between them caused by politics.  Horowitz's daughter supported Obama before her death.  Horowitz's attitude to the divide was that he had to leave her room to hopefully find things out for herself.  The desire to grip onto her and change her mind was the solution he reasoned.

In the interview with Liddy, Horowitz did talk about his basic world view.  You can't change the world, you can only change individuals in your life.  Changing institutions won't solve the world problems like war, racism, and poverty because the problem is people.  People who want to solve the world's problems are dangerous.  The biggest crimes of the 20th century were committed by progressives who wanted, for idealistic reasons, to change the world.

How do I deal with Leftists?  I avoid confronting them and I let them say their bit because they all seem so desirous of doing so.  Any thought that rises to the level of a poser for me, I give some consideration but that happens rarely.  Great at expounding the problems of the world, Leftists don't have any concrete solutions.

Reinhold Niebuhr

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

Mark Steyn

It should be the law that I include a Marc Steyn quote in my Quotes and Links features.  Like David Warren, he is addictive for me. Here is a prize quote about another inanity spoken by an Obamoid:

Valerie Jarrett announced the other day that "we're going to speak truth to power".

Who's Valerie Jarrett? She's "Senior Advisor" to the President of the United States – ie, the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to "speak truth to power" to.

W. Somerset Maugham

Passages from an linked article about the famous writer as a traveler:

Visit the China being "definitively" covered by tomorrow's foreign correspondents and you're unlikely to find anyone who catches the country's character and mysteries so well as Maugham did 90 years ago. It's hard not to go to an expat dinner party in Hong Kong, Paris, Buenos Aires, and not realize that you're in a collection of half-exotic types that you've met before in a Maugham short story.

Said Maugham:  "A novelist must preserve a child-like belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence," he wrote late in life. "He must never entirely grow up."