Order and astronauts

I like David Warren's cogent take on current events, one of which is the SpaceX + NASA Demo-2 mission with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

Six days later but in keeping with the theme in the heading for this entry, Neo turns a nice double play with help from the ever-reliable Thomas Sowell. And (as Neo also noted) David Horowitz remains a formidable thinker, so he's worth reading, too.

Music for Memorial Day

A twofer, just because.

First the Marine Band honors our country by playing the national march, which (as the conductor's introduction notes) was written by its most famous director, "the March King."



Second, the British a capella octet Voces8 covers Enya's hauntingly beautiful "May It Be," which was also a main theme in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies



The New Neo also has a wonderful musical Memorial Day tribute song posted.

And the PowerLine blog dusted off a beautiful essay about why we observe what we do.

The cult of expertise

Extreme reluctance to lift lockdown orders unless or until Wuhan coronavirus risk seems vanishingly small is not "following science," I don't think, even if our governor dresses it up that way.

Swinging for the fences

We're not yet back to normal baseball yet, so I've had to content myself with people who swing metaphorical bats. Jules Gomes, Roger Kimball, and George Neumayr are formidable sluggers:

Gomes has had it with the way Pope Francis obfuscates:

When a girl told Francis she wanted to invite her unchurched friends to church, Francis grabbed his interfaith fire extinguisher and hosed down her evangelistic brio.

"It is not licit that you convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path," he chided. Then, with Jesuitical equivocation rivaled only by the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth, he added: "You must give testimony of your Christian life ... But without wanting to convince."

Kimball is working to keep miscreants from being dropped down our collective memory hole:

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

George Neumayr is relentlessly logical:

How exactly do “believers of every religion,” which means believers of contradictory religions, those who accept Jesus Christ and those who reject him, unite themselves “spiritually”? The pope didn’t bother to explain. Past popes would have regarded such an instruction as jaw-droppingly scandalous. But for Pope Francis, “human fraternity” is more important than orthodoxy.

Thanks, Mike

Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe is my generation's Eric Hoffer.

Dave Rubin got Rowe to talk about the unintended consequences of making a fetish of safety.

Mr. Rowe has also been kind to many different podcasters, including Lewis Howes.

I like the fact that Rowe says his career started at age 17, when he was failing out of high school shop classes. I also like that he has a bit of experience singing opera (!). Rowe's fascinating conversation with Howes makes me want to look up the work of bass baritone James Morris. Rowe is also familiar with Aristotle's definition of tragedy, and the problem with focus grouping everything ("you eliminate really bad ideas, and really good ones").

Words to live by: "Run toward the thing that makes you uncomfortable."

More detail: confront, get good at, then find a way to love it. Note that this is deeper than "follow your bliss." Rowe says you don't follow your bliss, or wonder what you're passionate about. The trick is to take your passion with you wherever you go -- and don't be so damn picky about what you apply it to.

"There's this narrative that goes on in the world today -- I'm generalizing -- that says if you're happy in your personal relationships, it's because you found your soul mate, and if you're happy in your professional relationship, it's because you found your dream job, and if you're happy in both, it's because you followed your passion. And I think all of that is a big steaming pile of crap."

Alas! 'Tis no more

Pandemic response claimed a great little neighborhood pub, which will not be reopening its doors after North Carolina's restaurant restrictions are lifted sometime down the road.

I had a handful of friends who worked there, all of them aces at customer service.

It was also an honor to be fondly acquainted with one of the owners and his wife, and to see a favorite local band -- the Gravy Boys -- play regularly there.

It's not every pub that attracts two generations of the same family into the ranks of its employees, or hosts monthly jam sessions for students of Irish music.

The menu was limited but savory and seasonal. Beers on tap encouraged exploration, not least because bartenders like Kim and Sean understood their clientele. There were three large TVs in the pub, but they never dominated the space, because it was a watering hole rather than a sports bar (unless Irish football was making a run at one of the European championships).

You could eat there by yourself and not feel alone, or bring a loved one and be certain that the meal and the atmosphere would be memorably good. Regulars included people of all ethnicities and walks of life.

UPDATE: Jon Sanders of the John Locke Foundation (Raleigh) will also miss this place.

Because words mean things

The use and misuse of language (more specifically, American English) has been a favorite theme of mine over the years. I was fortunate to have both high school and college teachers who emphasized precision, and were vigilant about exposing smoke and mirrors before grading down for it (remember Mark Twain's quip about the difference between lightning and "lightning bugs"?).

Here's a bookmark for variations on the theme of words meaning things in a clear and commonly understood way, rather than as Lewis Carroll's version of Humpty Dumpty or a rousing game of "Calvinball" would have it:

• Lots of people are writing about "lockdown," but the linked essay is the pithiest I've seen
• Maureen Mullarkey tackles love and hope to wonderful effect in one ambitious essay
• Dennis Prager has some wise words about the difference between ignorance and evil

So much for the heavy lifting. There's fun to be had on the lighter side of the ledger, also:

• Here's Jeffrey K Mann on the problem with saying "People of Color"
• Glenn T. Stanton makes a case for taking the Q out of the "LGBTQ" abbreviation
• Jeffrey Lord explores shifting definitions of "tyranny"
• I wrote four years ago about how "community" had been watered down
• David Warren explains "free speech" as what you have when you're not noticed
• Fantasy novelist and former journalist John C. Wright muses about words a lot
• "Meritocracy" is one of the words that needs a second look, given current events
• Ditto (on that second look) for "accountability"
• Victor Davis Hanson performs a near-clinical dissection of "elite groupthink" 
• Ann Althouse on the use and misuse of metaphor

Remember Janis Joplin singing "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" in that great old song by Kris Kristofferson? Well, she was wrong, and Kristofferson wrote that evocative line as something that Bobbie (or Bobby) McGee's paramour would say while looking backward with regret.

A parting thought on this subject: With the exoneration of General Michael Flynn in (some of) the news as I write this, the redoubtable Katie Pavlich took issue with former president Barack Obama's oft-repeated claim that his administration was scandal-free. Her objections to that are reasonable, but it turns out that what Obama actually said was "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us." And if he learned to parse words as carefully as we might surmise, then his statement leaves wiggle room: who's to say Obama was embarrassed by things like Fast & Furious or Benghazi or the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS? He might not have been, either by temperament or because he knew that allies in the media were willing to carry water for him.

UPDATE. May 30: Voice matters, too. And when passive voice is used to obscure agency, it can be dishonest. Look no farther than the New York Times for examples of that.