Unexpected music

True stories that brightened my day:

• Most of the signs in my local Korean grocery store are, naturally enough, in Korean. But on my most recent visit there, Loggins & Messina's "Your Mama Don't Dance and Your Daddy Don't Rock and Roll" was playing over store speakers while I shopped. Good times!
• The higher-end fuel stations around here that serve both prepared and pre-packaged food still have their dining areas closed for the sake of pandemic precaution while North Carolina grapples with the Wuhan coronavirus. But there's something absurdly entertaining about eating tacos in a parking lot to the soundtrack of Blue Oyster Cult's "Burning for You."

A fine film for Juneteenth

My sweetheart and I enjoyed Miss Virginia last night. Virginia Walden Ford is not well known outside the ambit of education reform in the District of Columbia, but she's a woman worth celebrating, and the 2019 movie about her crusade for children does a good job of that.

Unrelated to education reform but in the spirit of Juneteenth, you might also want to check out The Help, from 2011. It's a good 'un!

Provacateurs

These are, as Gerard Vanderleun notes, strange days. Erick Hoffer's great book "The True Believer" deserves re-reading, and not simply because it explains why Confederate statues aren't the only ones being ripped down. 

I find that a little recourse to first principles as articulated by sober-minded pundits who can also entertain helps -- along with prayer! -- to get through the times we're in. Here are memes, and here (below) are excerpts from some of the more thought-provoking essays I've read lately:

The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.

Elections are usually information operations.
-- Kurt Schlichter: This Leftist Tantrum is an Information Operation and Trump is Winning It

Christian conservatives have not triumphed. Rather, cultural defeat and the near-total exclusion of social conservatives from power in the Democratic Party have left us with no options except the GOP and a defensive crouch in the court system. Thus, we end up supporting anyone who will work with and protect us, whether he is a boorish real estate developer and TV personality or a Mormon technocrat with a pro-choice record.
-- Nathanael Blake: Christians Have Very Good Reasons to Fear an Increasingly Hostile American Regime

For too long we have tolerated — some of us out of good manners, some thinking it unimportant, some effectively co-opted by the Left, and some just plain cowards — lies about American history. In the process, we have forfeited our past. The argument that America is morally indefensible has pretty much won the day. Even those who can’t possibly believe it are too cowed to resist it.
-- H.W. Crocker: The Price of Lies

Would it be impolite to mention that every damn one of the Confederate commanders whom Petraeus wants to toss in the dustbin of history was a Democrat? And is it also out of line to note that a memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (an all-black unit that fought bravely for the Union in the Civil War) was recently vandalized by rioters claiming solidarity with Black Lives Matter? Neither public education nor progressive ideology recognizes irony.
-- Patrick O'Hannigan (yup, that 'graph is mine): Rename Fort Bragg? Don't Do It

There will be no end to these demands to remove statues, because they are not made in good faith. The people making them are not attempting to make a more just and harmonious world; they’re aiming to tear America down beyond its foundations.

But if [Doug] Bandow insists on serving the communist revolutionaries at his rope store, may I suggest he at least charge full retail prices? Before we accede to demands that statues of Lee, or Washington, or Columbus, or Lincoln, or any of America’s other founding figures, be obliterated from public view, can we at least get something for them beyond empty promises of peace in our time? Can we at least force the bowdlerizers to offer up a consideration or two?
-- Scott McKay: Disagreeing with Doug Bandow on Robert E. Lee

...most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to your life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it’s really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
-- Winifred Gallagher: Why You Should Stop Reading News

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.