Good evening, welcome to EBD’s Wednesday edition of Late Nite Radio. Several weeks ago at SDA, Paul linked to his Cjunk post, “ Gaze In Wonder at Your Frigidaire.” The title is a line from the song “Auschwitz to Ipswich” by Jarvis Cocker, who is perhaps best known as the frontman for the British band Pulp.
One might expect any song about the West’s passivity and unwillingness to defend itself culturally at home to take an anthemic, “we must fight this” tack, but Cocker takes the opposite approach: his first-person narrator is a faithless, dissipated, sadly self-pleasuring Western everyman who has given up the ghost on the matter of his culture. He recognizes a cultural sunset, but since he uses his own life as a reference point, he sees nothing of real value being lost; since society is just himself writ large, it is no more worthy of being saved than he is. Cocker’s apt use in this case of the small, first-person ironic voice serves to limn the inexorable connectedness between citizens’ seemingly inconsequential personal attributes and civilizational changes of historic consequence.
It’s just a song we’re talking about, of course, one mostly notable for its subject matter. Before we get to it, I have a quick question for SDA readers: are there any other popular songs extant that either mention, refer to, defend, or acknowledge the value of western culture — even if only metaphorically — vis a vis others? I can’t think of any; if you can, please elaborate in the comments.
Anyway, here it is, without further ado: Jarvis Cocker sings From Auschwitz to Ipswich.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
“If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us.”
David Kahane;
One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.
Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley.
Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?
Your must read of the week. (h/t Paul A.)
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
“When I start receiving those turbines, I’ve got to … like I said, my garage won’t hold them,…” – T. Boone Pickens
Hope, Change, Historical Revisionism
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
[W]ithin a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: this change did not come from any one nation alone. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.
Just as WWII would not have been won if not for the pivotal event known as “Woodstock”.
What sort of President shortchanges his nation’s greatest modern foreign policy achievement before a foreign audience?
“This new plan marks the fifth change in taxation of energy companies since 2007”
Reader Adrian emails – “Surely it can’t be, a State/government run incentive scheme that is clumbersome, bureaucratic and doesn’t work… Whats going wrong? The future depends on these plans …doesn’t it?”
My Editor Hates Me
The Globe and Mail – is it a newspaper, or is it a safe injection site for addicts of BDS?
“For some Europeans, especially the French, Lance Armstrong is George Bush on a bike…”
Read the whole sorry mess at “Obama, Russia and Fact-Checking John Ibbitson’s Ass“.
Extend And Pretend
Bryan Marsal, CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings (via Calculated Risk)
One of my partners said yesterday that we are going to call this phase the “extend and pretend” phase in our economy. Which is you extend someone’s maturity – because they are going to default – and you pretend that business will come back or that leverage factor is going to come back.
Then we’ll enter phase two, which he said is the request to extend or “amend”.
Then “send”. In other words send the keys.
That is the phases we are in right now. Everyone is trying to buy time, as opposed to dealing with the leverage, they are trying to buy time. Whether you are a banker or a company, they are all trying to buy time. I don’t see the leverage coming back, and I don’t see the consumption of good and services coming back.
Y2Kyoto: But Canada, Now That’s Different
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the Royal Hawaiian Band, the oldest municipal band in the United States of America (they’re out of Honolulu, and have been together since their inception, in 1836, by decree of King Kamehameha III), performing Aloha ‘Oe ¤, in 1928 (3:21).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
From Film Actors Guild To Congressman
Baldwin, whose political entanglements include blogging for the Huffington Post and repeatedly tangling with Fox News attack-dog Bill Reilly, told Playboy magazine that he was looking for an opportunity to run when his 30 Rock contract ends in 2012.
“The desire is there, that’s one component,” he told the magazine. “The other component is opportunity.”
I can already hear the campaign ads.
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
The Times goes off message – “Apparently reacting to criticism, The Times has changed the title of the article to remove the word Nazi, and the title takes an entirely different meaning. … There is no mention of why.”
Update: – “The Times of London has now removed all mention of the Nazis from the story…”
FinancialStability.gov
Citizens are urged to remain calm…
kate@uptime:~$ ping financialstability.gov
PING financialstability.gov (66.77.70.102) 56(84) bytes of data.
— financialstability.gov ping statistics —
108 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 107015ms
h/t
Update: Financialstability.gov is back and a nation dares to breathe again…
Mothers, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Freak Shows
A celebration of network “news” ratings, fed by entertainment industry carrion, brought to you by people who cannot name the American Vice-President.
Hallelujah.
Y2Kyoto: Houston, We Have A Moonbat
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Al Gore, climate nazi fighter – …. said sceptics who refused to believe dramatic cuts in carbon emissions could be delivered should consider the example of the young scientists in the NASA team which put a man on the moon on 1969.
Buzz Aldrin, (who walked on the moon in 1969) – “If it’s warming now, it may cool off later. I’m not in favour of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.
Tony Blair’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and “an Islamic group outlawed in Pakistan but legal in Britain…”
Not Waiting For The Asteroid
“Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation’s “underwriting” of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize for the propaganda it is.”
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Mr. Chet Atkins and Mr. George Benson performing Help Me Make it Through The Night ¤ (4:10). Very nicely done, gentlemen. For those of you who like tonight’s artists: our previous Chet Atkins shows were 2008-08-08, 2008-10-10, and 2008-11-14, and, of course, we covered George Benson’s Breezin’ on 2008-03-07.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Y2Kyoto: Tracking Al Gore
And I, for one, welcome his new microchip overlords;
To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.
Since about half the planet’s climate-warming emissions come from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to follow these rich folks when setting national targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Is There Nothing That The Car-Salesman-In-Chief Can’t Do?
Your bail-out dollars at work…
When it was deciding where to build its new compact car, General Motors Corp. made a point of saying it would push politics aside and use strictly commercial criteria.
So Tennessee’s three top officials were astonished last month, in a meeting with GM, when they were told the first two criteria were “community impact” and “carbon footprint” — or how the choice would affect unemployment rates and carbon-dioxide emissions.
“Those didn’t strike us as business criteria at all,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, who was joined in the meeting by fellow Republican Sen. Bob Corker and the state’s Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen. Those factors, Mr. Alexander said, “seemed odd for a company struggling to get back on its feet.”
On June 26, after a monthlong competition, GM tapped an existing factory in Orion, Mich., pushing aside competing plants in Spring Hill, Tenn., and Janesville, Wis.
All the sites had merits, but the Michigan plant had additional attractions. It is embedded in a struggling state that is a Democratic stronghold. The Orion site, 35 miles from GM’s Detroit headquarters, is also close to tens of thousands of current and former United Auto Workers union employees, whose pressure previously helped persuade GM to scrap plans to build the car overseas.
Meanwhile Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd., which did not pursue any public aid, climbed to the top of the monthly market in June for the first time since 1949.”
Now Is The Time At SDA When We Juxtapose!
June 16th – U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday sought a review of the U.S. listing of a Uighur Muslim group in northwestern China as “terrorist,” accusing U.S. authorities of relying on intelligence from Beijing.
July 6th – Another Han Chinese man, who owns a shop in the city’s central bazaar, said he saw Uighurs “with big knives stabbing people” on the street. He said crowds of Hans and Uighurs were fleeing the violence. “They were targeting Han, mostly,” he added. “We need to hide inside for a few more days.”