Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

A very troubling book which I nevertheless encourage you to read

Posted on by
Reply

a big dumb ox

Diana West has posted my Quadrant review of her book at her blog, The Death of the Adult. The picture is from her blog and shows an ox attacked by wolves, the very image of its title, “America, a Big Dumb Ox”. This is her intro, the rest is what I wrote:

An interesting new review of American Betrayal from the January 2014 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant, edited by Keith Windshuttle.

She has highlighted various parts of the review so you can see what she thinks are particularly relevant. But why this book has caused the commotion that it has I have no answer to.

On the world’s two most ancient civilisations

Posted on by
Reply

From an article that more than just touches on the Chinese and the Jews:

There is no greater compliment to any culture than to be admired by Chinese, who with some justification regard their civilization as the world’s most ancient and, in the long run, most successful. The high regard that the Chinese have for Jews should be a source of pride to the latter. In fact, it is very pleasant indeed for a Jew to spend time in China. The sad history of Jew-hatred has left scars on every European nation, but it is entirely absent in the world’s largest country. On the contrary, to the extent that Chinese people know something of the Jews, their response to us is instinctively sympathetic. . . .

Family, learning, respect for tradition, business acumen: these are Jewish traits that the Chinese also consider to be their virtues. All this is true as far as it goes. One might also mention that China never has had reason to view the Jews as competitors for legitimacy. . . .

The Chinese, in short, have no reasons to dislike or fear the Jews, and a number of reasons to admire them simply because Jews display traits that Chinese admire among themselves. A Jew visiting China, though, senses an affinity with Chinese people, more than can be explained by the commonality of traits. There is a common attitude towards life, and especially toward adversity.

Movies and the absence of truth

Posted on by
Reply

My favourite story about the film “Mary Poppins” was told to me by one of my housemates in London. He was acutely embarrassed at 15 by being asked to take his eight year old cousin to see the movie but from the moment he heard Dick van Dyke’s cockney accent, it was his cousin who ended up embarrassed because of my friend’s hysterical laughter through the whole of the rest of the film. It’s a movie I have never warmed to and even seeing parts of it again in “Saving Mr Banks” did nothing to make me think different. But “Saving Mr Banks” we did like as we watched it, and the Australian scenes were better than you might have hoped, but now that I have learned a bit more, it is quite a disgusting event we have been party to.

As for the accuracy of the story, it’s a Disney movie about Walt Disney, so it was never going to be an honest portrayal. But there is a level of accuracy that is a minimal requirement. Because having seen the film I have now read this, Nine ‘Mary Poppins’ facts ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ did not get right. The first one, though, is the most compelling and makes you see the film in such a very different light that the real question is why did they even pretend they were dealing with an actual event of any kind. The story is about how Walt Disney finally gets P.J. Travers to sign the rights to her book over to the studio. Interesting story if it were true. But this is the first of the facts that the movie did not get right:

Disney already owned the rights when Travers went to L.A.

Yes, the central conceit of the film is fictionalised. Travers had already handed over the rights when she traveled to Los Angeles to consult on the script. Saving Mr Banks screenwriter Kelly Marcel also admits that the conversation Disney has with Travers, when he convinces her to hand over control based on their shared experiences with troubled fathers, is total fiction (although the stories about Disney’s childhood are true).

You go to the movies expecting at least some integrity – not a lot but at least some. How really strange this film now looks to me. We now live in a virtual world in almost nothing beyond what we see, hear and do ourselves – the kinds of things we read in the news or watch on TV – has much of any basis in reality. If this is what they do to P.J. Travers, imagine how much the true story has been distorted, covered up and ignored in the film about Nelson Mandela. A communist, revolutionary Marxist murderer as secular saint. Find the truth about any of it, if you can. You certainly must not expect to find out about it in the film.

Bob Dylan is even greater than I thought

Posted on by
Reply

What do you think of this?

I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker. . . . I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever fucked with his wife, he’d beat the shit out of me. A couple of days later, I’m on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me.

I turn around and it’s like—Dylan. I’m thinking, ‘Can you believe this? I’m getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan!’ I said, ‘Hey, man, how you doin’?’ But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He’s little, but he’s strong. He works out. I wouldn’t fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. He gets up, rips off my ‘Free Bob Dylan’ button and walks away. Never says a word.

The Bowery bums were coming over, asking, ‘How much he get?’ Like I got rolled. . . . I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some fucking lawyer. That was the last time I ever saw him, except once with one of his kids, maybe Jakob, and he said, ‘A.J. is so ashamed of his Jewishness, he got a nose job,’ which was true—at least in the fact that I got a nose job.

You should go to the original article because if you think this is strange, read the rest.

Colleges have gone rogue

Posted on by
Reply

This is about the US, of course, and i is a disgrace. By Victor Davis Hanson, The Outlaw Campus. He begins:

Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

Amongst his recommendations, what in particular appeals to me is this:

The old notion that a peer-reviewed article in a particular journal or a university-press monograph is the key to tenure has become antiquated in the age of the World Wide Web and the ubiquitous electronic audit of just about everything we do. Faculty are terrified of a future where one’s life’s work can be instantly accessed, and where its usefulness can be assessed by the number of scholars who consult it, footnote it, or buy it.

If Kafka had written this it would have seemed too farfetched

Posted on by
Reply

The world is full of crazy people. Want proof? Try this:

Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.

It was frankly unbelievable—except that people, most importantly, a Texas jury, did believe the Kellers had committed at least some of these acts. In 1992, the Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child and each sentenced to 48 years in prison. The investigation into their supposed crimes took slightly more than a year, the trial only six days.

And now, even the Travis County district attorney agrees that the trial was unfair.

After multiple appeal efforts and 21 years in prison, the Kellers are finally free. Fran Keller, 63, was released from prison on Nov. 26 on a personal bond, just in time for Thanksgiving. Her daughter was waiting for her with a bag full of the first clothes that weren’t prison-issued that Keller had seen in years. Dan, who turned 72 in prison and now walks with a cane, was released on Dec. 5; this time, Fran was there to greet him. (The Kellers divorced while in prison yet remain close, as close as two people locked up in separate prisons for crimes they say they didn’t commit can be.) [My bolding]

“They say they didn’t commit”!!! Even the writer here isn’t prepared to say that the story is beyond any semblance of credible and that there is not a chance in the whole wide world that any such things ever happened. Beyond disgusting. Clearly insane. Maddening to such an extreme that almost nothing can make the world right when this can really happen.

From Instapundit.

Mitch Podolak

Posted on by
Reply

mitch podolak 01

mitch podolak 02

Mitchell Podolak, now merely Mitch, is the person who I have consciously known for a longer time than anyone else in my entire life. We were in nursery school together and then went to various summer camps and I am not even sure that maybe we even met up at High School again. But around the age of 14 he decided that this was not for him and off he went, so by the time he was 17 or so, he had hitchhiked back and forth across Canada around a dozen times. A true Woody Guthrie type of a kind that does not exist today. I have met up with him only once since those days, on a visit I made to Winnipeg in the late 1990s, where he really has put down roots.

What he has made of himself can be seen in this citation just given last year where he was named, The Unsung Hero at Canadian Folk Music Awards. This is what the citation said:

CALGARY – Mitch Podolak, a prominent figure of the Canadian folk music community, is the recipient of the Unsung Hero award for this year’s Canadian Folk Music Awards (CFMA). The award will be presented at the CFMA Awards Gala on November 10 in Calgary, Alberta.

The Unsung Hero Award is presented annually by the CFMAs in recognition of the exceptional contribution of an individual, group, or organization to any aspect of the Canadian folk music scene. Each year, nominations are accepted from the region where the awards take place. With this year’s awards taking place in Calgary, nominations were accepted from the following regions in Western Canada; British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

Mitch Podolak began his career in the early sixties at the Bohemian Embassy Coffee House in Toronto, where he rose from bus boy to booking shows. In the late 1960s, he began a dynamic relationship with CBC Radio as a freelance documentary filmmaker, working into the 1970s for such shows as Five Nights, CBC Tuesday Night, Between Ourselves and This Country In The Morning. Podolak hosted the CBC’s Simply Folk radio program from 1987 to 1991.

With CBC as a resource base, Podolak helped found the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1974, serving as the artistic director with Ava Kobrinsky and Colin Gorrie. It was an immediate success and in 1978 he and Gorrie, with Ernie Fladell, Gary Cristall and Frannie Fitzgibbon, founded the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Within the next few years he also helped the Edmonton and Calgary Folk Festivals open their doors. He has also been a major contributor to festivals further east, including Canso, Nova Scotia, Owen Sound and others.

Beyond folk festivals, Podolak was the co-founder of the Winnipeg International Children’s Festival and was the originator of the idea and effort that created the West End Cultural Centre, a major music venue in Winnipeg. In 1976 he founded Barnswallow Records, the label that launched the career of Stan Rogers. Currently Podolak operates as Executive Producer of Home Routes, which is North America’s only house concert circuit.

He is one of the few people I know from my early youth who is famous enough to show up on Google when you put in his name. Our politics are, however, not all that similar. Yet I should mention that this was not always the case. The nursery school we met at was run by comrades for the children of comrades. Both of us began our treks through life on the far left side of politics. I am where I am, and this is where he is.

mitch podolak 03

Trotskyist is definitely right which is something of a shame since it got in the way of truly having a granfalloon moment when we met in Winnipeg those now many years ago. But every memory is warm and he still looks the same as he was when I knew him, maybe not in nursery school, but perhaps when we caught up the last time we met.

Classical music and young children

Posted on by
Reply

It apparently does them good, not that I’m surprised. From The Mail Online, Playing classical music to your child can improve their listening skills later on in life:

Playing classical music such as Beethoven and Mozart to young children boosts their concentration and self-discipline, a new study suggests.

Youngsters also improve their general listening and social skills by being exposed to repertoires from composers including Ravel, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn.

In addition, they are likely to appreciate a wider range of music in later years, according to a study from the Institute of Education, (IoE), University of London.

And as an extra added bonus, if they are listening to classical music, they are not driving you crazy with the stuff they would listen to normally!