httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1bG6BIYlo
We posted Pogo’s latest just the other day. But he’s got another, “Wishery,” which is a remix of sounds and samples from Disney’s Snow White. It’s been up on YouTube for less than four days and has already drawn well over a million hits.
On this date in 1308, the scholastic theologian and philosopher Duns Scotus died.
In October 1936, Frye, newly ensconced at Merton College, Oxford, wrote Helen about the college legend that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunted his room:
Apparently the tradition I think I mentioned, that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunts this room and the one above it as well as the library (which is really an extension of my staircase) is quite well-known and of some standing. He has a long and cold way to come, as he’s buried in Cologne, but I can see where the legend of his haunting the library would originate: Merton had the best library in England during the Middle Ages and all of Scotus would be here, being the greatest English scholastic and a Merton man. Then the Reformation came, this library was plundered, the manuscripts torn to pieces and thrown into the quad, and of all authors the one singled out for especial destruction was Scotus. I asked my scout if he had ever sensed a ghost on this staircase, and he said no, but various people have put on surplices and awakened people by putting cold hands on them.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3hMODMyed8
In just 38 seconds you can witness the way Fox News cuts and pastes its lies together
Rick Perlstein explains how a mendocracy works:
Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.
But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—”civil,” just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.
Frye cites Orwell on the social degradation of language in “The Primary Necessities of Existence”:
Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure. By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together. Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction. This is the kind of thing George Orwell was talking about, not just in 1984, but in all his work on language. The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication. The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking. It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness. (CW 12, 747)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCM–DWLfRk
“Car on the Hill” from Court and Spark
Today is Joni Mitchell‘s birthday (b. 1943)
Sometimes you forget just how good she is. But you remember soon enough. Yes, she’s a Canadian girl from the prairies, and she never seems to lose sight of that, but she also helped to perfect the lush California sound of the 1970s with Court and Spark.
After the jump a live BBC performance of “All I Want” from her album Blue.
This is welcome news. Last June 28th – 30th we covered the police assaults on peaceful demonstrators after allowing “Black Bloc” vandals to run amok in downtown Toronto for ninety minutes. We also drew attention to the fact that the police have a recent history in Canada of planting agents provocateurs during political summits to foment violence and provoke police action.
The Harper government spent nearly a billion dollars on security for the summit — security which evidently failed and resulted only in the arrest of hundreds of innocent citizens, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history.
A billion dollars. Compare that to what the Brits paid for the G20 security in London in April 2009 — $28 million — and the Americans in Pittsburgh in September 2009 — $12 million. Okay, so rounding that out, the Harper government spent $900 million more than the Brit and American summits combined.
Where did the money go? Who received it? And why was so much of it needed?
Frye on police power:
But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)
(Thanks to Ross Belot for the tip)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-WJO0YQLOs&feature=related
I was fortunate enough to see Billy Connolly perform in Hamilton this week. Here’s something for those of you who weren’t so lucky.
Jeff Mahoney’s review of Connolly’s Hamilton performance here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4vKeeQG58Q&p=AE91347DBA0F6B75&feature=BF&index=3
Seven very pleasant minutes with Tati as Hulot in 1953’s Les Vacances de M. Hulot
On this date French actor and director Jacques Tati died (1908-1980).
Courtesy of Dawn Arnold of the Frye Festival, here is what Adam Gopnik wrote in the guest book after appearing at the Festival’s Fall Reading Series:
I’m a partisan but have been making, I hope, fair comments about the Republicans and the way they are enabled by the mainstream media, thanks primarily to the toxic relationship of both with Fox News.
However, there is an x factor that the Democrats never fail to contribute and is best expressed by the quote, reproduced above, by the great American humorist, Will Rogers.
That’s not to draw a false equivalence: the Republicans are unregenerate cynics perpetually on the take from rapacious corporate interests whose lobbyists now write “legislation” whenever Republicans hold a majority. But it would help if the Dems were not such trembling feebs when it comes to a fight it matters to win. Does anyone think, for example, that just because the Dems did not prosecute the Bush administration for the war crimes it undoubtedly committed, the House Republicans will not now use its restored subpoena power to create the impression that Democrats are responsible for every crime dating back to original sin? The Republicans are unsurpassed at the narcissistic art of projection: they attribute to the Dems the crimes they are actually guilty of and thereby inoculate themselves against accusation. If the Democrats had bothered just to investigate the Bush administration and exposed its crimes until they could no longer be credibly denied, that’d have been much harder to ignore on Tuesday.
Remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the ultimately bogus Whitewater “scandal.” That is always how it’s played. Minority Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared late in the campaign that his one priority is to “ensure that Obama is a one-term president.” That’s the priority. Not the stagnant economy. Not nighmarishly chronic unemployment. Not the unimaginably vast corruption on Wall Street. Not two losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His one fully declared aim is to destroy the Obama presidency. And he’ll do that while pursuing an agenda to maintain a ridiculously low and crippling tax rate for the richest 5% of the population; and he’ll do that while refusing to cut entitlements or defence spending. Because although the Teabaggers talk a good game about fiscal responsibility, it’s clear they want their entitlements: they just don’t want others (people with dark skin, the poor, the young) to have them.
Again, the Republicans are nihilists, the party of nothing. And, as Edmund Spenser observed, that kind of evil is a sort of inflated absence of goodness that requires just one prick to make it pop into its proper non-existent state.
That makes being a prick in this instance a virtue.