Monthly Archives: June 2012

UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Steal A Rash’ (SENSUALITY VS. VULGARITY)

Aesthetics, Art, Celebrity, Music, Pop-Culture, Sex

So says Joan Rivers about Madonna’s oeuvre.

She, Madonna, keeps saying that Lady Gaga stole all her stuff. How can you steal a rash? Certain things you can’t steal.

AND,

She wasn’t showing off her nipple [in Turkey], she was showing off her ankle bracelet, at her age. I know the doctor who did Madonna’s fine body: Irving Schwartz. He did her and Kathy Bates.

Joan Rivers is brilliant. The Madonna-cum-Gaga claptrap is a rash. The one entertainer has accused the other younger version of herself of stealing her two-chord hump-along ditty. Both have been richly rewarded for the hideous bedroom noises they emit. To be honest, equally unintelligent, I think Gaga is slightly more talented, if that’s saying anything.

But, as a studio musician explained to me, this T & A line-up (Talor Swift, the Britney Spears of country music is included here) would be reduced to embarrassing grunts, out-of-tune yelps, and bedroom whispers, if not for the Auto-Tune, the “holy grail of recording,” that “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.”

UPDATE (June 15): SENSUALITY VS. VULGARITY. To Nick’s sharp Comment-Section observation: Are men still able to distinguish true sensuality from vulgarity? Back in the day, women knew how to exude the first quality. It invariably involved a hint of something, not a show of all you had. You just know that being in bed with Gaga or Madonna is the most frightening experience for a man. And, you can be sure that they fake IT. Sensuality involves the ability to transcend yourself; these creatures are pathologically narcissistic.

UPDATE IV: “Jesus, No Radical”? (Jesus’ Jewishness)

Ancient History, Christianity, Classical Liberalism, Hebrew Testament, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Justice

“Jesus was no political radical or rebel. He was God” is how the ever-provocative Jack Kerwick introduces his latest Belief.Net blog to Facebook Friends.

Maestro, pray tell, why are the two categories of the title—“G-d” vs. “political radical”—mutually exclusive?

One might have theological reasons for designating “G-d” and “political radical” as mutually exclusive, but reason is reason. It has to work a priori, surely?

Jews (at least those who think) think of Jesus as a preacher in the great tradition of the classical Hebrew prophets, whose genius, courage and yes, radicalism is hard to match—they were forever telling the stiff-necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms.

UPDATE I: “Yiddishkeit.” In reply to the thread on Facebook: Jesus was indeed a Jew (or a Hebrew), with everything that being a Hebrew would imply. A lot of people describe Jewish traits negatively. But you can be sure that Jesus was not without a dose of “Yiddishkeit,” as my blond, blue-eyed, Jewish mother would call it.

UPDATE II: Meathead: One should never place Russell Kirk in the company in which you placed him. For one, Kirk was against the wars Buckley embraced as a matter of principle. As I read Kirk, he was a classical liberal of enormous talent.

UPDATE III (June 14): The “because” is unfairly placed in yours sentence below, Jack Kerwick.

As for Ilana’s contention that Jesus was a “radical” because, like the prophets of old, He told “the stiff necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms,” how does that make Jesus, or anyone, a radical?

Here is what I wrote in the post above:

In punctuation, the sentence indicates that the last clause is but an example of the “genius, courage and yes, radicalism” of the prophets, and hardly exhaustive.

In meaning, how does the last clause, which you rightly seem to disparage as inexhaustible, qualify the words “genius, courage and yes, radicalism”?

It doesn’t. Yours is a somewhat unfair read of the sentence.

As for conflating, as you do Jack, the views of Jews on Christ with those of Muslims: That, in my view, is a grave error.

Rebel Atrocities Repackaged

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Middle East, Propaganda, UN, War

Via Daniel McAdams, at LRC.COM,:

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

Highlighted in the National Review, of all places, the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing.

NRO reports on the original FAZ story:

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

“the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad’s forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.

The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:

“Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. ‘Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,’ Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote.”

Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.

Follow the article links. This is a must read.

Minimum Wage, Maximum Economic Illiteracy

Democrats, Economy, Labor, Law, Regulation

The Bill to raise the minimum wage has three Democratic lawmakers — Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), and Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) — swelling with pride.

The “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012” … would spike the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 while mandating that future increases be tied to inflation. Jackson and his Democratic colleagues proclaimed that the legislation would model the 1968 minimum wage rate for inflation in today’s dollars. “This legislation is long-overdue and sorely needed,” Conyers affirmed. “More than 30 million Americans would see their wages increased, which would provide an immediate boost to the economy.”

Today’s youth don’t have the economic smarts with which to understand why they are less likely to be hired under legislation that fixes the price of their labor above its productivity.

Those who claim to represent unemployed youngsters—whose labor-participation rate has been in decline—don’t much care that such legislation circumvents voluntary exchanges in the market. Because government has fixed the price of labor, economic actors are prevented from engaging in mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange.

Still less is the hike justified because it impoverishes. For government can bid wages above market value, but it cannot compel business to hire, the outcome of which is unemployment among the young and the poor.