TODAY is Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday. Celebrate by listening to this beautiful version of the Bach Concerto in F minor, with Claudio Dauelsberg on the piano.

Bach means “brook” in German. Beethoven said, “Not Brook, but Ocean should be his name.”  Bach is a vast and glorious sea that stretches to the horizon.

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KILROY M. writes:

This from NineMSN in Australia brought a smile to my face: “Casey’s father Colin said he was proud his son has finally stood up to the bullying, and the support Casey had received had already changed his son’s demeanour and self-esteem.”  Read More »

THE LATEST DISCUSSION on free trade has been particularly interesting. One reader in that entry made the point that capital raised in offshore industry is reinvested in our economy and leads to further innovation and new industries at home. In response, the reader R.S. writes:

And that productive capital can in future be invested in places that are not the United States, for exactly the same reasons that productive capital has been invested in existing industries, in places that are not the United States, and exactly the same reasons that productive capital is being invested in new industries, in places that are not the United States.

He also writes:

[N]o serious thinker believes that a large nation can maintain itself, defend itself, and prosper as a “service economy.” Shills, hacks, CNBC screechers, Timothy Geithner, professors at George Mason, and Economist leader-writers, yes, but not serious people. Read More »

A man grieves in front of the wreckage where his mother's body was buried by the waves.

SEE The New York Times’s remarkable slide show of the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan.

LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Samantha Powers, of the National Security Council; and Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, were all influential in convincing President Obama to order up military plans for an attack on Libya. The New York Times describes their efforts to convince the president on the necessity for intervention. 

Suffragists and feminists often claimed that women would bring world peace if they could only get the reins of power. That’s because suffragists and feminists misunderstood how a powerful woman might react to a supposed “humanitarian crisis.” It’s not excessive aggression that drives women to unnecessary war, but excessive compassion.

IN THIS previous thread, Van Wijk writes:

It is no secret that the majority of American Jews are leftists; so are a great many whites. Since leftist Jews are in most cases racially and culturally white, and since they are too few and pacifistic to pose a physical threat, they can be lumped in with white leftists as a whole and dealt with in the same manner. The problem with the Jew-haters is that they tend to ignore or play down the danger posed by demonstrably violent peoples. Solve the problem of Jewish influence, they say, and all other problems will solve themselves. Every time I’ve asked a Jew-hater what to do about Mestizos or Muslims, the response has been that they can be dealt with “in a straightforward manner.” No one but the Jews are on the Jew-hater’s radar, and Jews are (naturally) responsible for most of the evil in the world. …. Since Jewish influence looms large in the mind of the Jew-hater and can never be resolved while there is a single Jew in the land, to engage them is to be drawn into what Mark Richardson calls an “intellectual cul-de-sac.” Read More »

R.S. WRITES:

One commenter in the previous discussion mentioned Toyota, I would like to hold that company up to the claim made by another reader that protectionism always leads to shoddy union practices and inferior products. Interested readers might like to review the history of that superlative manufacturer when evaluating theoretical objections to protectionism. Read More »

EARLIER THIS week, I recommended a new website Faith and Heritage.  I regret my hasty enthusiasm for a new venture. Disappointingly, Faith and Heritage is beset with the same viral tendency that afflicts many sites that defend white heritage: anti-Semitism.

In a review of the movie Social Network, the blogger “Generation 5” writes at Faith and Heritage:

Zuckerberg is a particularly pathological character, of course, but he is an extreme archetype of Jews, particularly those hailing from Eastern Europe where the hatred of Gentiles was most acidic. If the Winklevoss had inherited some of their ancestors’ old-fashioned anti-Semitism, they would have known that it’s generally a bad idea to do business with Jews. Lacking the Christian sense of fair play and good sportsmanship (that even nominal, cultural Christians like the Winklevoss still largely possess, and reinforced through athletics), nursing resentments against our culture and people, the temptation to cheat is almost impossible for them to overcome. The lesson for Christians is simple: avoid dealings with Jews, for they are too risky.  Read More »

THE DISCUSSION about white nationalism, which began here, continues below.

Boris S. writes:

The essential difference between the so-called “white nationalist” tribalism and the organization of Jews, which the “white nationalists” seek to emulate, is that the Jews point to a common four-thousand-year-old religion, with a shared culture, historical memory, and transcendental hopes. The “white nationalists,” on the other hand, want to impose a totally new tribal organization, invented out of thin air, on a group that has never constituted—that is, never saw itself as—a single nation, people, or tribe. “Whites” are not, and never have been, a people, in the sense that one speaks of the “Jewish people.”  Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: 

A number of the reader comments in the post on free trade struck me as clear-sighted. Take, for example, this one:

 “[T]he U.S. and other Western countries are importing goods from other countries that are cheaper than we can produce not because of any natural comparative advantage, but because those countries do not have the same laws and regulations regarding such things as environmental regulations, workplace health and safety, minimum wage laws and the like. To the extent that such laws and regulations are morally necessary (some but not all cases, in my opinion), we are getting cheap goods at the moral cost of patronizing companies, which treat their workers and environment in ways that we have deemed wrong and would not tolerate at home.” 

The “Free Trade” argument has always seemed to me grossly reductive. It says, in effect: “Look here, we can manufacture a doohickey for x dollars whereas the Laputans can manufacture it for 1/2x dollars; therefore let us stop manufacturing doohickeys so that we may buy them more cheaply from the Laputans.” Read More »

IAN FLETCHER recently discussed his book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace it and Why on Thom Hartmann’s TV show “Conversations with Great Minds.” You can view the program here. Fletcher criticizes what he calls the “intellectual corruption” and the “ultra mathematicization” of academic economics.

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DAVID LEE MUNDY writes:

I wonder how many of the Fukushima 50, those risking their lives at the breached nuclear facility, are women?

Peter S. writes: 

The apparent answer is none of them. Read More »

A Drover and a Shepherdess, Thomas Whittle, Jr. (fl. 1865-85)

TO A YOUNG LADY

Who Had Been Reproached For Taking
 Long Walks In The Country 

 Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!
–There is a nest in a green dale,
A harbour and a hold;
Where thou, a Wife and Friend, shalt see
Thy own heart-stirring days, and be
A light to young and old.

There, healthy as a shepherd boy,
And treading among flowers of joy
Which at no season fade,
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A Woman may be made.

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

— William Wordsworth

IN A discussion about the UCLA student who made a tasteless video about Asian students, Lawrence Auster writes:

White nationalists are material-racial reductionists who, like Nazis, treat race as the single all-determining factor of human existence, so that human beings are in effect automata controlled by their race. I treat race as one very important determining factor in human existence, along with many other factors. And I am not a material reductionist. Material/racial factors can be the controlling factors; for example, if you change a formerly all-white city into a half black city, certain effects will inevitably ensue. At the same time, material/racial factors are not the only factors, especially at the individual level. But the material/racial force of sheer numbers will overwhelm any individual exceptions. Read More »

Ilion T. writes:

I’ve long been amused at the silly and pretentious names developers of malls and apartment complexes (oops, it’s now “communities”) give them, especially those in the form of “The This At The That.”  I think the most amusing I have yet seen is this one: “The Legends at St. Andrews.”

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YOUNGFOGEY writes:

From our previous discussions of Lady Gaga, I know you are a connoisseur of music videos. I thought it might be worth drawing your attention to this one. I would love to hear your take on it. It’s for a song by Colbie Caillat. She’s known for pop songs that are melodic and peppy. She writes songs about her feelings and about boys, you know, girl stuff. This one is no different. Read More »

WRITING in The Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery pans Tina Brown’s Newsweek. She writes:

And the real news this past week is not that the fate of the Middle East swings in the balance, but that “150 women are shaking the world.” And who are the women doing this shaking?

The left-wing, the aging, and people left over from Brown’s now-dated circles of buzz. Read More »