Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Please Go Away Forever

Conservative Lutheranism strikes again, thanks to The Lutheran Satire:



Oh so close to the real thing.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

"A Pastiche Foxtrot For The House Musicians Of Genocide"

Inspiration originates in the full range of our emotion and experience, sometimes coming out of the darkest and most unexpected places. Here's an example by Leonard Cohen as explored by Mark Steyn in his latest Song of the Week column.

And here is the song performed by the Klezmer Conservatory Band:



And by the poet himself:



Quite a thought-provoking piece of work on Cohen's part. Let's hope there are lots of young "Cohens" at work these days. If so, there may be hope for popular music in the 21st century after all.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Mixing Sports And Politics

This graph reminds OTR of the time he overheard an argument among the professors regarding the new field of sports geography. The integration of popular culture and the academy has come a very long way.
















Advice of the day: Don't anger those PGA Tour members.

H/T Moonbattery

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Day The Sun Stood Still

In Earth's northern hemisphere, this is the day of the summer solstice (sol=sun, stice=still) and the beginning of Summer. The sun reaches its highest point in the sky today, and it is the longest day of the year. Although the sun begins its descent tomorrow, insolation from our star will continue to raise atmospheric temperatures until late July. As this day marks the end of the season of renewal and the beginning of the season of growth and flower, I am reminded of this quote by D. H. Lawrence:

The greatest need of man is the renewal forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of the sun's year, the body's year.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Paul McCartney..."You Say It's Your Birthday...."

Paul McCartney turns 69 today.



The man remains as powerful a force in music today as he was in 1966. What more can be said except...

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Maunder Minimum Matters: Issues Over A Quiet Sun

The Sun is the great engine that runs Earth's weather in what is normally an eleven year cycle coinciding with sun spot activity. That cycle, including one serious anomaly called the Maunder Minimum, has been observed over four centuries. Current observations now show that an expected increase in sun spots may not occur. This could lead to a 22 year-long or longer minimum, and it's raising concern among climatologists.

Why, you ask? Beginning in the mid-17th century, our sun failed to "show its spots" for seventy years and ushered in Earth's "Little Ice Age." If we don't see more sun spots soon, we could be experiencing the making of another Maunder Minimum.

We've posted about the Sun, its spots, and the global warming debate more than a few times over the past three years. John Hinderaker at Powerline has a link and commentary on this latest finding.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Music For A Summer Sunday Evening

Mrs. R's cousin shared this bit of Lutheran creativity with us.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Uberweiner

Here is Frederick Nietzsche , Der Weiner, and Alec Baldwin all rolled into a smorgasbord of perspectives on possibilities and expectations.

H/T to Instapundit.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

"We Are Witnessing The Total Failure Of Academic Keynesian Economics"

Glenn Reynolds has posted a link to Michael Walsh's New York Post article on the Obama administration's abysmal economic policies and unbending faith in Keynesian economics. Keynesian theories were suspect from their very beginning in the late 1930s. The results of industrial nationalization, the consolidation of government control, and increasing government spending-all Keynesian concepts-did not create sustainable economies in Europe over the last fifty years. In the United State from 1981-89, Ronald Reagan's economic policies essentially drove a stake through the heart of Keynesian theory, but it remains alive in the mind of Barack Obama a generation later.

This is a brief and notable appraisal of our current situation. Obama's response in filling vacancies in his economic leadership will quickly tell us if he has learned anything over the past thirty months.

NYT Limo Liberal Wants You To Live With Less To Save The Planet

Thomas Friedman is a New York Times columnist who writes from the usual list of lefty themes, including the environment. Yesterday, his column spoke about the degradation of our natural world at the hands of a broken business model. He called for societies to develop "a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less." Essentially, this was a call for downsizing in terms of expectations and acquisitions. Now one would normally expect an individual calling for such a move to practice what he is preaching. We are all stakeholders in the health of Planet Earth; therefore, each of us should do his part to mitigate our negative impacts on this delicate resource.

While Thomas Friedman calls for you and me to "down size," he enjoys living here:














Even Kool-Aide guzzling liberals should see something wrong here. Gateway Pundit has the rest of the story. Be sure to read the comments after the post. Priceless.

For the record, OTR and Mrs. R have sixty years of combined experience in the protection and preservation of natural and cultural resources. We did it from a center and right-center political perspective. There are more like us in the environmental movement than most people realize.

Monday, June 6, 2011

When Does Weiner's Nose Start Growing?

Looks like Congress's latest iteration of Pinocchio -that would be Anthony Weiner, D-NY, has himself in a big pickle. Today we have a new woman with 200 messages and photos, some of them too explicit for publication. Nevertheless, Big Government and Big Journalism plan on "releasing new photographs throughout the day."

OTR thinks this wretched, screaming moonbat's clock is winding down by the hour. Lots of potential NYC mayoral candidates will be happy to see him resign. His district is overwhelmed by solid democrat thinkers/voters, but at least they will have a chance to improve ethics in the House of Representatives.

H/T to Gateway Pundit.

Normandy

Today marks the 67th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy and the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. Learn more about this day here at the American Battle Monument Commission's Normandy Campaign website. The interactive link entitled "The Normandy Campaign" provides a brief but detailed look at the significance of this military action.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Anti-Semitic Campaign In San Francisco

The media and blogosphere had some fun this past week over San Francisco's upcoming November referendum on banning circumcision. The fun ended today with the appearance of some disturbing anti-Semitic campaign literature. Regardless of how you feel about the referendum or its subject, propaganda in the best tradition of the Third Reich has no place in the American experience.











Reason, rationality, and moderation have been in short supply in the City by the Bay for some decades now. Let's hope the leftists behind this campaign see the hatred and bring it to a quick end. Here is your link to more pictures and commentary.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for aggregating this story.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Obamanomics, Ein Volk And The Twilight Of Mass Affluence

OTR has never been one to specialize, not since he realized he didn't want to spend the rest of his life researching 18th century frontier settlement in the Great Valley of Anywhere. Instead, he devoted his career to making broad linkages in time and space across a wonder-filled organism he called the American Experience. Of course there was theme and focus in his work, but there was also plenty of opportunity to examine the "big pictures" that make our national experiment so interesting.

Every once in a while, the Internet makes for some fascinating linkages that grab OTR's attention. The prelude to today's discovery occurred yesterday while reading Andrew Klavan's Diarist column-unfortunately not available online as a freebie- in the latest issue of City Journal. His article describes the sudden realization that the study of popular or mass culture can be a very defensible discipline for explaining who we were, are, and may become as Americans.

Forward to today and a blog post by Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds and you have all the ingredients for building an exciting information web out of Barack Obama, Madison Avenue ad execs, Depression "porn," sheet metal and leather "Aviation Collection" furniture, James Lileks's "Retromatical Diversions," Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927), and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, that most effective Minister of Propaganda for the short-lived Nazi Empire.

Here is your link to the Reynolds blog. OTR's only instruction is to take your time, visit all the links and browse the comments. Readers will find some very perceptive-verging on prescient- archives, a catalog one could browse for hours, some of the best humor on the Internet, and several reasons why OTR never wrote a dissertation on frontier land speculation in 1790.

Footnote: When you are a culture lumper as opposed to a splitter, it pays to have plenty of time for diversions like the one I recommend above. It is like exploring new cave passages, returning to the surface and describing your discoveries only to be asked how much of the cave is unexplored. Nothing is ever as simple as it looks. I hope you enjoy the journey.

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