Barrel Strength

Reading Le Carré’s recent “The Mission Song”, and musing on moral equivalency. The poor mutt has been drifting since the evil empire popped like a balloon in the Gipper’s arthritic old mitts. He desperately lacks a new enemy, but it must be an enemy he can love, one as morally conflicted as his heroes themselves. Their conversations with foes, even the silent ones as between Smiley and Karla, are about recognizing their similarities as professionals in a lonely trade, by definition removed and isolated and elevated. Members of an exclusive and exquisitely morally troubled club.

Like Le Carré, moral relativism is ultimately snobbish. While bending over backwards to avoid classification, like the ‘bigotry of low expectations’, it really is about the exclusion of those ‘not like us’, and about stratification. Moral relativists are exam-passers, by nature authoritarian and exclusionist. Some pass, some fail. Ideological barriers are nothing to them beside the professional collegiality - and comforts - of their exam-passing, tenure-earning, essay-writing achievements. Le Carré went after big pharma in that medicine book that got made into a movie, and arms dealers in another one, I think - but there could be no dialogue with such abstract villains. It is his entire society he wishes to feel superior to, and to convey his misgivings in set-piece dialogues with the other sides’ villains. He could not personify those post-Cold War enemies and talk with them and share their doubts and misgivings. They were just big evil targets for his heroes to go around being diffident and English and rather much nicer than. (His chaps do so well at concealing their revulsion at the presence of Americans, those inconvenient and uncouth allies.)

So, moral relativism needs something to be cosily relative with - and it sure as hell can’t be militant Islam. Even Le Carré could not bring off a dialogue of his delicately sensitive Brit allusively debating a Muslim counterpart, because even Le Carré would have to concede that in such proximity to the jihadi, the Britisher would probably soon lack the tongue to talk with or indeed a head out of which to speak rot.

Reading this one is like accompanying a child on a creaky fun-house ride, knowing from the echoes ahead what soon must happen and what emotions one must share with the little one along the way. Ah well, he is a very good professional writer whose real world has grown away from him, leaving him with the interior world of a mentally narrow and emotionally stifled Englishmen politely wandering through increasingly improbable dramas.

(A little checking found this on the Penguin site. How sweetly they express his quandary of the last two decades.)

An absolutely triumphant bestseller

Absolute Friends has been hailed everywhere as the masterpiece toward which John le Carré has been building since the fall of Communism. This thrilling tale of loyalty, betrayal, and international espionage spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and uncertain new alliances alliances that aren’t always what they seem to be.‘

Jews that rush to their own destruction. Al Jazeera must be delighted to encourage this phenomenon.

Canada’s 24th place political blogger decides that statistics are just lies but truth can be found in megalomania:

Here’s one of Warren’s truisms, then: legitimacy is not found in numbers. Rightness does not equate with popularity. You can be entirely, utterly alone, as Jesus Christ was in the end - as the other prophets were, like Mohamed and Moses, at key moments in their lives - and still be irrevocably right.

So how does all of this relate to web stats?

Indeed

Krikey!

UPDATE:  Your correspondent commits to addressing the matter of Warren Kinsella no further, as it is clear that from here on his further debasement can only reach depths repellant to the intelligent observer and inconsequential to constructive pursuits.

Daily Tech records the following: All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

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The ice doth come and go as it listeth, and grindeth the earth beneath its vasty weight. When Toronto is pushed by advancing ice into Chattanooga, Tennessee, will David Suzuki please admit his manifold sins and errors? I doubt it.

An incisive article on the audacity of vacuity, with this kicker paragraph:

This sounds to me like a man doing an impression of what he thinks a great speech might be like. It is the kind of empty exhortation that usually gives politicians a bad name. Peter Sellers, a British comedian of the 1960s, caught the genre nicely in a parody speech: “Let us assume a bold thrust and go forward together. Let us carry the fight against ignorance to the four corners of the earth, because it is a fight that concerns us all.” Mr Obama might easily give a speech like that - although he would probably strip out some of the detail.

Ouch!

A panel of Beltway journalists take their version of a PBR ride up river to electoral Cambodia as they pose questions to senior Clinton campaign staffers. It’s a toss-up as to what’s more appalling in the Clintonistas, their smugness or their utter disconnect from reality.

A gun buyback program highlights the foolishness.

One is always told that Smirky Chimp, aka George W. Bush, is a divisive figure. And now we learn this:

Authorities said brother-in-laws Jose Ortiz and Sean Shurelds were involved in a verbal altercation over Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton when the argument escalated into a stabbing inside their family home on Honey Locust Court in Upper Providence.

Authorities said Ortiz, a registered Republican and Clinton supporter, allegedly stabbed Shurelds, an Obama supporter, in the stomach.

I was thinking about the nature of the Estonian composer Arvo Part’s music the other night as I was listening to the glorious and completely perfect rendition of it by the Elora Singers under Noel Edison. I was hearing Part not as a modern composer but as someone who has gone back to the musical composition styles of Orlando Gibbons, Tallis, Monteverdi, and Palestrina, and Orthodox Church composers unknown to me. That he is a Christian composer is obvious. He is composing religious music in the style of all three Christian denominations: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. He says the choice of language determines for him the musical style, so that if commissioned to do something in English it sounds like a commentary on English Renaissance compositional techniques, for instance. It could be so, but I suspect he is being way too coy. I think he is deliberately going back to the idea of music as it originally was in those times: religious, devotional, and even private - not meant for more than 12 people in the audience, maybe fewer. The number of musicians required to play his music is likewise small. It is as if he has decided that the whole western musical tradition needs to start anew, with very small ensembles, and get away from the titanic emotional outpourings of the 19th century, the bizarre ideological nonsense of the mid 20th, and return music to its roots in the expressions of the soul.

Try a comparison of the Beatitudes, which ends with Petrenko’s triumphal blast from the organ, and De Profundis, in Latin. One sounds so English in style, the other so Latin. Or at least English and Latin as interpreted by some talented musicological alien. His Orthodox work in Kanon Pokajannen is equally true to that tradition.

In any case I think with Part we are in the presence of a complete reinvention and rediscovery of music, which is not trying to go forward, but to go back to its wellsprings in expressions of faith.

See if that interpretation makes any sense for you.

… literally.

Whether you agree or disagree with their politics, one has to tip the hat to organisations like the Fabian Society that quietly go about destroying the fabric of the culture. A bit there, a bite there and so it goes.

Here is the latest example of that from Sweden.

When will Obama have his last KFC meal? That is the question that most intrigues your correspondent these days.

Read the rest…

Because sloth and now avarice apparently aren’t sufficiently satisfying.

Meanwhile, as the Chief Wiggum of Nazi-hunters salivates over Lucy Warman’s latest get-rich-quick scheme, Mark Steyn compares the latest rosters of Team elMo and the forces of freedom. One doubts that even Lucy’s putative jackpot wad will help bring in any new stars in the transfer window.

A polarizing power-hungry president, soon to leave office, is exerting all the levers at his disposal to exploit the energy market potential of a small state, with the aim of tipping global influence his way. Oh, and his name is Vladimir Putin. A good analysis of byzantine Russian diplomatic thuggery and the necessity of following the money.

Liberal sumo-pundit plummets from brazen cyber-warrior to roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

Dr. Bruce Thornton lays out the facts starkly in a Q&A on his new book, “Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide“.

At least one cynical moonbat will again froth at the notion of a professor of classics and humanities daring to comment on the downward paths of civilizations. Good. If this blog is upsetting the Usual Suspects™, then it is getting the job done.