A little Saturday afternoon smoothness with Tom Verlaine

Tom Verlaine under his Marquee Moon! Bravo.

Trouble in Socialist Paradise

Where's the outcry from Cambridge and Amherst, Berkeley and Ann Arbor? Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo has died and what does the fascist tyranny in Havana do? Round up the freedom fighters!

Cuban security forces rounded up political activists across the island yesterday to prevent protestst the funeral of a leading dissident who died after an 82-day hunger strike.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 42, a plumber and bricklayer declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, stopped eating solid food on December 3 to protest what he said were repeated beatings by guards at the Kilo 7 prison in the eastern province of Camagüey.

As his condition worsened last week, he was put on board an ambulance and driven to a clinic at the Combinado del Este prison in Havana where authorities administered fluids intravenously to try to keep him alive. He died on Tuesday after being moved again to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital, one of the best in Cuba.

“They have assassinated Orlando Zapata Tamayo. My son’s death has been a premeditated murder,” his mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, told El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald.

Again where's the American left on this one? It answers itself. In the enclaves where they worry about Halliburton and Mossad and other neat conspiracies they assure themselves "No enemies on the Left. "

The attempt to criminalize policy differences; Probe clears Bush lawyers

The great Richard Epstein, no friend of the late Bush Administration, takes a principled stand:

Let's thank David Margolis for putting a stop to a legal crusade before it turned into a legal vendetta. Yet, with hindsight, a prudent DOJ should not have started on this inquiry at all. To steal a line from William Tecumseh Sherman, "Investigations are hell." 

The Holder Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself. The far-left is wailing and whining at its failure to obtain a fresh scalp. Let them. Giving advice may show bad judgement; it is not a crime or a weapon to punish political enemies.
 

Keyboardist Jon Lord To Release New Album In March

An interesting conceptual enterprise from Jon Lord, who once attacked keyboards with great ferocity  for Deep Purple.

According to JonLord.org,  Jon Lord will release his next album, To Notice Such Things, on March 22 through Avie Records.

Titled after the main work -- a six movement suite for solo flute, piano and string orchestra -- the album was inspired by, and is dedicated to, the memory of Jon's dear friend Sir John Mortimer, the English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter, author and creator of British television series Rumpole Of The Bailey, who died in January 2009.

"He was a great friend and a great inspiration to me and I hope my love and respect for him comes out in the music," says Jon.

I can't wait!

Soft Machine in Italy

One of the great progressive music bands in my lifetime: Soft Machine.

TSA brilliance

Let's put a 4-year-old with leg braces through a little airport screening hell. But let's not call it a war on terror.

Joe Biden the gift that keeps giving.

JammieWearingFool:

The next time the Obama folks decide to trot out Joe Biden, they might want to at least make sure he's got the talking points in order. Not only did Dick Cheney hand him his lunch yesterday, today Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown unloaded on the Vice Moron.I wouldn't call Biden a "moron."

He's just being himself.

The very great Steve Morse

Steve Morse



He is the most tasteful guitarist of my generation. Period.

Holdsworth and Company!

Always worth a listen. Holdsworth, Levin, Bozzio, Mastelotto live!

Iron Maiden looking like Metallica doing Jethro Tull

Mashing away with Cross Eyed Mary, the Tull classic.
Clever! Very Clever.

Don't sell America short!

We've heard it all before from the declinists, America's prominence will slip away. Not so fast!

What I share with Joseph Schumpeter: a birthday

Joseph Schumpeter was born on this day. So was I.

Hat tip to Organizations and Markets: "Happy Schumpeter Day"

It was, from the beginning, a power grab!

The global warming consensus is falling apart.

Good for climate change skepticism. That's how science is supposed to work, isn't it?

But the claim [that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away] was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

Thank you Mr. Hitchens for skewering that crackpot

It is no secret that Gore Vidal has lost his bearings over the last few decades. A promoter of the vile, he has become the worm in modern literature. We could use a multifront attack on this "genius" of Anglo-American letters. Christopher Hitchens launches the first salvo and much welcome one at that.

As literary feuds go it has the all the hallmarks of a classic. In one corner, the journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens. In the other, America's great man of letters, Gore Vidal.

The latest salvo is in this month's Vanity Fair where, in an article headlined "Vidal Loco", Hitchens launches a stinging attack on Vidal, claiming that the events of 9/11 "accentuated a crackpot strain" in the author. He claims that Vidal's work after the terrorist attacks consists of "a small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces [which] either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks."

"He openly says that the Bush administration was 'probably' in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would 'certainly fit them to a T'; that Timothy McVeigh was 'a noble boy', no more murderous than generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that 'Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war' by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor," Hitchens writes.

However Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed objects.