crytical

As Ann Coulter begins the publicity tour for her new book, Mugged, we preview five other titles sure to be rightwing hits
As the conservative firebrand™ Ann Coulter begins the publicity tour for her new book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, we preview some other rightwing titles tipped to be among the season’s polemical bestsellers:
FURY: The Angry Rage of Barack Obama, by Dinesh D’Souza
In public, Barack Obama, the son of a leftwing Kenyan economist, maintains an eerily calm demeanour. insider accounts of the Obama White House suggest that he’s similarly unflappable in private; indeed, many of Obama’s leftwing critics have assailed him for being too conciliatory and conflict-averse. But in this devastating expose, the serious academic Dinesh D’Souza, president of the world-renowned Well-Respected College For Serious Academics, reveals the truth: behind Obama’s facade – unknown to his closest aides, his wife and children, or even to Obama himself – the president is angry, burning with a boiling anti-colonialist desire to subjugate America. Based on hundreds of hours of extensive daydreaming, FURY leaves the reader in no doubt that President Obama, who as you may know is black, is also very, very angry – as a direct result of his furious rage.
I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? by Jonah Goldberg
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship – a tour-de-force in the style of his bestseller Liberal Fascism – National Review writer Goldberg turns conventional wisdom on its head. Did you think the Nazis were rightwing? Actually, they were leftwing. Were you under the impression that the Democrats were the party of civil rights? Actually, that was the Republicans. Did you think that you should vote for Obama? Actually, you should vote for Romney. Do you think Jonah Goldberg is a contrarian for the sake of it? Actually, he’s vociferously opposed to contrarianism. True to the spirit of Goldberg’s worldview, the spine of this book is to the right of the pages, rather than to the left, the words can only be read if reflected in a mirror and the best way to enjoy it is not to buy it.
PUNK’D!!! Conservative Arguments to Drive Liberals #@!**?@ Crazy!, by SE Cupp and Greg Gutfeld
A book for butt-kicking, red-blooded conservatives who just don’t care how much liberals hate the fact that they love hunting with guns, eating red meat or dressing up in combat gear and pretending that the guest bedroom is a Marine training camp! In PUNK’D!!!, gun-totin’, right-leanin’, final-letter-of-words-omittin’ MSNBC commentator SE Cupp (author of Why You’re Wrong About the Right) and hilarious Fox News humorist Greg Gutfeld team up to show that liberals aren’t going to stop conservatives going hunting, or thinking about how it would probably be quite exciting to go hunting, or pretending that they went hunting once!
This book is sure to annoy the “politically correct” brigade, whose opinions Cupp and Gutfeld certainly don’t care about! They really couldn’t care less if leftwingers are outraged by what they’ve got to say! Not in the slightest! Really! (Important note: while reading this book, be sure to imagine that thousands of liberals have also bought it, for inexplicable reasons, and are being enraged by it, otherwise the entire premise collapses.)
DISTORTION: Fighting The Publishing Industry’s Liberal Lies, Communist Contortions and Socialist Spin, by Bernard Goldberg
Goldberg, a former CBS producer, shot to fame in 2001 when he published Bias, an impassioned account of how leftwing bias made it impossible for conservative voices to be heard in America. As if to prove his point, the book became a New York Times No 1 bestseller, but only for several weeks – and although Goldberg was interviewed in many news outlets, not one liberal publication dedicated an entire issue to his work. In this latest text, which has already sold 3m copies on pre-order, he shows how liberal tyranny has made it impossible to publish a conservative-leaning book in the United States.
SPECIAL THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE GOD SMILE, by Joel Osteen
Be inspired to live the life of abundance that God intended for you. In this special audiobook package, Osteen, the televangelist and pastor of the Lakewood megachurch in Houston, Texas, offers one spiritually enriching thought for each day of the year. In some of the days leading up to 5 November, it might occasionally sound like he’s coughing and saying “Vote Republican” at the same time – in some sort of subliminal message – but he isn’t. He is just inspiring you to live the life of abundance (and heterosexuality) that God intended for you.

Oliver Burkeman 26.9.2012
guardian.co.uk







THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness
 
  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
 
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
 
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
 
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

  Of deities or mortals, or of both,
 
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
 
  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
 
    What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

 
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
 
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
 
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
 
    Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
 
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
 
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
 
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

 
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
 
  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
 
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
 
  For ever piping songs for ever new;
 
More happy love! more happy, happy love!

  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
 
    For ever panting, and for ever young;
 
All breathing human passion far above,
 
  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
 
    A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

 
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
 
  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
 
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
 
  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
 
What little town by river or sea-shore,

  Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
 
    Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
 
  Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
 
    Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

 
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
 
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
 
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
 
  Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

  When old age shall this generation waste,
 
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
 
  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
 
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
 
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

In 1699, Jonathan Swift — author of, most notably, Gulliver’s Travels — penned the following list of resolutions, titled, “When I come to be old.” At the time of writing, he was 32 years of age.
(Source: Tale of a Tub.)

Transcript
When I come to be old. 1699.
Not to marry a young Woman. 
Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it. 
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious. 
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c. 
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly. 
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People. 
Not to be covetous. 
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness. 
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses. 
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others. 
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it. 
To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly. 
Not to talk much, nor of my self. 
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c. 
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare. 
Not to be positive or opiniative. 
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.

listsofnote.com 2.3.2012

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“… It greatly confuses the issue to assume … that social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – and this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. … you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer’s social superiors; you find boarding-school boys running Indian provinces and public school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the (“H”-less) millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a B.B.C accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape from the class into which you have been born [emphasis added].
As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow commoner. You don’t get more (“H”-less) millionaires, but you do get more and more public-school men touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven into the workhouse. Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianised; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate in the first generation, adopt the proletarian outlook. Here am I, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically, I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with: the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I personally would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time – the office-workers and the black-coated employees of all kinds – whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who certainly would not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready made Fascist Party.”
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell 1937

“Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world. The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible.
But isn’t that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn’t every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I’ll be alive tomorrow morning?
A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the earth and the stars.”
Sophie Scholl

The White Rose
First Leaflet
Munich, 1942
We will not be silent.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.
It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?
If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass – then, yes, they deserve their downfall.
Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now – the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their centre of stability – are waiting to be hounded to their destruction.
So it seems – but it is not so. Rather, by means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate.
Only a few recognised the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon.
Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilisation, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.
Offer passive resistance – resistance – wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!
Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.
“I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the crimes. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.”
Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin

by JESSE  •  FEB. 1, 2012

jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com.au 4.2.2012

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Photograph taken after the battle of George Square showing the arrest of Clyde Workers’ Committee leaders David Kirkwood and William Gallacher. Kirkwood was charged with incitement to riot, but maintained that he was batoned to the ground by police when he attempted to intervene to quell the fighting between workers and police in George Square. However, based on photographic evidence taken by a London-based paper, which showed Kirkwood lying prostrate after being struck by a policeman’s truncheon, he was found not guilty of this charge. His co-accused, Gallacher and Emanuel Shinwell, were not so lucky, receiving custodial sentences of six months and one year respectively.
The actions of the police on 31 January 1919 in George Square in Glasgow are widely believed to have led to the riot that ensued between between striking workers and the police. Heavy-handed charges into a boisterous but well-behaved crowd and indiscriminate use of batons led to workers regrouping and charging the police. Following prolonged scuffles the Riot Act was read and this event became destined to go down in Glasgow political folklore as ‘Bloody Friday’.
As one of the leaders of the CWC, Kirkwood had been involved in organising resistance to the Munitions Act during 1915-16, for which he was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act and, in 1916, deported to Edinburgh for the duration of the war.
gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redcly023.htm
1.2.2012

Holden Withington, Last Living B-52 Designer, Dies at 94

On a Friday in 1948, six aeronautical designers from the Boeing Company holed up in a hotel suite in Dayton, Ohio. They stayed put until Monday morning, except for the one who left to visit a hobby shop and returned with balsa wood, glue, carving tools and silver paint.
The group emerged with a neatly bound 33-page proposal and an impressive 14-inch scale model of an airplane on a stand. Col. Pete Warden, the Air Force chief of bomber development, studied the result and pronounced, “This is the B-52.”
One of those six was Holden Withington, and on Dec. 9, at age 94, he became the last of the B-52 designers to die. His daughter, Victoria Withington, said he died at his home on Mercer Island, Wash. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
It takes a vast team of experts to design a complex airplane, particularly one like the B-52 Stratofortress, with its eight engines and radically swept-back wings. Mr. Withington, called Bob, played down the achievement, saying it evolved from earlier plane designs and not a little luck.
The B-52, laden with nuclear warheads, was a forbidding-looking mainstay of American air defence during the cold war and a strategic deterrent to a nuclear attack. It saw substantial duty in Vietnam and the Iraq wars and is still in use. And its fundamental design — novel wings with engine “pods” positioned underneath — became the standard for almost all commercial jet carriers.
“Essentially, they discovered the perfect form of the subsonic jet,” Michael Lombardi, the Boeing Company’s corporate historian, said. “Airbus, Boeing, any other company, it’s the basic form they follow.”
A year after the B-52 breakthrough, Mr. Withington and other Boeing engineers turned their attention to designing a civilian jet transport plane. They used many features of the bomber, particularly the wing design and engine placement, to create the Boeing 707, the airliner that ushered in the Jet Age.
In 1941 Boeing recruited Mr. Withington from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had earned a master’s degree and done research using the university’s wind tunnel. His first assignment was to design and build a state-of-the-art wind tunnel for Boeing. Theodore von Karman, the eminent mathematician and aeronautical expert, passed on a piece of advice: “Make it as fast as you can.”
Mr. Withington didn’t know anything about jets at the time, but he suspected Dr. von Karman was speaking with knowledge of Britain’s top-secret research on jets. He built the wind tunnel to produce speeds of 625 miles an hour, close to the sound barrier.
In 1945 George Schairer, a renowned Boeing aerodynamicist, was part of an expert group following American troops through Germany to snap up intelligence on German weapons. Mr. Schairer discovered that the Germans had performed extensive studies on swept-back wings. He sent a letter to Mr. Withington, who immediately began testing the concept in his wind tunnel.
In less than a month, Mr. Withington proved that swept-back wings worked. When they were combined with jet engines, the way forward seemed clear. He tested the new wing formulation for use in Boeing’s B-47 bomber, the B-52’s predecessor. He did his tests at night when power was cheaper, sleeping on a cot next to the tunnel.
The resulting six-engine jet bomber perplexed even Mr. Withington. “That’s a mighty strange-looking airplane,” he recalled thinking in a 2002 interview. “I wonder if it will really fly.”
It did, and the B-47 bomber was used from 1951 to 1965. But the Air Force, wanting a heavier bomber with more range, chose Boeing to build the prototype for the B-52. A debate raged in the service and beyond over the merits of a jet engine versus those of a turbo prop, which would use less fuel but sacrifice speed. The RAND Corporation, the research group, favoured the turbo prop.
But the turbo prop approach “just wasn’t coming together,” Mr. Withington told The Times of Shreveport, La., in 2002. “The program was at risk of being canceled,” he said.
A meeting was held at Wright Field in Dayton to address what Mr. Withington said was now viewed as a crisis. Colonel Warden decreed that the turbo prop idea should be dropped in favour of jet engines, then ordered the group back to their hotel room for their weekend of frenzied work. They used slide rules for calculations.
Holden White Withington was born on Nov. 23, 1917, in Philadelphia. His family lived a peripatetic life; his father was a traveling salesman and, for a while, a bootlegger. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Withington is survived by his wife, the former Elizabeth Merrow; his sons, Vincent, Martin and Holden; and five grandchildren.
After the success of the B-52, Mr. Withington climbed Boeing’s executive ladder. At one point he was vice president and general manager of the company’s effort to build a supersonic jetliner to challenge the Concorde of Britain and France and the Tu-144 of Russia. Congress killed the project in 1971 because of worries about sonic booms and environmental damage. He retired as vice president for engineering in 1983.
Only then did he get his pilot’s license. At 80, he built a two-seater airplane in his backyard.
Douglas Martin nytimes.com 18.12.2011

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Rainbow 20.11.2011

Agribusiness Heir, Dies at 84

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. (AP) — Cargill MacMillan Jr., the multibillionaire heir to the Cargill agribusiness fortune, died on Monday at his home here. He was 84.
His death, of natural causes, was confirmed by the Riverside County sheriff’s office.
Mr. MacMillan was worth an estimated $2.6 billion based on his share in the family company, according to Forbes magazine, which placed him and other relatives on its list of the 400 richest Americans.
The family, which has a reputation for secrecy, holds 88 percent of the conglomerate Cargill, which is based in Wayzata, Minn. Founded in 1865, the company has international interests that include cocoa plantations, livestock, steel mills and commodities trading.
It is one of the largest private companies in the world, with nearly $119.5 billion in revenue and 138,000 employees in 63 countries.
Mr. MacMillan was a longtime board member. He had no day-to-day role in the company.
He and his wife, Donna, moved from Minnesota to Indian Wells in 1990. They were philanthropists, donating a $20 million art collection to the Palm Springs Art Museum, The Desert Sun reported.
He is survived by his wife and four children.

AP via nytimes.com
16.11.2011