The Galliano affair: dog bites man

The people commenting on Dior designer John Galliano's Hitler love universally fail to notice that the WWII SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss. You can't take the Nazi out of the designer, it seems.

Russian monarchists on the radio

A compelling "elevator story" - "The monarchy can combine different institutions for the best fulfilment of the state's obligations."

Mike Dukakis and Bill Weld

Howie Carr remembers the political corruption of Mike Dukakis and Bill Weld.

You cannot function as governor of the Bay State without deeply compromising yourself, assuming there is anything there to compromise.

BTW, anyone could tell Dukakis was dishonest based on how he handled Bill Rusher on The Advocates.

As if war were not enough

Afghanistan suffers a plague of "deeply shameful" pimp license plates.

George Osborne says of banks...

Via Private Eye.

Cheyenne is the new Vaduz

"The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming."

Here are some liberals worried sick about LLCs.

"Conservatives" celebrate gay marriage

Unbelievable.

This was a case where the radio conservatives would have been fired en masse for speaking out and thus it put great weight on the shoulders of the print brigade. The print brigade, however, has been out to lunch for 30 years.

Let us resort to Pope Benedict XVI: this is "insidious and dangerous."

Meanwhile, the armed forces' rank and file are in agony over gay integration while their officers prepare more "diversity" classes. Heterosexual soldiers have no one to defend them. Soon, they'll serve with "married couples."

Do Roman Catholics work for Bill Buckley's paper anymore?

The demise of the symphony orchestra

More orchestras are slated for Chapter 11.

The slippery slope, I think, has been the decades-long recalibrating for a mid-market patronage. These people do not have the financial strength to make up the loss of major patrons and they also lower the quality of the music and repertoire (tune into any classical music station these days; this is, in the apt criticism of Frank Zappa, mere "Top 40" music).

In other words, symphonic orchestras entered a death spiral with the end of civic capitalism, the geographic scattering of the wealthy, and the rise of the middlebrow. That's not in the linked story, but that's what I've been observing.

Producers must understand that the New York Times reader, the PBS watcher, the NPR listener, these are cultural straphangers, not major patrons, and they cannot carry the weight of a city's culture in their personal tastes or finances.

The disbanding of opera companies is not mentioned here, but the loss of the Baltimore Opera crimped me rather hard. The other nearby opera companies are either middlebrow or painfully intermittent.

Collecting and eating snails

Don't be squeamish.

Racial neutrality violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act

But of course it would. Somewhere out there Hubert Humphrey is eating his hat (as promised) and Barry Goldwater is looking on.

Car of the day

The 1954 Talbot-Lago T26 Grand Sport Coupe.

Let's play Euro Scramble

Actually, let's not. The Chinese keep winning.
(By WilliamBanzai7)

"Chug for growth"

Your not just helping yourself to a drink, you're helping society:

...mounting evidence suggests that beer in particular, and the beer industry that surrounds it, may be as good for growth as excess sobriety. In some of the world's toughest investment climates, beer companies today are building factories, creating jobs, and providing vital public services, all in the pursuit of new customers for a pint.

Hoist one "for the children."

What would Andrew Jackson say?

I have always been afraid of banks.

Make him a general!

If ever you should find a recruiter who not only meets his quota but has recruits pay him to join the Army, know you have someone very special - someone with a great future. Don't send him to jail:

Yupeng Deng, 51, of El Monte recruited about 200 other Chinese immigrants from southern California, the San Francisco Bay area and Atlanta to join his bogus Army reserve unit, telling them it could improve their chances of obtaining U.S. citizenship, prosecutors said.

The recruits were charged $300 to $450 to enlist and up to $120 a year to renew memberships in what Deng called the U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit.

Recruits could increase their rank in the “MSFR” by making cash donations to the defendant, prosecutors said.

This is genius.

New Army sumptuary laws (cont.)

There shall be no wearing of

... shoes that feature “five separate, individual compartments for the toes” ... Such shoes “detract from a professional military image” ...

Feel free, however, to visit Congress, VIPs, and five star restaurants in your baggy, dusty fatigues.

The curse of the Afghanistan War Timetable

From Spiked:

... everything was running according to the Afghanistan War Timetable, that strangely unreal schedule for this hitherto intractable conflict dreamt up in the White House just under two years ago.
[...]
...when the war being fought has so little to do with any strategic or material interest in the country in which it is being conducted, it is hardly a great surprise that domestic concerns rule the day. And so it is with the war in Afghanistan, a war so arbitrary in its objectives that its length and intensity can be governed by a timetable drawn up in a backroom in the White House.

Meanwhile, we learn that the "option" Obama "picked" was never "on the table." In other words, he made a decision outside of the options.

Church of England opts for Heliolatry

Maybe this is overstated, but I like it:

If you thought heliolatry (worship of the Sun) had burnt out, except maybe at Stonehenge once a year and at various other gatherings of backward, madcap Druids, think again. The Christian Church itself is now converting en masse to heliolatry, ditching its faith in Christ and the Cross in favour of bowing and scraping before the almighty Sun and its precious rays.

"What we can learn from Estonia"

We can learn to implement flat taxes, low/no tariffs, e-government, rule of law, relatively modest borrowing. The main thing we can learn is that political shock treatment is needed when saddled with a corrupt oligarchy.

"...government is the primary cause of systemic risk"

Actually, not all government, more the out-of-control bank-run oligarchies.