You have probably heard that Dennis Prager, a prominent conservative author, columnist, and talk show host, recently conducted the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra but not without hysteria generated by a few left wing musicians and the smearing of Prager by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR.
Lesson No. 1: When the mainstream media write or say that a conservative "suggested" something that sounds outrageous, it usually means the conservative never actually said it.
Lesson No. 2: When used by the mainstream media, the words "divisive" or "contentious" simply mean "leftists disagree with."
Lesson No. 3: Contrary evidence is omitted.
Lesson No. 4: Subjects are covered in line with left-wing ideology.
Be sure to read the whole article. One needs to be informed and fortified to detect the bias that is everywhere.
Rod Dreher wrote an illuminating column today which I continue to think about. He titled his column, "Sad Songs and the South."
He concludes his article with the following rendition of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," but you've got to read the article (below) to understand how it fits into the article's thesis.
. . . ..I was thinking the other day about the Confederate controversy, in light of the fact that the South is a shame-honor culture, and one where people are deeply rooted in a sense of family and place — for better or for worse. Might it be that non-Southerners, for cultural reasons, simply cannot understand why it’s difficult for Southerners to execrate their ancestors, even if their ancestors did bad things?
That thought came back to me after listening to this amazing episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. It’s about country music, and what sets it apart from other American musical genres. Malcolm Gladwell is not the first person I would go to for insight into how country music works, but boy, was this great.
On the podcast, Gladwell explores why country music has so many sad songs, but rock music does not. After listening to Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High On That Mountain,” which is about the death of country singer Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death, as well as Gill’s own brother, who died young of a heart attack, Gladwell says:
On August 21, we Americans get to see a total solar eclipse. As I mentioned in a previous piece, we can see solar eclipses only because our planet, our Moon, and our Sun sometimes come together in a straight line in space. When the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, those in the Moon’s shadow see an eclipse.
But the story doesn’t end there. A rare alignment of events allows Earthlings to witness not just solar eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses. Our Moon just barely covers the Sun’s bright photosphere. Such an eclipse depends on just the right sizes, shapes, and relative distances of the Sun, Moon, and Earth.
There’s no law of physics that dictates this layout. There are 65 major moons in our Solar System, and many smaller ones. But only we enjoy perfect solar eclipses. If there were Martians or Uranians, they wouldn’t see such eclipses.
The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun. But the Moon is also about 400 times closer to the Earth than is the Sun. As a result, the size of the Moon on our sky matches the size of the Sun. And since they appear as round disks, they match in both size and shape.
What’s more, the tight match between Moon and Sun only happens during a narrow window of Earth’s history. The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth — at roughly the same speed that fingernails grow.
In brief, the best time and place to view total solar eclipses in our Solar System is just when and where there are observers to see them.
Andy Kessler writes,"Hands down, the two most dangerous words in the English language today are 'studies show.' I totally agree.
Kessler goes on:
Many of the studies quoted in newspaper articles and pop-psychology books are one-offs anyway. In August 2015, the Center for Open Science published a study in which 270 researchers spent four years trying to reproduce 100 leading psychology experiments. They successfully replicated only 39. Yes, I see the irony of a study debunking a study, but add to this a Nature survey of 1,576 scientists published last year. 'More than 70% of reserachers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments,' the survey report concludes. "And more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments."
More: "It's easy to write this off as trivial, except millions take these studies and their conclusions seriously."
I like Kessler's conclusions: "These studies show whatever someone wants them to. So stay skeptical ..." Yes!
I wrote a photographer friend today the following:
The other day I read a Wall Street Journal article focusing on a former Wall Street trader, Chris Arnade, who "decided to quit finance and focus on photo essays, starting with addicts and prostitutes he had befriended on walks in the Bronx."
I thought you might be interested. The article goes on:
"He spent several years working on the streets, in squats and in rehabs getting to know his subjects for the series, which has been viewed about 1.5 million times on Flickr.
"He began reporting for newspapers and magazines and in late 2014 started traveling to towns across the country with high rates of poverty and drug addiction He met residents on the street, in churches and mosques, community colleges and McDonald franchises. Many felt abandoned economically and angry enough about Wall Street bailouts to support Mr. Trump."
I looked a few moments ago at his Flickr page and was moved to see the faces of people whom the Lord loves greatly.