Log24

The title is from a search in this journal — 
http://www.m759.net/wordpress/?s=1982+Janine .

"And all the clocks were striking thirteen."

See also, in this  journal, St. Cyprian's Day last year.

(Continued)

Orwell Meets Waugh

This journal’s Christmas Day entry, Brightness at Noon, was in response to the Orwellian headline “Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness,” at the top of the online New York Times front page on Christmas morning.

The entry offered, as an example of brightness, some thoughts of Leibniz on his discovery of binary arithmetic.

Related material:

From Mikhail Krawtchouk: Short Biography—

Anyone knowing even a little Soviet history of the thirties can conclude that Krawtchouk could not avoid the Great Terror. During the Orwellian “hours of hatred” in 1937 he was denounced as a “Polish spy,” “bourgeois nationalist,” etc. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years of confinement and 5 years of exile.

Academician Krawtchouk, the author of results which became part of the world’s mathematical knowledge, outstanding lecturer, member of the French, German, and other mathematical societies, died on March 9, 1942, in Kolyma branch of the GULAG (North-Eastern Siberia) more than 6 months short of his 50th birthday.

Incidentally, happy birthday
to John von Neumann.

For Mike Nichols,
whose birthday is today:

Angels in Arabia

Yesterday’s entries discussed an angel and a fugue; this suggests Clive Barker’s classic tale Weaveworld, which in turn suggests the following links:

1.  the Log24 archive,
     Aug. 1-6, 2005, and

2.  C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, and
     the Corruption of Language,

an essay at the website of
St. Christopher’s Cathedral
in Bahrain, Arabia.

Nichols, who is Jewish, may of course prefer the following remark of comedian Sarah Silverman:

“I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because– I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic– it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”

Project for the
New Century

“A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.”

— Tim Robbins, speech to National Press Club, April 15, 2003

Resoluteness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for such a voice.  Also needed is eloquence.  Here is such a voice:

William Rivers Pitt.

Postscript:

I wrote the above at 3:38 PM today, thinking I had finally found someone to admire whom my left-leaning friends might also admire.

Perhaps resoluteness and eloquence suffice to stop a mob; they are not, however, sufficient to impress professional journalists, who, to be much impressed, require a third quality– truthfulness.

Since today’s major Washington and New York papers indicate that a presidential scandal of Water- or Monica-gate proportions may be in the offing, some minimal fact-checking seems in order.  Hence, at 3:40 PM today, I did a Google search on names Pitt discusses:

“karl rove”  
“robert mosbacher”  
 novak. 

That search indicates that unfortunately, mob-stopper Pitt seems, like many leftists, to be a liar.

Here is an excerpt from Pitt on Karl Rove dated Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003:

The Most Insidious of Traitors

“Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind…. “

Here is an excerpt from columnist Robert Novak dated December 5, 2002:

Low Political Intrigue

“The article in Esquire’s January edition by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind is actually about Karl Rove, Bush’s powerful political adviser…. 

Unfortunately, I did not escape Suskind’s article, which includes these sentences: ‘Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fund-raising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.’  I was called by no fact-checker, who would have learned of multiple errors.

Suskind has confused former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher Sr., Bush’s 1992 chief fund-raiser, with his son Rob, who headed the Bush campaign in Texas (Victory ’92). Criticism of the younger Mosbacher, a frequent unsuccessful candidate in Texas, was not ‘planted’ with me by Rove but was passed to me by a Bush aide whom I interviewed. Rove was indeed fired by Mosbacher from Victory ’92 but continued as a national Bush-for-president operative.

Three mistakes in two sentences lend credence to claims by White House aides that they were misrepresented in Suskind’s July article…”

I say Pitt seems to be lying because in today’s editorial he never even mentions Novak’s column of December 5, 2002, which is, as noted above, readily available. 

It is, of course, possible that Pitt and Suskind are right and Novak is wrong.  It is also possible that Orwell was wrong, that Stalin was a great man, and that Communism is the wave of the future.

Every Boy Has a Daddy

Today is the Feast of Saint Peter.

The most timely quote I know of for today’s religious observances is from Oh What a Web They Weave, by F. John Loughnan:

“Every boy has a daddy.“

This was written as part of an attack on the father of a Latin-Mass Catholic who authored the website Ecclesia Militans, which has the logo

Note the resemblance to the Iron Cross.

Soldier of Fortune magazine, April 2002, contains a brief discussion of the German motto “Gott mit uns” that is relevant to the concept of The Church Militant.

Soldier of Fortune,
April 2002

The actor on the cover, Mel Gibson, also serves to illustrate our meditation for today, “Every boy has a daddy.”  See Christopher Noxon’s article in the New York Times Magazine of March 9, 2003:

Is the Pope Catholic… Enough?

Noxon attacks Gibson’s father Hutton — like his son Mel, a Latin-Mass Catholic, and author of

Is the Pope Catholic?

A related “Every boy has a daddy” attack appears in the June 2003 issue of Playboy magazine.  An entertaining excerpt from this attack on Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK, may be found at Orwell Today.  

Finally, let us meditate on the ultimate “Every boy has a daddy” attack — by novelist Robert Stone on the alleged father of Jesus of Nazareth:

The New York Times Magazine article mentioned above was prompted, in part, by Mel Gibson’s current movie production, “The Passion,” about the final 12 hours in the (first, or possibly second) life of Jesus.  If I were producing a Passion play, as Peter I would certainly cast Stone.

See also the 11 PM sequel to the above.

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”

Oscar

Deep Chomsky: Lying, Truth-Telling, and the Social Order

Michael  Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.

To the Green Lady
 of Perelandra

View from the slopes of Slieve na mBan

In honor of the relationship between theology and literature, of the Green Lady of C. S. Lewis, and of… 

John Flood BA, MA (NUI), Ph.D. (Dublin)
Senior Lecturer. Formerly a tutor at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Trinity College, Dublin, his Ph.D. was on the influence of the interpretation of the figure of Eve in Early Modern writing. His research interests include the Renaissance, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien and the relationship between theology and literature.

… this site’s music is now Caoine Cill Chais, The Lament for Kilcash.