Hey Britons...

Get 'em while you still can and put them to good use. See especially:

• Popular Basis of Political Authority
• Right of Revolution
• Rights
• Equality
• Property
• Constitutional Government

Against the dehumanization of art

An old must-read from Mark Helprin in The New Criterion. Here's the central blessed point of his essay:

I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard. Though the entire cultural apparatus may deny the existence of an absolute standard, though the universities, the philosophers, the newspapers, and eventually, perhaps, every single human being on earth may deny that it exists ... it does, nonetheless, exist.

And here's a paragraph that stuck with me as I read the latest equipment-laden Field & Stream magazine:

Modernism is by necessity obsessed with form, much like a craftsman obsessed with his tools and materials. In my climbing days we used to call people like that “equipment weenies.” These days you can see it in fly-fishing, where not a few people go out once a year with $5,000-worth of equipment to catch (maybe) $5-worth of fish. What should have been the story of the man, the stream, and the fish becomes instead a romance between the man and his tools. In this century the same thing happened in art. Just as they who would deny the existence of the soul will perforce worship the body, those who do not immediately know the difference between art and design are those who would confuse and equate a sailfish levitated above windblown waves with a reconstruction of its stiff and motionless skeleton in a natural history museum.

This 1865 painting by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field", figures in an anecdote in his essay:

Earth Hour is a 'psychological plague'

Have you heard this crap about businesses, maybe even entire cities, turning off their lights for an hour to "lower carbon emissions"? The global psychosis is scheduled to hit tonight at 8-9pm local time. Here's the best writing I've found on the subject:

I never get tired of looking at this photograph. It never fails to fill me with wonder and awe at the ingenuity of my species who, against all the odds, have carved these glorious man-made islands of light out of the primordial blackness. Whenever I am heavy of heart, I open up this photograph and stare at it to remind me that, somewhere, there is light and life.

With each passing day I become more convinced that the 'green' movement is actually a millenarian psychosis; a mental and spiritual sickness borne, perhaps, from some degree of civilisational exhaustion. Not just a belief that the end of the world is nigh, but an active desire to bring it about. And soon. Ours is not the first age to witness such pandemics of madness but, in the Middle Ages at least, there was the excuse of a near-universal poverty. In such a state of interminable plight, despair may not be the wisest response but it is at least an understandable one.

Read the whole thing. What do you want to bet that folks who leave their lights on tonight will be attacked here and there around the world?

UPDATE: not much Earth Hour action here in Small Town, Illinois. The neighbors across the street have their house lights off but the streetlamp attached to their garage is still on.

Watch this

"Freedom Never Cries": Watch this cool video and John Ondrasik's charity will raise money for Operation Homefront, which supports troops' families.

Brian Lamb groupies, rejoice!

He'll receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom November 5 at the White House:

Brian P. Lamb has elevated America's public debate and helped open up our government to citizens across the Nation. His dedication to a transparent political system and the free flow of ideas has enriched and strengthened our democracy.