Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

June 19, 2012

A light moment

I like it when a newspaper makes me chuckle. Rising Republican star and Tea Party favorite Senator Marco Rubio voted against reforming the sugar quota program, that costs consumers on behalf of a small number of farmers. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "...the Floridian was not a profile in courage on this issue, or even a profile."

 

June 19, 2012

In today's paper

Bret Stephens, who I usually disagree with, has written a thougtful piece about democracy and its shortcomings around the world.
      The Greeks voted in favor of staying in the Euro, and in favor of more austerity, apparently, but the relatively sensible party that won is in favor of a bailout that isn't going to work, and won with less than 30% of the vote.

In other words, the Greeks gave a solid 46% of their vote to parties that are evil, crazy or both, even while erring on the side of 'sanity' with parties that are merely foolish and discredited. Imagine that in 1980 Jimmy Carter had eked out a slim victory over a Gus Hall-Lyndon LaRouche ticket...

Despite the usual gratuitious sneer at Carter, I had to smile ruefully. Tackling the Middle East, Stephens points out that in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Gaza,"popular majorities have made a democratic choice for parties that put faith before freedom and substitute the word of God for the rule of law." Now we may think it ominous that the military in Egypt seems intent on retaining its power, but what is the alternative? Perhaps the real danger, Stephens writes, is that

The objections of an aged and ambivalent junta will not long stand in the way of millions of Egyptians demanding their right to choose unfreedom freely.

Strong stuff. Stephens hopes that "Egyptians may have a wider conception of freedom in 30 years or so, about the same amount of time it took Khomeinism to lose the masses in Iran." But I think he's right that we'll have a lot more argy-bargy in the foreseeable future.

 

June 19, 2012

More options! Arghhhh!

Wallowing in my new freedom to play with my stuff, I am dubbing LPs onto CDs so I can dump the files in iTunes, send a noisy LP through ClickRepair and all that fun stuff. And I have a fun and useful program called XLD for converting files, except that I can't get it to work most of the time. And my word-processing program and my iPhoto on my new computer have been pointlessly redesigned to make them more complicated and confusing, in other words, less useful. Firefox works just dandy, but they keep wanting me to download a fancy new home page that I can customize myself! Problem is, I want to play with my music, not the #%&! software.
      Also in today's paper, novelist and screenwriter Delia Ephron is scathingly funny about the relentless swarm of favors the cyber industry keeps doing for us that we don't want or need. Her piece is called "Upgrade Hell", and I wish there was a link.