Friday Galactic Blogging

Centaurus A presents a unique vision. It's an example of what can happen when a pair of galaxies collide - the resultant structures can be amazing. I don't think there's anything else in the sky that quite looks like this. It's also pretty bright, fifth brightest galaxy in the sky, in fact - though it can't be seen from most northern latitudes.

Click once for a more detailed description (courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.) Click again for a high resolution view.

How exactly does Michelle Malkin define "non-partisan?"

Earlier this year, I reported on a new, non-partisan movement that arose to challenge the surrender lobby. On a bitter cold weekend in March, the Gathering of Eagles brought together veterans, families of active-duty servicemen and servicewomen, Rolling Thunder members, military bloggers, and their grass-roots supporters to raise their pro-troops, pro-mission voices. I interviewed Eagles who flew in from San Francisco, rode motorcycles south from Georgia, drove all night from Boston, and trekked in caravans from coast to coast to answer ANSWER. At the crack of dawn facing biting winds and contemptuous taunts, tens of thousands of Eagles stood guard over war memorials threatened by anti-war anarchists and lined the streets where bongo drum-beating retreatists marched.

My goodness.

I'm Tempted to Start a Feature Called "Mark Steyn Watch"

He's a machine for producing quotable nonsense:

Your disparager's presumption that you must be arguing in bad faith is one of the most tedious features of the age.

Naughty liberals, Nasty liberals. Making specious claims of bad faith against arguments made by the Warriors for Truth. I guess he's just getting sick of hearing it.

The "disparager" in question is Matt Yglesias, who strikes me as an unlikely choice of target in this context. I don't know enough about Levin's views on the subject of farm subsidies to know whether Yglesias' claim is true. I do know enough about Yglesias to assert that he's a pretty careful partisan and doesn't generally make unsupportable claims.

Update: Yglesias Responds to Jonah and others who have weighed in.

Hypocrisy?

I found this at Ace's place. Despite the fact that I'm likely a "barking moonbat" who wouldn't deserve a link, I'll give credit (and a link) where it's due.

Larry Craig's Offense

Reposted (and somewhat cleaned up) from a comment I left at Garance's place:

I don't know if I think "peeping laws" in general serve a compelling good. I prefer public toilets not be multi-purposed this particular way - but I'm open to the argument that there might be issues of autonomy or freedom that outweigh my discomfort. Having said that, whether or not the law Larry Craig is accused of breaking is just, or even whether, whatever that law actually is, it was applied correctly - all these seem to be side considerations. Whatever the case might be, I haven't heard the suggestion that Craig was targeted because of his identity or his job. There's no "unfairness" here, in that sense. And he isn't in trouble because of some summary offense (or misdemeanor, I don't know for sure) he pled to. He did something that was extraordinarily stupid, with full knowledge of what he had to lose. As a result of that stupidity, he revealed that he has behaved with blatant hypocrisy on important topics.

And then, whatever you think about any of the rest of this, he tried to intimidate the cop.

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen originally released this song on his 1985 opus Various Positions, a somewhat underrated album, in my opinion. I think it stands with his best work. This song, a tour de force of spiritual ambivalence, is among my favorite of his lyrics. Cale's interpretations - the first of which I encountered in the soundtrack of the animated film Shrek (I wish I could have found a widescreen version to link to) - have been really strong. Accompanied only by his own piano playing, they are spare and beautiful. This adds a string trio quartet to that simplicity without in any way detracting from the immediacy and beauty.

Huh?

I would like to know what this guy is talking about:

It's getting to be a bit of a pattern. Someone generically of the left - or so they regard themselves - writes about regrettable features of leftist advocacy and alignment in recent times and is met by a chorus of voices saying, approximately, 'Who, me? Who, us? What, the left? No, never. Unheard of.'

The whole damn piece is a string of non-specific stream-of-consciousness jargon making an incomprehensible argument against some undefined bogey of a "left." Just the sort of thing to get a nod and a link from Glenn Reynolds.

Mark's Found His Mojo!

Errant Cornerite Mark Steyn rarely disappoints for long. This piece gets style points for outsourcing its requisite useless analogy.

But the following is sublime:

I take your point. If Senator Craig had gone into the stall, rolled out his prayer mat, yelled "Allahu Akbar!" and been observed attempting to weaponize the ballcock, the undercover cop would have shrugged, "Do I really want to get stuck with another four-week stint in Sensitivity Training hell?" and gone about his business.

The non-sequitur reference to Islamic practice, and the insouciant way he slides into an ugly equivalence between Islamic practices and cruising airport men's rooms, and managing to combine a reference to terrorism with the use of the term "ballcock!" - all that PLUS the PC gracenote at the end of that bit - this is the mark of a true virtuoso. Thanks for showing us how it's done, Mark!

No Comment

If you wanted to pick a perfect symbol for the current state of the Bush Administration you might find a better candidate than Alberto Gonzalez' death grip on on the office of Attorney General. Up until now, that would not have been a simple task.

Eve Fairbanks at The Plank get dibs on the best line: Ding dong!

Weimar crapola?

Sullivan's rhetoric is reaching toward the unspeakable; though I'm not sure I disagree. The general point of the Chait piece he's referencing ought to have been made weeks ago.

John Cole weighs in and says some some things pretty plainly.

H/T Henry at Crooked Timber.

Charles Stross says it better than I have

People who know me have heard my DRM diatribes on multiple occasions. I hate it. It gets in the way, and it provides a vector for malware. It allows for ugly theories of ownership. It solves no problems except for imaginary ones. (Which isn't to say that there aren't real problems to which it's intended to be a solution. It just doesn't solve them.) Here's somebody else's diatribe.

P.S. Read Accelerando.

Related: I haven't bought one of the damn things - I'm too cheap to be any better than a generation or two behind the bleeding edge: my current, relatively new, phone is a RAZR.

Friday Galactic Blogging

Yet another beautiful spiral, named M81, this one about twelve million light years away. Click through for a description, and click again for a higher resolution version. This was imaged with the Hubble space telescope, and one of the cool aspects of this image is that individual stars from M81 have been resolved.

More Kevin Ayers

Why? Well, mainly because I can. Also because this particular YouTube clip really seems to get at something essential about Ayers at a particular point in time. And additionally, that's Ollie Halsall playing one of the guitars - a great guitar player, an important part of what Ayers did musically, and someone who died unnecessarily young. (That's Ollie with the light colored jacket. Andy Summers is the third guitar player on stage.)

Mark Steyn Is Almost Always an Ass

But, in the ongoing effort to give credit where it's due, I agree completely with this.

What I've Finished Reading

I’ve just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, about a month, I think, behind most people. I came to the Harry Potter party late, anyway. I bought the first five books as a boxed set about a year and a half ago for my wife, and watched her consume the lot in about two weeks. I realized after she finished the first three in about four days that I’d better get number six pretty quickly. I was reluctant to believe I’d find them quite so compelling, but I decided that her obvious pleasure was a pretty good sign. I probably needed three week to get through those six. Since I’d seen the films that were currently available, I knew what to expect from the first few. In their slightly clunky way, the first three or four were really pretty charming. As the series went on, and the stories became longer and more complex, however, the plotting had something of an arbitrary this happened, then that happened, and then something else happened quality to it, and worse, some of the action began to seem forced, characters did or said things the logic of which seemed to have more to do with where Rowling needed to drive the story rather than what would be consistent with the characters, particularly Harry Potter, himself. Megan McArdle said it very well indeed, here.

Deathly Hallows turns out to have been a rather easier read than Half-Blood Prince, thankfully. There’s still some forced stupidity on the part of some of the characters, but this time around Rowling provides a better rationale. I certainly had a greater emotional investment in the characters, this time around.

Spoiler:

I thought the quasi-death and immediate resurrection of Harry was pretty cheesy, particularly in light of all the hype and speculation, in which Rowling was a full participant. I thought at least one of the primary trio was going to be killed off. Silly me. I liked the overall ending just fine; although I found the epilogue a little short of detail. Another reviewer made the point that maybe a little bit of the hiding-in-a-tent interlude could have been trimmed in exchange for a slightly more hefty wrap-up, with a bit more detail about what becomes of this character whose struggles we’ve been following for all these thousands of pages.

Pink Martini

Ok, back to the present. Sort of. They're a kind of a throwback to some other time, between, I don't know, maybe 1920 and 1960. These guys are a great live band. There are twelve to fourteen people on stage, instruments ranging from piano, upright bass and Latin percussion to brass, a string trio, guitar, drums, etc... The music is a combination of original material and multi-national pop from the last century. It's magnificent, if you like this sort of thing. Which I do, definitely.

K-La La

How is it that dishonest creeps like Mark Krikorian get the keys to post here? It’s an important blog. If you don’t read it you’re missing out on an interesting window into what conservatives are thinking. But, posts like this one beg the question of standards over there in K-Lo land. First there’s the implicit twofer swipe at the Association for Civil-Rights in Israel and the ACLU. How is it that standing up for civil rights is a partisan issue of the left? We should ask Bob Barr about that.

Then, there’s moving from this ACRI quote: "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom" to “So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay.” Ignoring the phrase “life-threatening” as an intensifier in that compound leaves a pretty unbalanced pair: life-threatening danger on the one hand, not lesser danger, but “life-threatening” danger, and amorphously defined infringements on the other. He ignores the obvious intent just to get the cheap applause line: “So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay.”

Where do they find these people?

Friday Galactic Blogging

Not every visible galaxy is a spiral, of course. But the spirals are among the most beautiful things I can imagine. This gorgeous image of a relatively close neighbor was taken, surprisingly, by a ground-based telescope, Many of the really striking images from the past decade or two originate from orbital scopes, such as Hubble and Chandra.

He Was Against It Before He Was For It

Again, from PZ's invaluable Pharyngula: