Child Prodigy is an overused description for almost any child showing unusual talent or potential. The candidates extend from three year old Tiger Woods showing a classic golf swing on the Michael Douglas show to the various Lil’ Orphan Annies’ belting out “Tomorrow” on a Broadway revival. The true test is really the development of adult level interpretative capacity and technical skill at an age associated with the superficial emotional depth and life experiences of youth, and no place is this more aptly expressed as in the classical music genre, particularly the classical piano. Interestingly our greatest pianists often studied in obscurity until a performance break exhibited their prodigious talents, and often required years of mundane musical years in the “wilderness” before becoming identified as superb interpreters of the piano compositional canon. In a very few cases, the spectacular potential of youthful prodigy becomes fully realized in adult form in a continuous path, and one such prodigy is Evgeny Kissin.
Mr. Kissin is in 2010 only 39 years old, but has been recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of the late romantic piano literature since age 12. It is a strange capacity that allows a twelve year old to have unique interpretative powers and such affinity for the music, and no scientist is likely to be able to specifically represent the portions of the brain that allow such a gift. In Mr. Kissin’s situation, it was as if he was born with the adult emotional latice to provide definitive versions of composers such as Chopin and Rachmaninoff, so profoundly expressed that one wonders if the religious concept of re-incarnation and the spirit of Liszt himself found a home in Evgeny’s body. What ever the source of such genius, Kissin has managed to maintain and expand on his youthful powers and become as an adult one of the foremost performers on the classical stage seen in the last 100 years. Born in 1971 in the former Soviet Union, Kissin was already recognized at age ten as a profoundly special talent, and at age 13 had an international best selling performance recording of the Chopin Piano Concertos. In his twenties and thirties he has performed with every A-rated orchestra in the world and is among the most sought after performers in our time. In an age where fifteen minutes of fame provide fleeting veneers of supposed genius capacity, Evgeny Kissin has lived up to and surpassed any estimation of his potential and is a modern musical Prometheus that will be for decades to come one of the People We Should Know.
Enjoy Evgeny Kissin’s performance of Chopin at age 12, age 15, and recently Rachmaninoff:
The late 1960’s and early 1970’s were a period of radicalist chic in universities of the United States with an anarchist fringe developing out of eastern and Midwestern universities from the radical group, Students for a Democratic Society. Anarchists with violent cast accumulated in organizations such as the Weathermen Underground in New York and Chicago and the Karleton Armstrong gang at the University of Wisconsin resulting in bombings and deaths. The fractured logic of the extremists was the logic of all anarchists, destruction of society’s stable fabric in order to foment revolution.
England appears to be suffering under a similar period of anarchist proliferation and the embryonic center appears to be the obscure Bedfordshire University in Luton, England north of the metropolis of London. This time the radicalist mantra is islamic extremism, and its anarchist tendencies are becoming every bit as violent and dangerous as the American version. With Great Britain’s role in the response to 9/11 and its history as a colonialist overlord in the near East and Central Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was particularly vulnerable to internalized hatred and feelings of victimhood from a Muslim immigrant population absorbed at the time of the collapse of empire, and the peculiar tendencies of this immigrant culture to resist any absorption in British society and its cultural mores. At the same time, England in particular has lost passion for its “britishness” in a global world it no longer leads and barely influences.
In Sweden, this past week a radicalized former British university student blew himself and several other people up in an effort to create mass death as a suicide bomber, luckily detonating before he achieved a position in the midst of a significant crowd of people. The biography was eerily similar to the London subway bombers of 2005, british students of muslim faith radicalized at mosques associated with the university in Luton who murdered 52 people in what has been referred to as Great Britain’s 7/7. Radical cells have been permitted in England to proliferate around places of learning as an expression of British “cultural tolerance” and the penalty for the world has been a parade of anarchist bombers, starting with Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” in 2001, through multiple successful and near successful plots, to this most recent event., effecting multiple countries and providing energy and willing dupes for Al Qaeda’s necrophilic and anarchistic philosophy.
The parents of the most recent bomber in Sweden blame the british model of educational “tolerance”for allowing young men to become brainwashed by radical clerics protected by their proximity to institutions of higher learning. The colleges provide easy fodder for the clerics in vulnerable young Muslim males who feel dissociated from their roots, and are looking for any direction and clarity. the pattern is repeated over and over,; radicalization in the mosque, training in Afghanistan camps, return as willing participants in the Al Qaeda’s war against civilization and Muslim moderation. A significant national conversation has to be held in Great Britain in how to balance religious tolerance without permitting what has become a progressive cancer on free society.
Bedfordshire University in Luton, England might be a very good place to start, and maybe end, that conversation.
Every four years another group of egocentric, driven individuals get it in their mind that they have the special ingredients that are required for the demanding job of President of the United States. They come in several distinct sub-species. There are the career politicians who “understand” the inner workings of modern government “better” than the rest of us, and can make it work where others have failed. There are the giant intellectuals who are convinced the guy who had the job before was obviously the village idiot or doofus. There are the up and comers who feel that the establishment team in place is worn out and devoid of new ideas, and the country only needs the spark of a fresh face with newer ideas to stimulate progress. One lucky winner finally gets to take his place in the sun and see if he (or eventually she) is up to the job.
And every four years the enormous responsibility, pressures, and burdens of marshaling the largest economy on earth and being leader of the free world come barrelling down on the new Achilles. Like Achilles with his unique and fatal flaw, the cracks in the armour become progressively exposed in the new leader and in the case of those unprepared emotionally for the job, can find their armour broken wide open.
On Friday the Leader of the Free World, President Obama, a politician his adult life, a giant intellectual replacing a “doofus”, and an up and comer who was going to “heal the earth and stop the rising of the oceans” met full face his own Achilles heel. He has found himself bored with the job and its increasingly heavy stresses. Most profoundly, he recently has had to experience the sour taste of compromise negotiations that come with a democracy that in November declared his radical agenda unacceptably radical. On Wednesday he was forced to explain at a press conference a tax agreement he had negotiated, at which he immediately stated he would do what he could to over turn in two years, while simultaneously explaining why it was good for the economy and country. In this particular case, he was against it before he was for it, and he is against it again. The Friday press conference was the coup de grace however to his crumbling veneer of special capacity for the job. In a hastily arranged press conference his own press secretary Robert Gibbs had no indication he was planning, he went out with former President Clinton to “explain” the virtues of the compromise. From the start he gave the podium to Clinton, who reveled being back in the klieglights; within minutes Obama started staring at his watch, and when a period for questions began, suddenly announced he had to leave to attend a party to keep his wife from becoming angry with him. He turned and left, leaving the former President to do the explaining to the American people of what in the world the current President had in mind for them. Former President Clinton LOVED it; almost no one else did.
Every four years, a group of individuals think they are up to the spectacular personal demands of a Presidency. Some are. This President isn’t – and we somehow have to get through two more years without damage.
Everything that is loved and hated about America resides in the 5 borough metropolis known as New York City. The most populous city in the United States retains its place as a leader in almost everything that is going to be anything, and often does it in excess. In my trips there I have palpably felt the energy that so many people coming together to be in the high temple of the American Experiment create, and no other western city comes close. Its in the speed of the walk, the buildings, the bustle, the lights, and the pizzazz that takes you in its bosom and makes you want to be part of it. It is very likely, with all its irritations and headaches, what freedom feels like, and everybody there knows it.
New York City was placed from the very beginning to be the crown prince of American commerce. Positioned at the end of the Hudson and East Rivers and owning one of the best deep water ports in the world, early New York by the Revolutionary War was already the home to pre-eminent citizens like Alexander Hamilton, and was a key battle ground in 1776 when the newly independent American nation almost saw its entire army get swallowed by a massive British force. It remained in British hands through the war, considered too important to abandon even at the end of the conflict when British troops in Yorktown desperately needed relief. The city was chosen as the early national capitol and the first President Washington to his oath and presided there. The next century saw spectacular growth for the city with teems of immigrants initiating their search for the American Dream in New York City, and many staying. It remains the ultimate first home melting pot that has always separated (at least until lately) the American immigrant experience from that of any other country on earth. At 8.2 million people and a metropolitan population exceeding 23 million, the city holds sway over almost every cultural trend in entertainment, sports, commerce, fashion, health care, and education.
Manhattan is the home of the New York image, and is felt in its massive skyscrapers in such a way that other cities aspiring to be great, like Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, and Dubai City have sought to outbuild the skyscraper experience in an effort to capture the “power” of New York. Walking up 5th Avenue the king of buildings is still the magnificent Empire State Building, with a soaring structure of concrete and glass that speaks to the power of great capacities and entrepreneurial will. From every direction it singularly dominates and reminds you always that this is THE city. Close by is one of the great reading rooms in the world at the New York Public Library. it simply makes you want to learn. Just up the road is the vast Grand Central Station with a ceiling of stars that reminds the traveler that he is close to the center of the universe. Finally at the corner of 59th and 5th, the majesterial Plaza Hotel guarding Central Park. Its not important to stay there, where room charges exceed monthly mortgage payments, but its fun to pretend and imagine the days when the Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts used the carriage circle. Across the wide boulevard you enter the otherworld of Central Park, designed by the brilliant Frederick Law Olmsted to be transformational zone of tranquility in the bustling chaos of the city.
Mid-Central Park , the park is bookended by Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum , which have lavish collections that require days of view to appreciate their width and breath.
If your legs haven’t left you, the west side avenue takes you to Columbus Circle, and down to Times Square and Broadway. I finally end this tour with a nighttime skate at Rockefeller Center and imagine a night with the Rat Pack in the Rainbow Room.
Travel is meant to be transformative. No one wants to feel at home when one takes the time and effort to be away from home. New York City for me defines city, and I have only scratched its wonderful surface. If you get a chance, give this great city another look, and get ready to be entertained.
This past week was the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, legendary member of the Beatles rock group, and an emblem of the fragmented value that comes with celebrity status in western society. Lennon is an unfortunate member of a small group of public figures who were assassinated for the notoriety it would bring the assassin rather than any other identified specific cause or perceived societal effect. On the night of December 8th, 1980, Lennon and his wife were returning to their mid town West Central Park condominium from an outing, when they were approached by Mark David Chapman, who wordlessly shot Lennon four times in the back as he passed. Chapman had stalked the entrance to the Dakota complex awaiting Lennon’s return, assured of Lennon’s presence as several hours before as Lennon had left the Dakota, Chapman had asked Lennon to autograph a Lennon album and Lennon had complied. In the vein of Arthur Bremer’s attempted assassination of politician George Wallace in 1972, or later, John Hinckley, Jr’s. attempt on President Ronald Reagan in early 1981, the crime victim themselves bared very little impulse for the disturbed stalker assassin who simply reveled in their ability to achieve their own personal celebrity through their act. Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, but was unable to be re-susitated and died that night. Chapman subsequently was arrested and convicted of murder, and has been in jail since his conviction.
John Lennon was a difficult human being with multiple run-ins with family, friends, band mates and governments. His status in western culture, however, will always be secure due his exalted role as leader of the revolutionary musical force known as the Beatles, and his combative but spectacularly prodigious membership in the song writing duo of Lennon and McCartney. The duo,with minimal formal training, produced a song catalogue that ranks with the great song writers and songwriter teams of the 20th century. For the 5 year period from 1964 to 1969, Lennon and McCartney changed forever the role of the musical group, who to that time had been performers rather than creators of original music; after their spectacular run no quality act could proceed to be seen as elite without producing original material. Lennon was the stronger wordsmith who often corrected McCartney’s tendency toward saccharinelyrics and brought depth, wisdom and at times angst to the simplest expressions. He was personally not a revolutionary but formulated a revolutionary style that created new sound motifs, visual poetry, and a competitive personality to always try to top the band’s last creative impulse with each successive effort. By 1969, the pressure of continuous originality and brilliance exhausted all the members, but particularly Lennon, and he sought and succeeded to gain a way out of the group, and the madness. Like all creative but unstable personalities, he continued to occasionally produce epic music thereafter, but missed the steadying influence of his musical partners. It appeared at age 40, he was finally seeing the gentle stabilizing influences of adulthood when his life was cut short by Chapman’s bullets.
We struggle in western society to accept celebrity as an indicator of achievement, rather than artificial status. The reimbursement for creativity is often dis-proportunate, the public exposure, claustrophobic, and need to maintain status inevitably self-destructive. Peculiar to the western societal model, is the desire of certain people to achieve the illumination of celebrity without the hard work and talent that often is required. The effect is the disturbing glow that is cast on those who succeed at destroying a celebrated person, and through denying the society access to the individual’s further contributions, disturbingly cementing in their own influence on events in a memorable way. Our continuing weakness for elevating people to impossible heights often contributes to their destruction. The price of a free society unfortunately will always be the danger of free will to those in society who wish to effect their influence beyond their capacity, for the sheer thrill, and “fifteen minutes” of recognition.
Whatever John Lennon was, or would have been, was focused on the night of December 8th, 1980, in the hands of an individual who cared about neither.
December 7th, 1941, the date of the surprise attack of Imperial Naval Forces of Japan on the United States at Pearl Harbor, is now an unknowable memory for anyone under the age of medicare or social security. The resonance of the attack, however, continues to define every argument of preparedness for a democratic power, and its stunning effect on the transformation of the United States from isolation to a military colossus makes it one of the most studied events in its history. Sixty nine years ago, at 7:48 am, a beautiful, peaceful Sunday morning at the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was shattered by strafing gunfire and torpedoes released from a overwhelming wave of Japanese planes onto the moored battleships of the US Pacific fleet. The audacity of the attack was transcended by its brilliance in plan and execution. The head of the Japanese imperial Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, determined months previously that the only hope of a Japanese long term victory in a climatic war with the United States would be determined by “decisive battle” strategies. A singular devastating attack on the United States capacity to extend across the Pacific Ocean would be the only way to achieve sufficient military parity with the United States to make a war unwinnable for the Americans. This would necessarily involve the destruction of the pacific fleet and base facilities in one mortal blow. No scenario not involving complete surprise would conceivably be successful and Yamamoto concluded the shock and rage of an unprovoked attack would only be mitigated by overwhelming success. In a time of relatively poor communication and logistics, Yamamoto managed to secretly transition a force of 6 attack carriers and 414 attack aircraft thousands of miles across the Pacific to the very limits of Japanese logistical capacity, initiate and coordinate two waves of combined air and sea attack, and successfully neutralize both American air and naval forces with catastrophic impact. America’s sea power lay in 8 massive battleships at dock, and meticulous planning assured an almost complete devastation.
Almost simultaneously, the USS Oklahoma, California, Nevada, Utah, and West Virginia were struck by torpedo bombers, but the colossal destruction was saved for the USS Arizona, when a dive bomber penetrated the munitions hold with a bomb that created such an explosive force that the massive ship was lifted out of the water and split in half. Of the 402 American planes maintained at the army field complex 337 were destroyed or damaged beyond flight capacity. Multiple other ships, oil depots, barracks, repair facilities, harbor docks, and runways were destroyed. In 110 minutes of sustained attack, at a loss of 55 Japanese airmen and 9 submariners, Japanese forces inflicted 2,386 American deaths and the destruction of 18 American ships, including 5 battleships.
There are no words to describe the cumulative impact of the attack on the American psyche. Propelled by incautious feelings of superiority of American military capacity and horrendous underestimation of rival Japanese ingenuity and military professionalism, the United States was overwhelmed by the sheer capacity of the Japanese to perform such a complex and precise attack. The thin luck that allowed American carriers to be at sea and avoid the fate of their battleship brethren did little to assuage the feeling of catastrophe and gloom. The expectation that the Japanese, already nine years at war on mainland China, would suddenly be able to extend their reach to the very shores of the United States shook the country to its core.
President Franklin Roosevelt, as he was so apt to do, seized the moment to focus the disparate tones of shock and disbelief and focus them into righteous crusading anger. In his masterful speech following the attack, he sustained like a drumbeat the “surprise” nature of the attack and its inherent treachery, He focused the energy into quasi- religious fervor with an appeal to “righteous” might and ” inevitable” victory under the auspices of a chosen people assisted by their choosing God. No element of American society, including the most extreme isolationists like Charles Lindbergh, were capable of resisting the compelling nature of his articulate oratory.
In a time of significant pride of nationhood, the United States converted itself from an army of less than 200, 000 in the space of 20 months to 16 million, became an arsenal of democracy, and in bitter fighting crushed the Japanese in less than four years. Yamamoto himself was sacrificed in an airborne assassination accomplished by US forces in 1943. His vision of a victory based on the decisive character of the Pearl Harbor attack proved to be ephemeral and within 6 months, the United States managed to put Japan on the permanent defensive by sinking four of the six Japanese carriers involved in the Japanese force responsible for Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor turned out to be a symbol of American resolve that until 9/11 represented the biggest loss of American lives on American soil since the Civil War. So long ago now, the direct memories are slowly being replaced by faded newsreel and archaic pictures. The emotions are long gone and to most Americans grown up in a time of the Japan as one of America’s most intertwined allies and friends, almost impossible to contemplate. We will always fall short in our ability to long maintain the learning lessons of history, and will always be at some risk to succumb and be dumbfounded by the unperceived rise of the blood red sun against the peaceful dawn.
A documentary captures the intensity of destruction that allows us to feel a small part of that horrible morning so long ago:
The Metropolitan Opera of New York City is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s ode to the American West , La Fanciulla del West. The opera was first performed by the Met in 1910 as a crowning showpiece of the Met’s then 20th year in existence with a first performance commissioned from the leading opera composer of the time. Puccini was a fan of the perceived view of the American frontier promoted by Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, who had toured Europe with an fantasized version of the west identified by outlaws and cowboys, Indian “savages”, shoot’em ups, and fearless gun play. He enjoyed setting opera in non-traditional settings that made for spectacular sets and no more fantastic backdrop for an opera existed than the American western frontier that had so captured the imagination of Europe at the turn of the century.
With the aggressive and physical presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the world began seeing a new American power endowed with a unique free spirit culture that many in the tradition and hierarchy bound European society so envied. Puccini on a trip to New York had seen “Girl of the Golden West”, a play by American playwright David Belasco. Belasco had been responsible for one Puccini’s earlier triumphs, Madame Butterfly, a story line regarding an American naval officer in Japan that had translated seamlessly into operatic structure. Puccini saw the Girl of the Golden West in a similar vein. He was intrigued and attracted to the “native” elements of American music form and composed motifs of American song, Indian chant, and western expanse into the musical score. Exotic or not in locale, the opera libretto was in Italian and followed the traditional Italian 19th century operatic success story. Boy meets girl. Girl meets another boy. Boys fight. Girl expresses her love for boy. Boy expresses his love for girl. Boys fight. Boy turns out to be bad, but good. Girl defends him. Boy meets tragedy – or something along those lines. The dramatic overtones of love, violence, life, and death made wonderful ingredients for Puccini’s masterful sense of drama and melody, and he possibly was the greatest serious composer of saccharine music. The aria was the pinnacle weapon of Puccini’s popularity and no one was better at creating the dramatic star vehicle that would leave audience members humming the melodies as they left the theater. That made opera stars very, very happy and they were rabid to associate themselves with Puccini’s melodies. The premiere was no different and had the world’s greatest tenor Enrico Caruso in the lead tenor role of Dick Johnson.
Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West is not his most aria glorifying but is one of his more inventive and serious musical scores and has plenty of beautiful “Puccini moments”. Placido Domingo has managed to make the Johnson role his own and for twenty years was the signature performer. Below is his performance in London in 1983 with Carol Neblett in the role of Minnie:
There have been hints of the power of software assassins to wreak havoc with the world’s computer grid of the past twenty years. These have produced more hysteria than actual damage – the Love virus and the Y2K event, to name a few. Something new and more ominous has presented itself in Iran recently, and across the world software experts are in awe of its sophisticated and cyber-lethal capacity. The apparent spectacular damage it created to delay Iran’s nuclear ambitions has far exceeded the world’s tepid efforts at embargo and sanction. What seemed to be a minor bump in the road may turn out to be a critical intervention that will allow a sufficient “breather” in the battle to prevent the theocratic and apocolyptic elements of the Iranian dictatorship from living out their anti-Zionist fantasies. The cyber-weapon of note is known as STUXNET, and the world is just getting to realize the power and potential trouble such technology holds for what has become for all of us a basic staple of life, the computer.
As the weeks extend from the cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, the information regarding STUXNET becomes more cloak and dagger with every piece of evolving information. A transfer of the virus was achieved into facilities with the highest security and no outside Internet access. The virus was so sophisticated that it achieved the control of the critical centrifuges causing them to spin at high and damaging speeds without any monitor showing an aberrant function, sufficient to damage the fragile and sophisticated machinery without anyone the wiser, the virus then hiding without a trace and waiting for new sites to proliferate and destroy. By the time Iranian scientists realized the damage, the ability to produce the enriched uranium required for atomic weaponry appears to have been significantly set back, and may require Iran to again attempt to obtain the components of the centrifuges from countries who may no longer have the capacity or desire to give them access to the precision equipment .
The question as to who is capable of such sophisticated software capacity, and a recognition of the thousands of man-hours needed to produce such a sophisticated cyber weapon leads inevitably to nation states. The Cold War was fought by stealth warriors on both sides, whose exploits were popularized in spy novels and Bond movies. The ‘Bond spys’ were special warriors with special technology not available to the rest of us, designed to protect their nation’s interests and roust out evil plots with all of us being none the wiser in our daily existence. The realities of STUXNET suggest intelligence agencies of the highest order. The Iranians with their hatred and paranoia suspect Israel. The incredible sophistication of the weapon and its military nature could easily implicate the western intelligence services from the U.S., France, United Kingdom, or Russia. The reality could be some combination of all of the above given the obvious interests all would have in seeing Iran not being successful in its nuclear ambitions.
STUXNET has created a new reality and perhaps a new cold war weapon. In the days of the cold war the fear was nuclear holocaust and we were all trained at school to seek shelter under our desks in case of attack, however ludicrous the level of protection that may have offered. Now we will have to learn to hide from what is on our desks, as we note the capacity to turn off our communications, our power, our commerce, our lights, and our way of life may just have annouced its first ominous presence on earth.
The western world is seeing a developing crisis that shows no identifiable end in sight. Presumptively a crisis of economic stability, it is fundamentally a crisis of leaders and leadership. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dramatic end of direct Soviet threat to western institutions, the nations victoriously transcendent were those with traditions of capitalist democracy and democratic principles. Instead of showing inspired leadership to the developing world as to the human benefits of individual freedom and expression, the west has collapsed into a post cold war funk of navel gazing, self flagellation, isolationist rhetoric, and self absorbed societal economies rewarding personal security not innovation and risk. The sputtering exception has been the United States, briefly awoken by a direct attack on its nationhood and democratic principles on 09/11/2001, taking an aggressive tact with Great Britain to ferret out the threats to basic western principles in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to see little secondary support from its fellow democratic states, and progressive deterioration of their own population’s will.
The approaching climax of the challenge to western will is the two headed monster of the farce of global climate extremism, and efforts to pay for and maintain a social safety net well beyond those who actually need it. I have recently reviewed the underlying agenda of climate change extremists epitomized in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung interview of German Economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member Ottmar Edenhofer finally exclaiming the underlying agenda of climate change, “climate policy is about re-distributing the world’s wealth.” The second and equally precarious trend is the burgeoning anti-democratic trends in western nations taken to protect the elaborate personal security cocoon that has come to dominate western society and threatens its very economic health and stability. The trend shows itself in progressively anti-market financial bailouts, government takeovers of bankrupt and struggling companies, and re-distribution stimulus policies. The development of the European Union with a progressively aggressive supra-national parliament and a binding single currency across 16 nations, the Euro, has managed in recessionary times, to see the precarious nature of rigid governmental over-structure and anti-democratic tendencies. In its bailout of two economically undisciplined members, Greece, and now Ireland, it has positioned itself for real economic crisis when larger nation members like Spain and Italy present unbailoutable dilemmas.
Enter Nigel Farage. Farage is a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a breakaway conservative British party formed when the European Union developed a formal governmental structure with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. Farage and the party are EU sceptics to the extreme, believing that the anti-democratic tendencies of EU bureaucrats rarely have the interests of individual Europeans at heart and on every occasion they could, have separated the local individual from having a say in economic and political decisions. His brand of politician is seen in more and more of the traditional European democracies as local control is steadily being usurped by the EU bureaucrats in Belgium. The artificial edifice of the EU is falling on the sword of inflexible economic policy and Farage is gleefully helping the sword’s direction. His view of the need to fight for the individual European nation to determine its best destiny democratically has significant tea party strains in it, and his recent blast at the European Parliament savaging the policy of bailout was in the best traditions of in your face British parliamentary debate. Farage is no outlier; his party won the second highest total in British elections for European parliament, out-polling the Labour party, and with the developing economic crisis on the continent definitely a Person We Should Know as Great Britain grapples with its outsiders role in the philosophical debate as to the role of individual enterprise and governmental regulation in the age we live.
Every once in a while sport provides us with moments of awe of what humans are capable of. And what they are capable of sometimes exceeds the laws of physics. In a college football game on Saturday night, in-state rivals Oklahoma and Oklahoma were locked in duel and Oklahoma State was getting the short end of it, when Oklahoma quarterback Landry Jones was flushed out of the pocket and decided to throw the ball away out of bounds. Unfortunately for him, defensive back Broderick Brown of Oklahoma State determined to take that very moment to defy the laws of gravity and several other undetermined laws of physics. In a perfectly timed flight, he tipped the ball to his teammate in an unconscionably spectacular play that deserves viewing if you haven’t seen it. It didn’t help Oklahoma State win, losing again to their rival Oklahoma, 47-41, but it did move the eternal and ongoing measure of human experience one positive molecule forward.
