More from Peter Hitchens on WW2: Anniversary Waltz with Michael White.

Joseph R. Stromberg on Albert J. Nock

Radical Conservative (via AmCon)

Joe Hargrave, Aristotle & Distributism: Part I (h/t to Richard Aleman)

KK reminds us that the St. Anthony of Padua Institute is holding An Evening with G.K. Chesterton -- Dr. John Chuck Chalberg will be portraying Chesterton. (Surprise, surprise, he performed at Baylor this past Spring.)

The Corporate Stranglehold on Education by HENRY A. GIROUX
Is Higher Education in Need of a Moral Bailout?

NLM: Compendium of the Reforms of the Roman Breviary, 1568-1961: Part 1 - The Basic Structure of the Divine Office

Kevin Gutzman responds to Austin Bramwell: The Genuine Article.

Asia Times: A Byzantine vision for Russia
A film on the fall of the Byzantine Empire made by a close confidant of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offers a rare insight into the thinking of the country's elite. Like the masks actors wear in Venetian plays, the film is a disguise, in this case, for what Russia needs to do to deal with the dangers to its east and to its west. - Dmitry Shlapentokh (Sep 8, '09)

Asia Times: Possible October surprises
The inflation that might be expected in the United States from unprecedented expansionary monetary policies has failed to appear, while huge budget deficits have yet to produce higher interest rates. Far from being signs of a new economic paradigm, this merely means new bubbles are forming. - Martin Hutchinson

SJ Mercury: San Jose cops checking whether garage killing was linked to Dub Show Tour

20th homicide of the year.

Interview with Bob Hirsch - The Stonewalling of Peak Oil

Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA

Robert L. Hirsch is the lead author of a seminal report–Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management—written for the US Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE, NETL) and released in early 2005. He has remained very active with respect to his concerns about peak oil. ASPO-USA’s Steve Andrews tracked him down last week and posed some questions about the report, then and now. Bob will be a presenter at the ASPO-USA conference in Denver next month (October 11-13).

(original)

The Name That Must Not Be Mentioned by Paul Gottfried (A defense of PJB against Victor Davis Hanson, h/t to the Western Confucian)

Mass education covering up for the incompetence of the teacher?

Certainly it is more difficult to cover up one's lack of expertise when one is dealing with students one-on-one rather than as a class of 20 or more. How many teachers rely too much on teacher's workbooks and such in order to give a lesson? How many teachers could give a lesson without one of these ubiquitous teaching aids? It seems easy to lean on a large class size so one doesn't really have to teach and just recite a lesson out of a book. One is quickly tested as to how much one really understands when a child fails to understand the lesson. The teacher must then look for another way to explain the material, or to find the source of the misunderstanding or the appropriate imagery to accompany the explanation.

Exams for teachers may be able to quantify how many grammatical rules a teacher knows, but they cannot test the teacher for the possession of the "arts" -- grammar, rhetoric, logic, and so on, the skills that are needed for writing essays and speaking well. A teacher must master the basics, but not in a haphazard way. Rather, they need to acquire the arts as arts, so that they can re-present their knowledge to their students in an orderly and systematic fashion.

J. H. Huebert, President Obama’s Bad History Lesson

The 2009-10 season of the Boston Early Music Festival:

Saturday, May 1, 8pm
Hespèrion XXI & La Capella Reial de Catalunuya
directed by Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras

It'd be nice to be in Boston to attend that performance. I don't think they'll be returning to Berkeley this academic year... but I should check CAL performances.

Related links:
ALIA VOX

Paul Gottfried, The Bad Old Days.

I would finally note a point that Alan J. Levine develops exhaustively in Bad Old Times: The Myth of the 1950s (Transaction Publishers, 2008), a brilliant revisionist work on a supposedly repressive decade that its author was not able to have published by a major commercial press, for obvious reasons. Levine shows that in comparison to earlier decades in the twentieth century, the 1950s were a period of enormous upward mobility and major economic and social breakthroughs for ethnic minorities, including blacks. But even more significantly, it was a decade of academic and intellectual freedom relative to what we would later see in the U.S., once the social Left had begun to take over our universities, politics and media.

During the height of the McCarthy era, left-liberals continued to run our elite academic institutions, and they were free to browbeat and even ostracize rightwing dissenters, as happened to Willmoore Kendall, who allowed his contract at Yale to be bought out in 1963 after years of social isolation. In comparison to the PC control that has taken over our increasingly government-run educational system since the 1950s, the McCarthy era coincided with a brief moment of relative intellectual freedom. Moreover, as Levine demonstrates, there was screaming and publicized dissent against McCarthy’s methods throughout the period of his influence in the early 1950s, and by 1954, when McCarthy had gone after the army and the Eisenhower administration, many conservatives turned against him openly and decisively. But what should not be forgotten, Levine cautions, are the grave security problems and Communist infiltration that had given rise to McCarthy’s accusations. Down to the present, the liberal establishment has either denied or obscured the validity of these concerns, while invoking “McCarthyism,” as a catch-all description for all security checks in the postwar period.

Taki, Queen of the Court. Margaret Court was a Catholic and became a Pentecostal? Does she ever have doubts or regrets about her decision?

John Zmirak, What Do Sky-High College Tuitions Really Buy These Days?

Pope Benedict XVI arrives at the shrine of Santa Rosa during a visit to the Italian city of Viterbo September 6, 2009. (Reuters/Daylife)

La Serenissima is featured on the Early Music Show, with a program on Vivaldi.

La Serenissima at Cadogan Hall


La Serenissima - La fida ninfa


Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto fragment for bassoon RV468


Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for violin, 2 cellos, strings & b.c. in C major (RV 561)

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for violin, strings & b.c. in B flat major (RV 370) - I. Allegro II. Grave

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for violin, strings & b.c. in B flat major (RV 367) - III. Allegro

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for 'violino senza cantin', strings & b.c. in D minor (RV 243) - I. II.

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for 'violino senza cantin', strings & b.c. in D minor (RV 243) - III.

Zenit: Benedict XVI's Homily in Viterbo

Dear Brothers and Sisters, every liturgical assembly is the space of the presence of God. Gathered together for the Holy Eucharist, the disciples of the Lord proclaim that he is risen, that he is alive and the giver of life, and they bear witness that his presence is grace, is a task, is joy.

Let us open our hearts to his word and welcome the gift of his presence! In the first reading the prophet Isaiah (35:4-7) encourages "those whose hearts are frightened" and announces this stupendous novelty, that experience confirms: when the Lord is present, the eyes of the blind are reopened, ears of the deaf hear, the lame "leap" like a stag. Everything is reborn and everything revives because wholesome waters spring up in the desert. The "desert," in its symbolic language, can evoke the dramatic events, difficult situations and solitude that often mark life; the most profound desert is the human heart, when it loses the ability to hear, to speak, to communicate with God and with others. One then becomes blind because he is incapable of seeing reality; he closes his ears to not hear the cry of those who implore his help; his heart is hardened in indifference and egotism. But now -- the prophet announces -- all is destined to change; into the "arid land" of this closed heart a new divine blood will flow. And when the Lord comes, he will say to "the frightened of heart" of every age, "Courage, fear not!" (35:4).

Justin Raimondo weighs in on the discussion of World War II, begun by Pat Buchanan: The “Good War” That Wasn’t. (Or is he just summarizing Buchanan's book?)

Verde Tea Cafe in Cupertino has closed. (A victim of the recession, or beat out by the competition?) It's been replaced by Bonjour Crepe.

Edit. According to the yelp reviews, it's been closed since the beginning of the year? I suppose I haven't been around Cupertino enough this year to have noticed. The lease was not renewed because of complaints by neighbors...

A.P. U.S.-German rift emerges over Afghan deaths case
When I first heard the news, it was not clear to me why the Germans decided to call in an air strike, instead of engaging the enemy on the ground. The article says that the German commanders thought 120 enemy soldiers were gather together in one place? Would the enemy really do that, knowing that the coalition forces have easy access to airstrikes? Does that really make any sense? Would the pilot have been able to easily identify civilians among the crowd? (Especially if combatants dress like civilians?)

If the German soldiers weren't sure if civilians were in the area, and if the tankers could not move, would it have been that bad to let them go, if they couldn't confront those responsible for stealing the tankers without a risk of civilian casualties?

Daylife photo search

Zenit publishes the Letter Sent to Regnum Christi in US.

Rod Dreher says, "Goodbye, Facebook."

I'm still thinking of doing the same thing, eventually. Or maybe I shouldn't take it so personally when people de-friend me without an explanation. (Most of them have been high school acquaintances.)