London Honors Reagan

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
July 7, 2011

LONDON -- The other morning I wandered down to Grosvenor Square to see the July 4th unveiling of a statue of President Ronald Reagan, despite reports that only a handful of people would be there. That invaluable piece of intelligence was handed down by the the Hon. Louis B. Susman, our ambassador, who was busy as a director of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team during the 1980s when President Reagan was staring down the Soviets with his befuddling mixture of amiability and steely resolve that astoundingly “ended the Cold War without firing a shot.” That is how Lady Thatcher memorably put it. She was not astounded, nor was President Richard Nixon or other hawkish Cold Warriors.

Our Liberal friends had a different way of seeing it. They thought Reagan was a dunce, and many still do. They feared he would bring us to nuclear holocaust, and Senator Ted Kennedy surreptitiously entered into league with the Soviets to oppose the president in 1984. They did not know what to make of his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, and I remember one, the journalist Michael Kinsley, saying no one Left or Right predicted the peaceful end of the Cold War. Later, as the historically-minded dug out Reagan’s assurances that the Cold War could be won, the Liberals had moved on to a different subject. No one is better than the Liberals at avoiding epochal events that they have played little part in.

I liked the Hon. Susman’s crowd estimate. It shows how attuned to the times he and all his Liberal friends are. They are now predicting an Obama victory in 2012, and when it fails to take place they will change the subject. How about the conservatives are scary or leading America to its doom? Actually, the crowd Monday morning numbered in the thousands and many had to be turned away. There were hundreds more who turned out in the evening at an elaborate black tie tribute to the 40th president at Guildhall that was more than a tribute to Reagan. It also seemed to me to be an acknowledgement of the vast achievements of America and Great Britain’s “special relationship,” and of what great things those two resolute powers have achieved since the dawn of the 20th century. July 4, 2011 was a great day of American and British friendship.

There in Grosvenor Square, with statues of Dwight David Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt looking on, a handsome ten-foot statue was unveiled of the Old Cowboy, looking out on the festive crowd with a vaguely amused look on his face but his chest thrust out, his shoulders broad. He once corrected me when I told him I had heard that in recuperating from an assassin’s bullet he did bench presses and put an inch of muscle on his upper body. “Two and a half inches,” he serenely but firmly said.

There were speeches by Congressman Kevin McCarthy, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the invaluable erstwhile Reagan aide, Frederick Ryan, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Ronald Reagan Foundation. A note by the ailing Lady Thatcher was read. The Hon. Susman gave a speech that was admirable in its recognition of Reagan and also of FDR and Ike too. His predecessor Robert Tuttle spoke engagingly and, of course, First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Great Britain the Rt. Hon. William Hague who said “it is a fitting tribute to the honor of the truest friend that Britain has ever had,” Ronald Reagan.

We all walked off glad to be breathing the sweet air of a Free World.


PHOTO: LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 04: (L-R) Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip, US House of Representatives, Robert Tuttle, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Fred Ryan, Chairman of the Board for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, Condoleezza Rice, Former US Secretary of State, William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary and Louis B. Susman, US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, attend the unveiling of a statue of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in the grounds of the American Embassy on July 4, 2011 in London, England. Today would have been Reagan's 100th Birthday. The 40th President of the United States of America enjoyed close ties with the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Getty Images)

- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. His new book, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery, was published on April 20 by Thomas Nelson

Q & A: Bishop Kallistos Ware on the Fullness and the Center

The metropolitan archbishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the U.K. on evangelism, evangelicals, and the Orthodox Church.

Interview by David Neff
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
posted 7/06/2011 10:18AM

In 1960, Penguin Books asked the 26-year-old Timothy Ware to write a book on his newfound Eastern Orthodox faith. His first reaction was to say no; he had been Orthodox for only two years. But a friend urged him to try and so he set his pen to paper. Now nearly 50 years old, The Orthodox Church remains the go-to book for people who want an introduction to Orthodoxy. Since that first book, Ware became a monk, took the name Kallistos, became a lecturer at Oxford University, and was made Metropolitan Bishop of Diokleia for Greek Orthodoxy in Britain.

Earlier this year, Ware lectured at North Park University and Wheaton College about what evangelicals could learn from the Orthodox and what the Orthodox could learn from evangelicals. Christianity Today editor in chief David Neff interviewed him during that visit.

Some friends who have joined the Orthodox Church talk as if the Orthodox tradition was fixed very early and handed down without change. You treat tradition in a much more dynamic way.

You're quite right that I think tradition is dynamic. I recall the definition given by the great Russian Orthodox theologian, Vladimir Lossky: "Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit in the church." Clearly, tradition is life; it's not a fixed formula. Still less is it writings in leather-bound volumes. Tradition is life, and it is the life of Christ present in the church through the Holy Spirit. It is not simply fixed doctrines, but the continuing self-understanding and self-criticism of the Christian community.

What keeps that dynamic self-understanding from going off the rails?

Holy Scripture as it has been understood in the church and by the church through the centuries. With that understanding of Holy Scripture, we would appeal particularly to the fathers and the saints.

Tradition is not a second source alongside Scripture; clearly normative for us Orthodox is Scripture as interpreted by the seven ecumenical councils. But tradition lives on. The age of the fathers didn't stop in the fifth century or the seventh century. We could have holy fathers now in the 21st century equal to the ancient fathers.

The implosion of Communism left a spiritual vacuum, and my fellow evangelical Protestants rushed into Russia. There have been tensions as they have tried to help people get to know the Bible better and to make their faith personal. Why has it been so difficult for Orthodox and evangelicals to work together in post-Communist countries?

The Orthodox felt and still feel deep resentment at the way—as they see it—evangelicals have moved in on their territory. They feel we suffered persecution in Russia for 70 years, often very severe, and we struggled to keep the faith going under immense difficulties. Now that the persecution has stopped, people move in from the West who have not suffered in the same way for their faith, and they are stealing our people from us. We feel as if our Christian brethren are stabbing us in the back. I'm putting it in extreme form, but there is this deep feeling.

Bound up with this is the sense in Russia and other Orthodox countries of what is called canonical territory. Orthodoxy is the church of the land. Therefore, they feel if other Christians come in, they are stealing their sheep.

I know evangelicals look at it differently. They would say, "Here is a country with enormous numbers of people who are totally unchurched, who for 70 years have had no chance to have a living link with Jesus Christ, and we must help them." But that's not the way the Orthodox look at it. They would welcome cooperation, but they resent anything that involves stealing their sheep.

The Orthodox have always had good cooperation with Billy Graham. When Billy Graham went to Russia, he was received by the patriarch, because he worked on the principle that those who came forward to make a commitment to Christ at his preaching were handed over to the clergy of their own church. He did not try to set up his own evangelical communities that would be rivals to the Orthodox.

In open countries where Orthodoxy has never been an established religion, how does Orthodoxy reach out to unchurched people?

In Britain, we have until very recently been concerned simply to be able to minister to our own people, to the children of Orthodox immigrants, who have lost a living link with their own church. Building our parishes from nothing—no church building, no accommodation for the priest—is not easy, and many of our priests in Britain still have to earn their living with secular work, because the community wouldn't be able to support them full-time. We need to have a much more effective home mission before we reach out to others.

We Orthodox would certainly be against proselytism, by which I mean negative propaganda aimed at practicing members of other churches, criticizing what they already believe. That is not the way of Christ. But evangelism is something different.

We Orthodox are still certainly too inward looking; we should realize that we have a message that many people will listen to gladly. I see our mission not primarily to practicing members of other churches, but to the unchurched who are very numerous in Britain, less so in the United States.

To me, the most important missionary witness that we have is the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharistic worship of the Orthodox Church. This is the life-giving source from which everything else proceeds. And therefore, to those who show an interest in Orthodoxy, I say, "Come and see. Come to the liturgy." The first thing is that they should have an experience of Orthodoxy—or for that matter, of Christianity—as a worshiping community. We start from prayer, not from an abstract ideology, not from moral rules, but from a living link with Christ expressed through prayer.

To draw in the unchurched, evangelical churches often strip away things that might be mysterious or strange. But when you invite someone into an Orthodox liturgy, you hit them full-on with strange symbolism and unfamiliar words.

Yes, and let them understand what God gives them to understand. Throw them in at the deep end of the swimming pool and see what happens. That is very much our Orthodox approach. I would not want to offer a watered-down version of Orthodoxy.

The basic rules of Christianity, our relation to Christ, are very simple. Because they are simple they are also often difficult to understand.

On the other hand, we should not be content with a bare minimum. We should offer people the fullness of the faith in all its diversity and depth. I would wish people, when they come to the Orthodox liturgy, not to think that they understand everything the first time. I hope, rather, that they have an experience of mystery, a sense of awe and wonder. If we lose that from our worship, we have lost something very precious.

There's a bad expression of mystery, which is just mystification. But there's a good sense of mystery—to realize that in our worship we are in contact with the transcendent, with that which far surpasses our reasoning brains. I hope that this sense of living mystery, which is entirely bound up with a personal experience of Christ, is conveyed through our worship.

You speak of the fullness of the faith, experienced through the Divine Liturgy. Evangelical Protestants, from the first days of the Reformation through the Wesleyan Revival, have been eager to crystallize a central message and a central experience. We need to help people see both the center and the fullness of the faith. One theologian I talked to before this interview said, "Ask if the fullness doesn't sometimes obscure the center."

I agree that what we want is both/and—the fullness and the center. There could be a way of presenting Orthodoxy that makes it sound very complicated. We Orthodox have a rich inheritance, which could become a heavy burden if not properly handled.

Yet I certainly believe that Orthodoxy is simple Christianity—not an elaborate Byzantine ritual, but simple Christianity. When I first came in contact with the Orthodox Church, the music, the icons, the total experience of the liturgy influenced me greatly, but I did not become Orthodox because of that. I became Orthodox because I felt that it is simple Christianity.

If I were to meet you on a train and ask you, "What is the center of the Christian message?," how would you succinctly put that?

I would answer, "I believe in a God who loves humankind so intensely, so totally, that he chose himself to become human. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ as fully and truly God, but also totally and unreservedly one of us, fully human." And I would say to you, "The love of God is so great that Christ died for us on the cross. But love is stronger than death, and so the death of Jesus was followed by his resurrection. I am a Christian because I believe in the great love of God that led him to become incarnate, to die, and to rise again." That's my faith. All of this is made immediate to us through the continuing action of the Holy Spirit.

Evangelicals agree with everything you have just said. But we tend to focus on a transaction that happened at the Cross and a transaction that happens when the believer puts faith in what happened at the Cross. We take up Paul's courtroom metaphors. How would you describe the East's way of looking at it?

It's true, we Orthodox would, on the whole, not use the word transaction. It's also certainly true that we do not emphasize legal language.

We prefer the image of Christ as victor over death, love stronger than death, the kind of victory that we sense at the Paschal service Easter midnight in the Orthodox Church, when there is a constant refrain, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs he has given life." That is the image of Christ's work that we chiefly stress.

But certainly within the New Testament there is a whole series of images. There is no single systematic theory of the Atonement, and we should make use of all these images. So, yes, we should find a place for the idea of substitution, which the Orthodox don't stress so much. It is there in the New Testament, in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "He who was without sin was made by God to be sin for us, that we in him might become righteousness." The idea of the sacrificial Lamb is also a profound scriptural image. We should make use of those images as well as Christ the Victor.

I don't care so much for the idea of satisfaction. Satisfaction is not a scriptural word. The legal imagery, I think, should always be combined with an emphasis upon the transfiguring power of love. The motive for the Incarnation was not God's justice or his glory, but his love. That was the supreme motive. "God so loved the world." That is what we should start from.

We've talked about evangelizing the unchurched. That's one area where Orthodoxy hasn't done a whole lot. Why is that?

You are not entirely fair to the Orthodox. From the ninth century on, the Orthodox undertook an immense missionary outreach to Slavic peoples—Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia. In that period they were every bit as dynamic in their missionary outreach as the Western church.

You have to take into account the effect of being under Muslim rule, when any form of missionary outreach was forbidden. Christians survived under Islam as self-contained communities, but to attempt to convert a Muslim to the Christian faith would have led immediately to a death sentence. So, naturally, under Islam the Orthodox could not undertake notable missionary work. In the 19th century, there were Russian missions in China, Japan, Korea, and among the Muslim tribes within the Russian Empire. Then came Communism, and it made outward missionary work more or less impossible.

We Orthodox ought to be doing much more than we are doing in this field, but you have to allow for the historical circumstances. The West in the last five centuries has been dominant, rich, influential, colonial, imperial, expansionist. That made missionary work much easier. The East had none of these privileges except for a limited extent in Russia.

How about social justice—how does Orthodoxy practice that?

There is a great deal of room for Orthodoxy to do more. The most notable efforts in recent years have been by the church of Russia. At its local council in 2000, and more recently in 2006, the church of Russia has produced reflective documents on social witness. This may be only a beginning, but it's a valuable beginning.

In the West, we ought to develop our social witness. Within Orthodoxy, there is a strong tradition of compassion for the poor, the underprivileged, the suffering. This you see in many of the lives of our saints. But all too often, this was merely on an individual basis, helping those who were in distress and need. There was not enough effort made among Orthodox to question unjust social structures. We gave bread to the poor, but we did not ask sufficiently why the poor had no bread. We did not, perhaps, protest against the unjust social structures that existed in Orthodox countries and now exist in the Western world.

Jaroslav Pelikan, an important historical theologian who became Orthodox late in life, once told me, "You evangelicals talk too much about Jesus and don't spend enough time thinking about the Holy Trinity." Can one talk too much about Jesus?

I would not want to contrast faith in Jesus with faith in the Holy Trinity. My faith in Jesus is precisely that I believe him to be not only truly human, but also to be the eternal Son of God. I cannot think of a faith in Jesus that does not also involve faith in God the Father.

How is Jesus present to us personally at this moment? How is it that he is not merely a figure from the distant past, but that he also lives in my own life? That is through the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I cannot understand a faith in Jesus Christ that would not also involve faith in the Holy Spirit.

I don't think we can have too much faith in Jesus. But faith in Jesus, if it is to be truly such, is necessarily Trinitarian. If you look at the lives of the Orthodox saints, you will find a very vivid faith in Jesus. Their affirmation of the Trinity did not in any way diminish their sense of Jesus as their personal Savior.

Related Elsewhere:

Bishop Kallistos Ware's book The Orthodox Church is available at ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

A portion of Christianity Today's interview with Ware is available on YouTube.

Previous Christianity Today coverage of orthodoxy includes:

Performing Orthodoxy | "The Hermeneutics of Doctrine" argues that belief is as much about embodiment as affirmation. (March 26, 2008)

What's so Radical about Orthodoxy? | Introducing Radical Orthodoxy and the project to "re-narrate" reality without the word secular. (May 24, 2005)

Paradoxical Orthodoxy | Great sayings from Christianity's master of irony. (September 1, 2000)

Additional coverage of orthodoxy from Christianity Today's sister publication ChristianHistory.net includes:

Orthodoxy, Explained | How did the church come to understand Christ as fully God and fully man? Stephen Need is an excellent tour guide to the early church councils that debated the core issues of Christian faith. (October 9, 2008)

Neo-Orthodoxy: Karl Barth | He revived orthodoxy when mere moralism and humanism had seemingly won over the theological world. (January 1, 2000)

Eastern Orthodoxy: Did You Know? | Little-known or fascinating facts about Eastern Orthodoxy. (April 1, 1997)

No Homophobia

A reminder about the totalitarian temptation

By George Weigel
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 5, 2011

The Washington Post’s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other.

As an example of those who resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, Kennicott cited Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who had remarked on the similarities between the Empire State’s recent re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by totalitarian states; NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez and I came into Mr. Kennicott’s line of fire for displaying similarly “virulent homophobic rhetoric” in articles defending Archbishop Dolan’s suggestion that, in the marriage debate, the totalitarian temptation was very much in play.

Philip Kennicott’s line of attack nicely demonstrates the truth of Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that the only way to rid oneself of temptation is to yield to it. For crying “homophobia” is a cheap calumny, a crypto-totalitarian bully’s smear that impresses no serious person.

But for charity’s sake, let’s assume here that Mr. Kennicott simply had a bad day and might actually be interested in the arguments of those he and others have dismissed as bigots. Perhaps I can illustrate the point Kennicott’s targets were making by reminding all parties to this dispute of what marriage under totalitarianism was like — a subject I happened to be discussing with a Polish couple who were preparing to mark their 47th wedding anniversary when the Kennicott article appeared.

Under Polish Communism, Catholic couples — which is to say, just about everyone — got “married” twice. Because marriages in the Catholic Church were not recognized by the Communist state, believers had two “weddings.” The first was a civil procedure, carried out in a dingy bureaucratic office with a state (i.e., Communist-party) apparatchik presiding. The friends with whom I was discussing this inanity are, today, distinguished academics, a physicist and a musicologist. They remembered with some glee that, a half century before, they had treated the state “wedding” with such unrestrained if blithe contempt that the presiding apparatchik had had to admonish them to take the business at hand seriously — a warning from the über-nanny-state my friends declined to, well, take seriously.

The entire business was a farce, regarded as such by virtually all concerned. Some time later, my friends were married, in every meaningful sense of that term, in Wawel Cathedral by a Polish priest whom the world would later know as Pope John Paul II.

Americans will say, “It can’t happen here.” But it can, and it may. Before the ink was dry on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature on New York’s new marriage law, the New York Times published an editorial decrying the “religious exemptions” that had been written into the marriage law at the last moment. Those exemptions do, in fact, undercut the logic of the entire redefinition of marriage in the New York law — can you imagine any other “exemption for bigotry” being granted, in any other case of what the law declares to be a fundamental right?

Either the recently enacted New York marriage law is nonsense, or its religious opponents are bigots whose prejudices should not be given the protection of law. To use Mr. Kennicott’s sociological term of art, it’s a matter of cognitive dissonance to try to have it both ways. In any event, pressures like that of the Times and its activist allies will continue, for the logic of their position requires them to try and strip away religious and other exemptions from recognizing “gay marriage.”

Should those pressures succeed, the Catholic Church will be forced to get out of the civil marriage business — as it has been forced in some states to stop providing foster care for children and young people, thanks to the pressures of the really phobic parties in these affairs: the Christophobes. Priests will no longer function as officials of the state when witnessing marriages.

So what will Catholics and other adherents of biblical morality do (for evangelical pastors are just as much at risk from the Christophobes as Catholic priests)? They’ll have a civil “wedding” that will be a farce, just like that endured by my Polish friends in 1964. And then they’ll really get married in church.

Thus the net effect of the pressures now being mounted by the Times and others — a redefinition of “marriage” that puts Christian communities and their pastors outside the boundaries of the law for purposes of marriage — will be to reduce state-recognized “marriage” to a sad joke. One can even imagine a whole new genre of dark humor, of the sort represented by “Radio Yerevan” and other brilliant exemplars of anti-Communist raillery, emerging. That might be fun, but it’s a sad price to pay for this state attempt to redefine reality.

And that brings us to the totalitarian temptation. As analysts running the gamut from Hannah Arendt to Leszek Kolakowski understood, modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice — justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion — was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order — a New Order of reality, a new set of “truths,” and a new way of living “in harmony with society,” as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.

The 21st-century state’s attempt to redefine marriage is just such an attempt to redefine reality — in this case, a reality that existed before the state, for marriage as the union of a man and a woman ordered to mutual love and procreation is a human reality that existed before the state. And a just state is obliged to recognize, not redefine, it.

Moreover, marriage and the families that are built around marriage constitute one of the basic elements of civil society, that free space of free associations whose boundaries the just state must respect. If the 21st-century democratic state attempts to redefine something it has neither the capacity nor the authority to refine, it can only do so coercively. That redefinition, and its legal enforcement, is a grave encroachment into civil society.

If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society. In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce.

That’s what those whom Mr. Kennicott deplores as virulent bigots were trying to point out.

— George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

There has been no global warming since 1998

By James Delingpole
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/
July 6, 2011

The headline of this post really shouldn’t be controversial. It chimes perfectly with what Kevin “null hypothesis” Trenberth wrote in that notorious 2009 Climategate email to Michael Mann:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

And it’s what Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview when he said that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995.

Why then am I mentioning it now? W-e-l-l, because just as ze war is to the Germans, Chappaquiddick is to the Kennedy family and that Portland masseuse incident to Al Gore, so the recent lack of warming is to the, er, Warmists. They hate it. It’s an affront to everything they believe in. Damn it, if the world isn’t warming with the alacrity they’d prefer, how are they going to keep the funding gravy train going, and how are they going to persuade an increasingly sceptical populace that the “science” is “settled”, the debate over and the time for action is now? That’s why they can’t reminded of the truth often enough. It’s like salting the slugs that are ruining your garden: necessary, but also kind of fun too.

Consider their latest desperate effort in fudge, denial, and duplicity. It concerns a new report which – if you believe the Guardian and Michael Mann – confirms that man-made global warming is even more man-made and more happening and more dangerous than at any time ever.

Michael E Mann, at Pennsylvania State University and not part of the research team, said the study was “a very solid, careful statistical analysis” which reinforces research showing “there is a clear impact of human activity on ongoing warming of our climate”. It demonstrated, Mann said, that “the claim that ‘global warming has stopped’ is simply false.”

Actually the paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 [PDF] by a team led by Robert Kaufmann at the Department of Geography at Boston University demonstrates no such thing. What it shows – yet again and in excelsis – is the chutzpah and threadbare desperation of the “scientists” involved in the Great Global Warming Boondoggle. Rather than admit that their Ponzi scheme is dead in the water, they try to dazzle us with new imaginative theories which prove that, even though they’re wrong they are in fact right.

No global warming since 1998? Simple. All you’ve got to do – as Kaufmann et al have done – is apply the Even Though We’re Wrong We’re Right Panacea Get-Out Formula. In this instance the ETWWWRPGOF (as it’s snappily known) involves Blaming The Chinese. Yep, it turns out all that pollution that Chinese are pumping into the air thanks to their unhealthy obsession with economic growth and giving better lives to their children is actually counteracting the effects of Man Made Global Warming.

“Results indicate that net anthropogenic forcing rises slower than previous decades because the cooling effects of sulfur emissions grow in tandem with the warming effects greenhouse gas concentrations. This slow-down, along with declining solar insolation and a change from El Nino to La Nina conditions, enables the model to simulate the lack of warming after 1998,” the team explains.

In other words Man Made Global Cooling is cancelling out Man Made Global Warming.
Judith Curry is unimpressed:

Their argument is totally unconvincing to me. However, the link between flat/cooling global temperature and increased coal burning in China is certainly an interesting argument from a political perspective. The scientific motivation for this article seems to be that that scientists understand the evolution of global temperature forcing and that the answer is forced variability (not natural internal variability), and this explanation of the recent lack of warming supports a similar argument for the cooling between 1940 and 1970. The political consequence of this article seems to be that the simplest solution to global warming is for the Chinese to burn more coal, which they intend to do anyways.

As is David Whitehouse at the GWPF:

Tweaking computer models like this proves nothing. The real test is in the real world data. The temperature hasn’t increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.
Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out-of-date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.

As indeed might you and I be. For years the Warmists have been telling us that they’re so sure of their computer models that they know, they just know, that CO2 has a forcing effect on global temperatures and that combined with positive feedbacks this is going to cause catastrophic warming. And now they’re saying, without a blush, “Well all right, some of those feedbacks might actually be negative and, er, completely cancel out the terrifying thing we were telling you to worry about. But don’t stop worrying, for God’s sake. Whatever is happening is still worrying, very worrying. And if you give us a bit more time we’ll come up with a paper explaining just why it’s worrying.”

Meanwhile, further evidence emerges that “science” informing the IPCC’s prognostications of Man Made Climate Doom is junk science. It comes courtesy of Nic Lewis, the man who helped expose the flaws in a paper about Antarctic temperature trends, who has now noticed another instance in which the IPCC has been torturing innocent data – sorry: made a perfectly innocent mistake quite accidentally with no bad intention whatsoever – to suit its twisted ends.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 (AR4) contained various errors, including the well publicised overestimate of the speed at which Himalayan glaciers would melt. However, the IPCC’s defenders point out that such errors were inadvertent and inconsequential: they did not undermine the scientific basis of AR4. Here I demonstrate an error in the core scientific report (WGI) that came about through the IPCC’s alteration of a peer-reviewed result. This error is highly consequential, since it involves the only instrumental evidence that is climate-model independent cited by the IPCC as to the probability distribution of climate sensitivity, and it substantially increases the apparent risk of high warming from increases in CO₂ concentration.

Matt Ridley explains the significance of this better than I can:

This mistake is central to the IPCC’s case, not peripheral. It undermines the credibility of the case for urgent action against climate change and strongly supports the argument that, other things being equal, CO2 doubling will not cause more than a mild and net beneficial warming.

Now can we have our economy back, please?

Book Review: G.K. Chesterton - A Biography

A mind as wide as the legendary waistline.

By Edward Short

The Weekly Standard

June 27, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 39

http://www.weeklystandard.com/

G. K. Chesterton
A Biography
by Ian Ker
Oxford, 688 pp., $66

Many will know Ian Ker as the author of the definitive life of Cardinal Newman. Now he has focused his biographical and critical skills on G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the great journalist, critic, poet, novelist, and biographer, and the result is a discriminating portrait that does welcome justice to the full richness of his subject’s hitherto undervalued work.

In his life of Newman, Ker encapsulated his subject’s quest for reality by translating Newman’s motto, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: “Out of unreality into Reality.” In G. K. Chesterton he persuasively argues that his subject was Newman’s successor precisely because he shared the 19th-century convert’s passion for reality, a quality which Hilaire Belloc also discerned in his friend: “Truth had for him,” Belloc recalled, “the immediate attraction of an appetite. He was hungry for reality. But what is much more, he could not conceive of himself except as satisfying that hunger .  .  . it was not possible for him to hold anything worth holding that was not connected with the truth as a whole.”

Chesterton was a servant of the truth, as well as a champion of reality, and it is these qualities together that make him so salutary a figure for our own age, which is not only reluctant to acknowledge objective truth but embraces unreality with frenetic abandon. The entertainer in Chesterton might have been intent on making his readers laugh, but he also extolled what many in his time (and our own) wish to see diminished, including the Christian tradition, the sanctity of life, the dignity of the family, and personal liberty—and it is refreshing to see these vital aspects of the man given their prophetic due.

With the same critical distillation that distinguished his life of Newman, Ker has sifted through Chesterton’s massive output to identify several major themes which, taken together, demonstrate the unity and depth of his thought. In his introduction,
Ker writes:

Chesterton’s philosophy of wonder .  .  . is well known, but I have also highlighted the complementary principle of limitation that informs all his thinking about art, literature, politics, and religion. Linked, too, to his philosophy of wonder is his concept of the role of the imagination in enabling us to see the familiar afresh, as it were for the first time.

Unlike other commentators, who insist on seeing Chesterton the thinker as separate from Chesterton the funny man, Ker appreciates how the two were fused. For Chesterton, our misconceptions, our lies, our manifold allegiances to unreality cry out for exposure; and it was his abiding sense of caritas, no less than his keen sense of humor, that impelled him to use paradox to show his readers the comic discrepancies between truth and falsehood. Every reader will have his favorite Chestertonian sallies; one of mine is from his introduction to David Copperfield:

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other. Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages; but there is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

Marriage meant a good deal to Chesterton, and it is another merit of Ker’s life that he shows how, at once, it saved and renewed his wayward hero. To appreciate this fully, however, the reader needs to know something of Chesterton’s life.

Born on Campden Hill in 1874, he was educated at St. Paul’s School and the Slade School of Art. His father worked for a firm of estate agents and his mother was of Franco-Scottish ancestry. Her Aberdeen forebears, the Keiths, gave Gilbert his middle name. A dilatory learner, Chesterton never shone in his studies, though he excelled at comic drawing. It was after becoming a publisher’s reader that he took up journalism, and for the rest of his life he would see himself as a journalist, who only wrote novels and plays, poetry, and biographies as a sideline.

This insistence of his that he was only a journalist has led some to conclude that Chesterton was shallow. Yet in a piece on Marshal Ferdinand Foch, which would have amused his mother, he gave the lie to such dismissive appraisals.

There was a great deal about Foch that was intensely and peculiarly French. Nobody but a Frenchman would have launched that direct and yet dazzling epigram in the midst of the Battle of the Marne: “My right gives way; my left retreats; situation excellent; I attack.” Where that phrase was so typically French is that it has three separate meanings, and they are all true. A superficial person will take it as a fine piece of fanfaronade, a romantic defiance and refusal to accept defeat. A more sagacious person will see that it is a piece of irony almost worthy of Voltaire. .  .  . The most sagacious person of all will observe that it was also a piece of cold, hard, scientific fact. It really was true that the Germans pursuing the Allied retreat on one side, and checking the attempted envelopment on the other, created the strain and the weak point at which Foch suddenly struck. That is the French genius; to say things that only look witty and are also wise. That is the achievement of all French literature and philosophy; it is the supreme and splendid triumph of looking shallow, and being deep.

Given his marked differences with the Modernists, it is ironic that Chesterton should have grown up in the same Bedford Park neighborhood as Yeats. Chesterton and Yeats make for an instructive contrast: Although inspired rhetoricians, they could not have taken more different roads philosophically. In 1922 Chesterton converted to Rome, what he called the “rock of reality,” while Yeats left the Protestant agnosticism bequeathed him by his father to convert to the table-tapping and hocus-pocus of Madame Blavatsky. Chesterton and Yeats also differed in their view of the common man: Yeats, the last hurrah of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that had produced Swift and Burke, always took a seigniorial line with his Roman Catholic countrymen, speaking of them by turns as having been born in the peasant’s cot / Where men forgive if the belly gain, fumbling in a greasy till, adding the halfpence to the pence / and prayer to shivering prayer, and as base-born products of base beds. Chesterton, by contrast, exulted in the common man. Indeed, as Yeats’s friend Ezra Pound once observed, “Chesterton is the mob.”

On this theme, which runs throughout Chesterton’s work, Ker is revelatory. As he points out, “Aversion to the masses, Chesterton dares to suggest, is really aversion to their ‘energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.’ ” For Chesterton, only the humble can appreciate the “colossal vision” of “things as they really are.” The intellectuals who looked down on the common man—especially such progressives as Carlyle, Shaw, and Nietzsche—were heretics in his eyes precisely because they discounted the common man’s dignity.

The amount of lasting work that Chesterton produced—despite his delight in the bonhomie of Fleet Street—is impressive. One can point to his novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908); to his great Father Brown stories; to his critical studies of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens; and to his wonderfully witty essays, his “tremendous trifles,” in which he managed to pack such a wealth of insight. His marriage to Frances Alice Blogg in 1901 transformed his life. In 1909 she removed her convivial husband to Beaconsfield, far from the beckoning public houses of London. She also moved him towards Catholicism. A devout Anglo-Catholic, Frances introduced her husband to many aspects of Christian orthodoxy of which he was ignorant. Without her influence, it is fair to say, Chesterton might never have managed his greatest work, including Orthodoxy (1908), The Everlasting Man (1925), St. Francis of Assisi (1924), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1933), the last of which Etienne Gilson considered the best book ever written on the subject.

Ker is excellent on Chesterton the critic, too, showing how trenchant he was not only on his beloved Dickens but on the Victorians as a whole. In The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), Chesterton described how the English might have resisted the French Revolution but underwent a revolution of their own when the rich used their game laws and enclosures to turn England into a land not of common landowners but landlords, who then set about making the rationalism of Bentham, Mill, Darwin, and Huxley the new national faith. And in response to these depredations, Chesterton saw a series of spirited counterattacks, launched not only by the Romantic poets but by Cobbett, Carlyle, Newman, Dickens, Ruskin, Arnold, and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Victorian middle classes accepted the revolution of their oligarchs to avoid a more drastic democratic revolution but (as Chesterton recognized) this only emboldened the “enemies of the Victorian compromise” to intensify their own counterrevolutions.

Ker highlights the magnanimity of Chesterton. Again, like Newman, he looked for what was good in those he criticized—even those, like Matthew Arnold, who never shared his religious convictions. In his biography of the painter G. F. Watts, for example, Chesterton had occasion to praise Watts’s great portrait of Arnold, about which he said:

The portrait-painter of Matthew Arnold obviously ought not to understand him, since he did not understand himself. And the bewilderment which the artist felt for those few hours, reproduced in a perfect, almost an immortal picture, the bewilderment which the sitter felt from the cradle to the grave.

Most critics would have left matters at that, but how typical of Chesterton to add that “the bewilderment of Matthew Arnold was more noble and faithful than most men’s certainty.”

In drawing his own portrait of Chesterton, Ker exercises an artful self-effacement, which allows the wit and wisdom of his subject to take center stage. In this, he embraces something of his subject’s own respect for limitation: Rather than interjecting his own views into those of Chesterton—or worse, paraphrasing him—Ker allows his subject to speak for himself. As a result Chesterton is not only funny but full of surprise and charm and profound good sense.
There are some genuinely good books on Chesterton. Maisie Ward, who knew him, wrote a lively biography in 1943. William Oddie recently wrote a groundbreaking study of Chesterton’s early life. D. J. Conlon edited two volumes of criticism on Chesterton by the likes of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, V. S. Pritchett, John Gross, Kingsley Amis, P. J. Kavanagh, and Wilfrid Sheed. But the need for a proper critical biography has long been acknowledged, and Ker has supplied it. Now, and for the foreseeable future, for any true understanding of the scope of G.K. Chesterton’s achievement, which captures not only the sage but the good, gentle, generous man, Ker’s biography will
be indispensable.

Edward Short is the author of Newman and his Contemporaries.



Chesterton: The Mystic of Everyday Life

By Michael Potemra
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/268987/chesterton-mystic-everyday-life-michael-potemra
June 6, 2011 7:22 P.M.

I have had for many years a great ambivalence toward G. K. Chesterton: I enjoyed his works back when I read most of them (which was decades ago) but have since found his too-often-quoted bons mots irritating in their appropriation by lesser men, for lesser causes. You know what I mean: The “Prophet Chesterton” warned us against gays/feminists/Muslims/liberals/etc. I can imagine a perfectly decent and intelligent person thinking Oscar Wilde shallow, for similar reasons: He was after all a great man, not reducible to his quips and his political usefulness to the present day. (It rather reminds me of the commonplace, “I like Elvis OK, it’s just his fan club I have a problem with.”) So I have found the terrific new biography of Chesterton by Ian Ker an excellent corrective, because it gives us a portrait of the man in full, in which his personal faults and various opinions find a helpful context.

Even when defending Chesterton on a disputed point, Ker gives the reader enough information to come to his or her own conclusions. Take, for example, the notorious question of whether GKC was an anti-Semite. Ker quotes from a 1911 Chesterton letter: “Jews (being landless) unnaturally alternate between too much power and too little . . . the Jew millionaire is too safe and the Jew pedlar too harassed . . . I don’t mind how fiercely you fight for the pedlar.” One can say that in these words there is more a class bias than a race bias, but talk of a “Jew millionaire” being “too safe” is, to my ears, too close to the recent Norwegian headline Jay pointed out a few days ago: “Rich Jews Threaten Obama.” Ker also quotes a passage from Chesterton’s 1935 book The Well and the Shallows: “The Jews are now being jumped on very unjustly in Germany,” with the result that Chesterton and Belloc, “who began in the days of Jewish omnipotence by attacking the Jews, will now probably die defending them.” So Chesterton opposed the policies of the Nazis, and was willing to fight them, which put him ahead of many people in the England of 1935; but he spoke of “the days of Jewish omnipotence,” a puzzling era to which I find no reference in serious history books. Can anybody help me as to when exactly that era was? The upshot of the quote, then, is that Chesterton was a decent and kind man who opposed Nazism, but had a certain attitude toward the Jews that was unfortunate. Whether it was anti-Semitism or not depends on rather complicated issues of taxonomy; someone who said that sort of thing today would almost certainly be an anti-Semite, but in the context of the virulent common prejudices of 1935 it might have been more excusable. (One of the most commonly quoted Chesterton mots is, “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” This system was evidently not, in Chesterton’s case, fail-safe.)

I mention this in detail to get the unpleasantness out of the way first; it’s well-known, after all, that anti-Semitism is the most serious rap against Chesterton these days. But read the 729 pages of this book, and you will see that his faults are the concomitant of his virtues. He was a Romantic, who loved sharp lines and bright colors, and devoured the world as only a genuine lover would. In his enthusiasm he sometimes bit off more than he could chew, and ended up getting some things wrong. But as a percentage of the staggering volume of words he generated, what he got wrong was relatively small. And what comes through most vividly in the book is Chesterton’s overall decency: I think most people will come away from a reading of this book with a sense that it is a great thing to look at the created world from the standpoint of Chesterton. From there — as from any other given angle — you will see some things wrong or out of proportion; but you will be consumed by gratitude for the gift of existence in all its diversity, and, most likely, end up reaching out for Someone to thank for it.
NB. The only review of this book I have read so far manages to get it spectacularly wrong, in one important regard. The London Telegraph’s review ends as follows:

By the time page 700 is reached, with its summary of the Chestertons’ final trip abroad (“They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen . . .”) it becomes clear that this book has done what should have been impossible: it makes Chesterton sound boring.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I read this review before reading the book, and so I picked up the book with great trepidation, expecting a tedious chronicle of names and dates and personal trivia. To my surprise and delight, I found that the passage quoted by the Telegraph reviewer was far from representative. Any biography of this size is bound to have some elements of dry, encyclopedic chronology; but in Ker’s book, they are far more the exception than the rule. On just about every page, one will find extended quotes from Chesterton, of the kind that display his personality and overall joie de vivre. The author made me rediscover my early love of Chesterton and his perspective on the world, and for that I am deeply grateful.

Related:
Dr. Ian Ker: On Writing Biography -
http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/ker-biography/

Liberal Frankensteins

From Greece to California, the liberal dream is dead.

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.nationalreview.com
July 1, 2011 4:00 A.M.

This Fourth of July, what remains is the Founders’ vision of a limited government; the idea of a population united by common values, themes, and ideas; a republican form of checks-and-balances government to prevent demagoguery, factions, and tyranny of the majority; the sanctity and autonomy of the nation-state; and individual freedom and liberty as protected through the Bill of Rights. Everything after and against that has proved a failure.

Indeed, what makes this Fourth different from recent celebrations is the ongoing repudiation of almost everything antithetical to the Founders’ views — the redistributive, all-powerful welfare state, the therapeutic arrogance that believes human nature can be altered by an omnipotent well-meaning government, the postmodern notion that nationhood and borders are passé, and the utopian idea that war can be declared obsolete and the need for defense transcended. From Greece to California such dreams are dead.

The European Union is unwinding for two very simple reasons. First, it is not a constitutional state, but a loose conglomeration of nations run by elites who are not responsible to the people. For decades the undemocratic nature of rule from Brussels was masked by politically correct edicts on everything from global warming to anti-Americanism. But as the money runs out, the elites’ fraud becomes impossible to hide.

Second, Mediterranean countries were allowed to cook their books in such a way that northwestern European money would continue to be loaned to the siesta cultures that had not produced goods and services to justify the influx of foreign capital and the attendant lifestyle it ensured. Now we are well past any chance that German money can be paid back; the only mystery is over the conditions of the default — whether slow and incremental, or sudden and cataclysmic — and whether it will leave in its wake a downsized EU or no EU at all.

In other words, the notion that platitudinous elites could, by their proclaimed virtue, establish a constitutional union without real democratic values proved unrealizable. More important still, socialism came to an end with fiscal insolvency. This happened, of course, most dramatically in southern Europe, where climate and culture conspired to hasten its demise; but northern Europeans now realize that they too have a rendezvous with a Greek-like reckoning unless they increase worker productivity, curb government, prune the power of public-employee unions, bring market-based incentives back into the workplace, reestablish national sovereignty, raise the retirement age, and address the declining demography that is so often the handmaiden of socialism. In short, EU elites have done what the half-century-long threat of Red Army tanks and missiles never could: destabilize Europe to the point of anarchy.

Here in the United States, we await the imposition of Obamacare, despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable — and even acknowledged as such by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal irresponsibility. As we near 50 million Americans on food stamps, another year of 9-plus percent unemployment, and the third $1 trillion–plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that statism does not work — a fact brought home not just by the disaster in Greece, but also by the growing divide between a successful red-state paradigm and California-like blue-state doldrums. What saves the United States for now is only the fact that, unlike California, it can print money — plus the fact that there is no red-state version of America to flee to.

On the immigration front, there will still be some quibbling, but the liberal argument for open borders has been lost, both here and in Europe. The United States simply cannot afford any longer the $50 billion that flows to Latin America each year in remittances, coupled with multibillion-dollar costs for providing social services to seek parity for illegal aliens, in addition to vast new outlays in education and criminal justice. California elites swear that a multimillion-person community of illegal aliens has nothing to do with our near-bottom ranking in public-school math and science scores, but privately even the most die-hard unionist teachers confess that it does. When Los Angeles has more resident Mexican nationals than do most cities in Mexico, and when the liberal paradigm of the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot is into its fifth decade, then it is logical, not aberrant, that tens of thousands in the Rose Bowl would not merely cheer a Mexican soccer team over a home-team American one (understandable, though regrettable, garden-variety ethnic chauvinism), but trump that by booing even the mention of the United States.

Either federal law will be enforced and immigration will return to an orderly, legal process — where merit, education, and skill sets are used as litmus tests for would-be immigrants without regard to ethnic or racial background — or else Arizona, New Mexico, and California will soon become a dysfunctional region, where one class flees and quite another enters, and soon even illegal aliens seek a new, more northern border to cross. Open borders, non-assimilation, ethnic separatism, and tribalism lead to the Balkans or Rwanda — not, as envisioned, to a society patterned after the boutique diversity of the faculty lounge.

The classically tragic notion that deterrence — based on military preparation, balance of power, and eternal vigilance — alone prevents wars is returning, as the postmodern idea that international good will and multilateral policing can ensure world peace has almost sputtered to an end. Colonel Qaddafi is not impressed by an indictment from The Hague, and so far he is not backing down in the face of the combined air power of France and Britain. Qaddafi fears no new Napoleon or second Wellington, and he will leave only if the United States, for either good or bad reasons, decides to lend Europe the military wherewithal to end the Libyan regime.

In the last hundred days, the world has seen not only how weak and divided are the European members of NATO, but also how the once-celebrated European notion of “soft power” means very little in the world of perpetually savage nations. What stops China from carving out a new co-prosperity sphere in Asian waters, Russia from reconstituting a hegemony over the former Soviet republics, Turkey from ending the notion that the Aegean is a Hellenic lake, a new alliance of radical Arab states from attacking Israel, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran from threatening its Jewish and Arab rivals, and North Korea from invading the south is only lingering worries over a U.S. military response or an American-led alliance of resistance — not international sanctions or condemnation, a U.N. decree, an Arab League resolution, an International Criminal Court writ, an IMF or World Bank reprimand, a lecture from an EU grandee, or the EU rapid response force.

Back home, we have suffered through decades of declining test scores and rising teachers’ salaries, and we now have a trillion dollars in college loan debt, more remediation for incoming college freshmen, weaker skills apparent in graduating college seniors, an omnipresent -studies curriculum, and a new national dialogue over whether college is even worth it — not just in terms of whether college degrees raise salaries sufficiently to justify huge loans, but whether the new therapeutic race, class, and gender curriculum is antithetical to classical liberal arts with their emphasis on reading, written expression, math, and science.

Modern university education has achieved the dubious result of turning out a self-described sensitive, caring mind that has never been more ignorant of the past and the present. The modern therapeutic university has managed all at once, with its various “centers,” reduced teaching loads, empty faculty research, and legions of new administrators, to put tuition costs beyond the reach of most Americans, to spark an entire new competing industry of no-frills, private, for-profit certificate-granting trade schools, and to end the old idea that a student’s B.A. degree was synonymous with competency or a faculty member’s Ph.D. with wisdom.

We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A “planet is doomed” Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.

In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in bringing to life the Frankenstein’s monster it designed in its own image — but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Roger Maris and the Myth of the Asterisk

By Allen Barra

Mon., Jun. 27 2011 at 1:59 PM

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/

Phil Pepe's superb new book, 1961: The Inside Story of the Maris-Mantle Home Run Chase (Triumph Books, $20.00) is the best thing yet written - or likely to be written - about the amazing season 50 years ago which captivated the country.

Pepe dispels several myths about the legendary pursuit of Ruth's 60 home runs by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, one of them being that the two were hostile rivals. In fact, Mantle admired his quiet, reserved teammate and actually shared an apartment with him (also with reserve outfielder Bob Cerv) in an effort to get his own life in order. Later in the season, Mickey rooted hard from his hospital bed for Maris to break the record.

Another myth Pepe tried to bust is the myth of the asterisk that was supposedly placed after Maris's accomplishment in the record books. Sunday's Daily News included an excerpt from 1961 in which Pepe states the case for the asterisk that never was.

There was no asterisk. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
The myth that an asterisk was used to denote that Roger Maris needed expansion and a longer schedule of games to exceed Ruth's single season home run record has been perpetuated in story on and film. But it's not true. It never was. There never was an asterisk. What there was for almost 50 years, however, were two entries in baseball's official record books, as such:

Most Home Runs, Season.

61 Roger E. Maris, AL: NY, 1961 (162 G/S)

60 George H. Ruth, AL. NY, 1927.

So there was no asterisk on the books.

Pepe's account is mostly right, but I want to add a couple of things. I've been fighting the myth of the asterisk for years. First, in the 1996 book, That's Not The Way It Was or (Almost) Everything They Told You about Sports Is Wrong and then in my 2002 book, Clearing The Bases, The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Century. In the latter I wrote:

That anyone ever thought there was an asterisk is at least as much the fault of the New York Daily News' Dick Young as of Commissioner Ford Frick. Frick worshiped Ruth and was at his bedside the day before he died (and made much of that in interviews and after-dinner speeches). Maris had the bad luck to have his greatest season in 1961 at a time when Frick was commissioner of baseball. As early as July 17, when Maris and several sluggers were ahead of Babe Ruth's 1927 pace, Frick, apparently distressed that the new 162-game season would give someone an unfair crack at Ruth's record, called a press conference and issued this ruling: 'Any player who has hit more than 60 home runs during his club's first 154 games would be recognized as having established a new record. However, if the player does not hit more than 60 until after this club has played 154 games, there would have to be some distinctive mark on the record books to show that Babe Ruth's record was set under a 154-game schedule.'"

In his biography of Maris, Roger Maris, A Man for All Seasons, my late New Jersey neighbor Maury Allen got it right. Dick Young, he said, called out loud "Maybe you should use an asterisk on the new record. Everybody does that when there's a difference of opinion.

What Pepe and other baseball historians haven't understood is that Frick's statement was not a ruling but merely an opinion: Frick had no power whatsoever to make a ruling on the subject. To put it simply, he was grandstanding. What escaped most baseball writers present at Frick's press conference, and what continues to escape the sports media today, is that major league baseball had no "official" record book and didn't have one until Total Baseball got the job in the late 1990s. So, in essence, Frick was trying to pressure publishers over whom he had no authority to print his version of the Maris/Ruth home run chase.

What everyone seems to have forgotten is that Frick himself denied that the asterisk ever existed. The reason is that practically no one remembers that Frick wrote an autobiography published by Crown in 1973, Games, Asterisks and People. "No asterisk," he wrote, "has appeared in the official record in connection for that accomplishment." He failed to mention that there as no "official" record and that some record books chose to list the record for "Most Home Runs Season" the way Pepe related, but several more (including Gillette's record book) did not.

Frick, though, couldn't resist reminding us that "His [Maris's] record was set in a 162- game season. The Ruth record of 60 home runs was set in 1927 in a 154-game season."

Frick's denial of the asterisk did nothing to erase it from fans' memories. In a bizarre postscript to the asterisk story, in 1991 Commissioner Fay Vincent issued a statement indicating that he supported "The single record thesis," meaning that Maris held the record for most home runs in a season period. The Committee on Statistical Accuracy, appointed by Vincent, then voted to remove the asterisk from Maris's record.

Thus, a commissioner of baseball voiced his support for removing an asterisk that a previous commissioner denied every having put there in the first place. Probably nothing did more to enhance the myth of the existence of the asterisk as Vincent's "removal" of it.

I don't know if the combined efforts of Pepe, Frick, Vincent, and myself are ever going to convince the fans that there never was an asterisk next to Roger Maris's name in the record books. But here are a few observations:
One, no matter how many games Ruth and Maris played, it should be noted that Maris hit his 60th home run in his 684th plate appearance, while Ruth didn't reach 60 until he had had 689. Two, there was an oft-repeated theory by sportswriters who didn't like Maris that Yankee Stadium's short right field porch was responsible for many of Maris's "cheap" home runs. The right field fence at Yankee Stadium was as short or shorter in Ruth's time, but it was simply assumed that Ruth, who hit home runs longer than Maris did, didn't need a short porch. In any event, Maris actually hit 30 home runs in Yankee Stadium that season and 31 in all other American League ballparks.

On second thought, what had has probably perpetuated the myth of the asterisk more than anything else for this generation's fans is Billy Crystal's wonderful 2001 film, 61*, which, after Bull Durham, gets my nod as the best baseball film ever made. I'll give Crystal a pass for making the mistake, but as far as everyone else is concerned, it's time to dispense with the notion of the asterisk and recognize Maris for what he did.

How to ‘Green’ Your 4th of July (Take Note, Right Wing Revelers)

By Doug Powers • July 1, 2011 04:38 PM
http://michellemalkin.com/

It only stands to reason that if the 4th of July is more of a Republican holiday, it must be inherently bad for the environment. I mean, that’s what Republicans are all about, right?

Fortunately, an op-ed in the New York Times is there to help “green” our Independence Day feast:

FOOD is responsible for 10 to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. By many estimates, cooking represents more of a meal’s carbon footprint than transport. For certain vegetables, it accounts for more emissions than agriculture, transport and disposal combined.

Fourth of July, the national celebration of combustion, presents an opportunity for atonement.

I’m not advising you to forsake grilling this holiday and join the ranks of raw-foodists. Nor do I believe that we can reverse climate change by eating burgers rare instead of well done. But a little creative thinking can reduce this year’s Fourth of July carbon emissions without gustatory sacrifice. And maybe that awareness will carry into other days and other parts of our lives.

Read on and discover all the things you should take into account when planning your July 4th cooking, from how to prepare the potato salad to skipping the baked desserts (unless a rare FLOTUS pie waiver is obtained). The list of considerations is so long that you could end up accidentally hanging yourself from the eco decision tree:

Now for the burgers and dogs. First, a green disclaimer. Beef is an environmental disaster, no matter how you cook it. However, if you can’t resist grilled cow, your big decision is between charcoal and propane.

This guy must be a blast to party with.

He goes on to point out so many things you should take into consideration that, if you took the time to ponder them all, by the time you actually started cooking it would be July 6th.

For other ways to “green” your 4th, I suggest printing several copies of the above article, setting them on fire, and cooking burgers and hot dogs over the flames. That way none of it will go to waste. Also, instead of environmentally unfriendly traditional fireworks, try blowing up an electric car. You’ll still get the “boom,” plus you’ll be helping get those carbon nightmares out of circulation. It’s a brand of “green” firework serves as its own offset.

(h/t Fox Nation)

No Independence Day for debt-ridden America

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
July 1, 2011

Dozens of countries have "Independence Days." Nov. 25, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance, as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname's case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America "Independence" seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded "independence" not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. "Independence" is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history – as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? "You go talk to your constituents," President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, "and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?"

In the Republic of Brokistan, that's the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" – i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an "economic forum."

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama's debt. Five thousand years is the year 7,011. Boy, our kids'll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president's performance Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can't seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that's different! He's in "public service." A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Virginia. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That's 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another "economic forum." This time with House Democrats – the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. "Economic forums" are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it's ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America's debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.

By the way, one way to cut back on corporate jettage would be to restore civilized standards of behavior in American commercial flight. Two weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport flying to Michigan to be with her family for the final stage of her terminal leukemia was made to remove her adult diaper by the crack agents of the Transport Stupidity Administration. George III wouldn't have done this to her.

Oh, c'mon, do you want to compromise your kids' safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be "the same for everyone" – because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment. Oddly enough, it's not "the same for everyone" if you're Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else's name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he'd been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair and dying of leukemia, we'd have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we're now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable expose of America's revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

What else isn't "the same for everyone"? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about "tax breaks". We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that's a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies – equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he's issued – what is it now? – over a thousand "waivers" for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn't, tough.

But that's the point. Big Government on America's unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it's not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you're a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today's Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he's outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

That's all, folks!

©MARK STEYN

On a special night, Dean Smith’s cameo elevates the goose bumps

By Dan Wiederer
http://blogs.fayobserver.com/accbasketball/
June 30, 2011

PHOTO BY Robert Willett - rwillett@newsobserver.com

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, right, and former UNC coach Dean Smith share a smile. At left is Charlie Scott, who became UNC's first African-American scholarship athlete in 1966, who told the crowd that Smith made his largest impact as a teacher and person.


RALEIGH – Charles Scott woke up around sunrise Wednesday in Atlanta, his eagerness already percolating and his sense of responsibility dialed in. Just like always.

It was Scott’s honor to present Dean Smith at Wednesday night’s Naismith Good Sportsmanship Award ceremony at the Progress Energy Center’s Memorial Auditorium in downtown Raleigh. Which meant Scott wanted to be prepared and punctual.

So he set a departure time for 6:45 a.m. to make the 7-hour trek north and stuck to it.

Only when 6:45 arrived and he settled into the driver’s seat, his wife was nowhere to be found, still inside getting ready.

“At 6:55 she still wasn’t there,” Scott said. “At 7 o’clock she still wasn’t there.”

The former North Carolina All-American was practically crawling out of his skin, gnashing his teeth and wanting to pound the steering wheel. But, he says, many years of marriage plus an enlightening career at UNC taught him valuable lessons about patience and respect and tone.

So when his wife finally got into the car 25 minutes behind their scheduled departure time, Scott turned and delivered the sternest reprimand he could think of.

“You will never play for Coach Smith,” he said.

It’s been 41 years since Scott last played college basketball, 41 years since he was last under the direct command of Smith. But to hear him speak Wednesday, Smith’s influence still resonates daily, providing a benchmark with which to evaluate his life.

Forty-one years later and Scott still cherishes the opportunity he had to play for Smith and still finds himself not wanting to let his old coach down.

“Coach Smith was not our coach, he was our mentor,” Scott said. “He set the standard by which every day I get up I ask myself, ‘How would Coach Smith feel about what I��m doing today? Am I a good human being? Am I a good father? Am I a good neighbor? Am I compassionate?”

A TRIBUTE TO HEROES

Three Tobacco Road legends – Smith along with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and former N.C. State women’s coach Kay Yow – were honored Wednesday for their contributions to basketball, for succeeding at a high level and always doing it the right way. And if the 70-pound Naismith Good Sportsmanship trophy each honoree was given seemed impressive, then I don’t know how you’d even begin to describe the sincere praise heaped upon all three coaches on a goose bump-filled night.

By far, the most special moment came when Smith was officially honored, first with the presentation by Scott, and then with an emotional speech from his protégé, Roy Williams.

At 80 years old and still in a fierce battle with a cruel neurocognitive disorder, Smith attended Wednesday’s ceremony. But he was on stage for less than 10 minutes, a reminder to everyone to soak up these moments while they last.

Yet it was no surprise that even in that short amount of time on stage, Smith received a pair of standing ovations plus warm hugs from Scott and Williams and an extended ovation from Krzyzewski.

And, as you probably guessed, the stirring applause triggered that old palms-down reflex in Smith with the legendary coach gesturing for everyone in the audience to sit down and to stop brightening the spotlight.

LOYAL HEARTS

Williams noted that while Smith is rightfully praised as an innovator, he himself has spent his entire coaching career as “a copier,” trying desperately to emulate everything Smith ever did.

First, Williams quoted an old adage Smith used to recite.

“The dogs may bark but the caravan rolls on.”

Then the current Tar Heels coach invoked Kierkegaard.

“Life can be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards,” Williams said.

With a crack in his voice, he explained why those maxims resonated.

“Both of those,” Williams said, “I interpret as you have to move on. Regardless of what adversity you have, you have to move on. But the one person I cannot do that with is Coach Dean Smith. Because I have to (look back) and remember every single day I spent with him. I have to remember everything he gave me.”

Krzyzewski, too, felt a profound appreciation for Wednesday night’s event and valued the opportunity to spend time with Smith, against whom he battled for 17 years in the ACC. Before the night’s ceremony began, Krzyzewski visited briefly with Smith in the green room.

Later, on stage, Coach K looked around at an array of Smith’s former UNC players – from Phil Ford to Eric Montross, Rusty Clark to Al Wood, Dave Hanners to Dennis Wuycik – and let the admiration they have for Smith wash over him.

“Dean set the standard for basketball – and not just college basketball – that everyone is still trying to reach,” Krzyzewski said. “He demanded that his teams play as one. And what he got in return from all these guys who played for him was the intense loyalty that they feel toward him. And that’s something I’ve admired since I started coaching. It’s really one of the great things in all of sport: that intense loyalty the Tar Heel players have for Coach Smith.”

Smith has never needed nor wanted the commendation. But you can be certain he’ll forever be proud of that loyalty and what it has meant in building and elevating the North Carolina basketball program.

Yet for Smith, this was always about more than basketball. He wanted to impart wisdom and teach life lessons to his players. And you can bet that Charles Scott wasn’t the only one who woke up Wednesday measuring himself by the values Smith instilled.

Staff writer Dan Wiederer can be reached at wiedererd@fayobserver.com or 486-3536.

Today's Tune: The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight (Majordomo Version)

Beck Bids Adieu

Posted By Arnold Ahlert

http://www.frontpagemag.com
July 1, 2011 @ 12:13 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage | 5 Comments

Yesterday was Glenn Beck’s last day on Fox. In his run there, which began in 2008 after Fox hired him away from rival network CNN, Mr. Beck was a lighting rod for relentless progressive vitriol. Perhaps only George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have been subjected to more criticism than the controversial TV and radio host. Yet despite the controversy, Beck leaves behind a solid legacy in two arenas: his attention to the far-left’s alliance with Islamic radicalism, and his exposure of the breathtaking degree of leftist radicalism that permeates the Democratic Party.

Beck has done yeoman’s work with regard to exposing radical Islam, as demonstrated by a a six-part series of videos (available here, here, here, here, here and here). In fact, Beck’s ongoing exposés of that radicalism remain unmatched by most in the mainstream media. Yet when Beck offered his rationale connecting Muslim radicals with the “hard-core socialist Left,” he was not only taken on by the Left, but conservatives as well. For instance, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol accused Beck of “hysteria,” and National Review’s Rich Lowry called it a “well-deserved shot.”

The leftist/Islamist alliance is in fact quite ubiquitous and there are many disturbing examples of it that Beck took care to document. The radical leftist group Code Pink, which has forged ties with Hamas, did indeed spend time in early 2011 agitating in Cairo and at the Egyptian Rafah crossing, a border which many Egyptians believe Mubarak closed because he was a pawn of the Israelis. It was Code Pink founder Jodie Evans, along with leftist Weather Underground terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who helped organize last year’s Free Gaza Movement which launched the “peace” flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This year’s 11-ship flotilla, with the same objective, includes a boat named the “Audacity of Hope” and carries American leftists, including author Alice Walker, who this week called Israel and America “terrorist states” (as the Iranians do). Beck also created a video montage of leftist organizations mingled with Islamic radicals, all promoting the same anti-Semitic message. Ironically, that video begins with Chris Matthews mocking Beck for making the connection.

Yesterday, on the same day Beck’s Fox career was coming to an end, he may have received one of the more satisfying vindications of his assertions: Commentary Magazine reported that the Obama administration is reversing a five-year ban on contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. That would be the same Muslim Brotherhood which spawned Hamas, whose charter is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and calls for the extermination of Jews. “We believe, given the changing political landscape in Egypt, that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps Beck is equally vindicated by another revelation which occurred recently. Left-wing Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), despite assertions that his statements had been “mischaracterized” by the Syrian media, was caught praising President Bashar Assad as a man “thinking about the different ways that would be the best way to address the needs of the people…And frankly, that’s a positive development.” How has Assad been addressing the needs of his people? By gunning them down in the streets for daring to stand against his thug regime. Over 1,400 men, women and children have been murdered so far.

Glenn Beck also made the Left hysterical when he took on one of its cherished icons, George Soros. Beck contended that Soros has a five-step plan to bring down America, a charge which was greeted with contempt. One of those steps, according to Beck, was to “control the airwaves.” Once again, Beck was vindicated when an in-depth Fox report revealed that Soros “has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets–including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.” The breadth of Soros’ media connections are explained in great detail, but nothing sums up his influence better than this:

Readers unhappy with Soros’ media influence might be tempted to voice concerns to the Organization of News Ombudsmen–a professional group devoted to ‘monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.’ Perhaps they might consider a direct complaint to one such as NPR’s Alicia Shepard or PBS’s Michael Getler, both directors of the organization. Unfortunately, that group is also funded by Soros.

The response to Beck’s efforts to expose Soros were characterized as anti-Semitic, with Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg calling them an “updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” ADL leader Abraham Foxman piled on as well, calling Beck’s coverage of Soros’ actions as a boy during the Holocaust (when he aided Nazis in the confiscation of Jewish property) as “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top.” Yet a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft is where this information originated, and most of the controversy surrounding the interview has to do with Soros’ near-sociopathic lack of guilty for his conscription: “No feeling of guilt?” asked Kroft. “No,” said Soros. “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there. If I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not. So I had no sense of guilt.”

Of course, Beck’s exposure of the control of the far-left over what’s left of the Democratic Party, facilitated immensely by Soros, was monumental. From Obama’s czars, such as dedicated Marxist Van Jones and the FCC’s chief diversity czar and Hugo Chavez sympathizer Mark Lloyd, to the president’s spiritual advisor and self-admitted Marxist Rev. Jim Wallis, Beck has sought to shine the light on the assortment of radical elements that form the basis of this administration and its defenders.

For that he has been routinely excoriated by the American Left, various elements of which have actively worked toward or endorsed the abridgment of Beck’s free speech. Even to the end, as yesterday’s piece in the Baltimore Sun indicated, there will be no letup. Writer David Zurawik stated that Glenn Beck ”will leave a TV legacy of reckless, divisive and ugly speech in his wake,” and that “he and Fox News should both feel some shame for the harm they have done to the national political discourse — how they have taken an hour of dinnertime each weeknight and used it to help polarize us with paranoid and angry words.”

Despite such obtusely hyperbolic detractors — who consistently and bizarrely level more vitriol and hysteria toward Beck than the very “hate” they purport to despise him for — Beck remains popular. Even with a forty percent drop-off from his ratings high-water mark, Beck’s remained the most popular show on cable news in his time slot, with almost two and a half times the number of viewers as his closest rivals, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. And contrary to published reports that he was fired, Beck is leaving Fox because his contract is up, and his business and creative teams at Mercury Radio Arts prefer to get out from under the grind of producing his 5 p.m. show amid the corporate bureaucracy “where most ideas must be generated, spelled out in pitches, run by producers, budgeted, then run by more producers, approved by senior executives, etc.”

His next venture, GBTV, will be a web-based TV network, with two hour shows broadcast on weekdays from 5-7 PM EST, beginning on Sept. 12th. The show will also be available on demand. Subscriptions will cost $4.95 per month for access just to the show, or $9.95 for premium member access to all of the site’s programming. Advertising will provide additional revenue. “Lots of people are talking about the digital content revolution, but few are willing to risk it all and place a huge bet on the future,” said Christopher Balfe, President & COO of Mercury Radio Arts in a statement. “With GBTV, Mercury is doing just that. Fortunately, our incredible team at Mercury, as well as our industry-leading business partners, makes me confident that we will once again build something extraordinary.”

On his last show, Beck explained the reasons for his success. “I contend that is the reason we are successful here…because it’s true,” he said last night. “It seems as though there’s no truth anywhere anymore. We’ve made a lot of enemies on this program. We’ve taken on every single person we’ve been told not to take on…because the truth has no agenda. It will lead us where it leads us. This show has not only survived; we have thrived.” He then explained where he was going. “I have given up on admiring the problem. I am focused solely on the solution…I’m running to something. I know exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Will Beck remain a controversial figure? Undoubtedly. Yet despite his well-publicized foibles, Beck was more than willing to take on the sacred cows of political correctness and their defenders, often by the most devastating method possible:

Their own words.

Arnold Ahlert is a contributing columnist to the conservative website JewishWorldReview.com.