Fort Hood Shootings

My very first thought at seeing the headline about the shooting at the army base was to wonder if the shooter was a Muslim. Well, turns out he has an Arab name and was getting interested in suicide bombings and that sort of thing.

Of course CAIR is asking us not to jump to conclusions since the man has an Arab name. How about the fact that he was attracted to the idea of suicide bombings? Can we jump to some reasonable conclusions from that PLUS his Arab name?

How did THEN and THAN get mixed up?

How on earth did this particular error get started anyway? It is so jarring to read that such and such is more or less THEN something else. The word is THAN, people.

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THEN refers to TIME -- something happened and THEN something else happened.

Maybe this will help:

RHYME IT:

THEN is about WHEN.

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THAN, on the other hand, is the word for making comparisons -- something is more THAN something else, or less than or better than or worse than, etc.

The internet spreads this kind of mistake like a virus.

Yuck.

Roman Polanski must be prosecuted

Because of the controversy over the Polanski situation I've been through some different shades of understanding of it, which I may get around to explaining eventually.

But it's always been clear from the transcript of the victim's testimony that what he did was a clearcut crime, the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl -- no, not violent rape, not rape by physical force in a dark alley, but the kind of rape that occurs when the rapist simply ignores the feelings and welfare of the victim and overpowers her psychologically. In this case he was an influential celebrity, gave the girl alcohol and a drug, and she was in a helpless position with no ride home. Her many attempts to say "no" and keep him at a distance were ignored and she finally gave up resisting out of fear. This kind of rape happens frequently with victims of various ages, but by a 43-year old man with a little girl it is of course all the more criminal. Her age alone makes it rape, statutory rape, even if she were consenting, which was far from the case.

Such a crime MUST be prosecuted and arguments that he should go free based on his filmmaking artistry and his hard life as a child are irrelevant. The arguments based on supposed misbehavior by the judge are also irrelevant. This will have to be resolved but it remains a fact that Polanski left the country to avoid the sentencing he expected, and the sentence he expected was well within the legal requirements for his crime.

Pray for a speedy extradition and a just outcome of the case.

It is demoralizing to a society to let such a crime go unpunished.

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Oct 17 update: Boston Globe columnist covers it well:

In 1977, Polanski violated not just a 13-year-old, but also a society that believes children shouldn’t be drugged and treated as things.

The Duchess of Apostrophe on pronouncing Idumea and Muir

Recent encounters on the internet have prompted me to add a Feature to my Hodgepodge blog, about grammar and pronunciation. Just kind of a running random commentary for the benefit of anyone who happens to have need of it.

For this purpose I have a guest blogger, the Duchess of Apostrophe. Over to you, Duchess.

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Thank you, my dear. I think we will simply plunge right in without ceremony today.

I must apologize for not appearing in full regalia in the accompanying portrait. As has been the case with others of my station in life I've fallen on rather hard times, but I will refrain from burdening you with my problems for now. Clearly, as you can see, teaching children takes a toll on a person.

My teaching selections may seem whimsical and I will not be justifying them to you, but as a Duchess I have certain prerogatives you understand. I am not yet commenting on the egregiously offensive offense against my very title, that of the epidemic misuse of the poor apostrophe, but you can be sure that, God willing, I'm going to have quite a bit to say on it eventually.

But for today I had a couple of mispronunciations on my mind. And they are also words I mispronouce myself it turns out. Hard as it is to believe, duchesses do have a thing or two to learn as well as everybody else, and a GREAT need of learning humility in particular. So I've heard at least.

So we begin with how we are to pronounce:

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IDUMEA

A nice Biblical word. It's that part of the Middle East that was Edom in the Old Testament but got renamed Idumea under the Romans.

Here's the pronunciation entry at Merriam Webster dot com:
Variant(s): or Id·u·maea or Id·u·mea \ˌi-dyu̇-ˈmē-ə\

Go to the site to hear it pronounced. I found out that I pronounce it wrong myself. I say ID-YU-MAY'-UH but they say ID-YU-MEE'-YA. I think my pronounciation is more accurate of course :>) as the word is clearly Latin-based. But I'll do mee-ya from now on. Can't argue with Merriam-Webster.

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MUIR

I also looked up "Muir" as in John Muir ("Scottish-born American naturalist who promoted the creation of national parks and reservations") after whom the famous Muir Woods of California were named.

In this case you get three different pronounciations: Merriam-Webster has MYUR (You'll have to listen at the site, I can't make it look reliably the way it sounds). Free Online Dictionary has MYOOR, which is similar but not exactly identical to the pronunciation at Dictionary.com. As for my own mispronounciation of this word, I'm sorry to say I've ALWAYS said MWEER. Oh dear.

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"Bozrah" is BAWZ-rah. "Hecate" is HEH-ka-tee or HAY-ka-tee. "Tarot" is roughly TEH-roh or TAY-roh. "Irenaeus" is either Ear-ren-AY-us (American) or Eye-ren-EE-us (British)

"Conflageration" doesn't exist, and "perquisite" is NOT "prerequisite." You need to look at the word carefully from left to right and sound it out.

Some American Stories

I have a Netflix account. Which is maybe an odd thing to have since some time ago I unplugged my TV and all its accoutrements (DVD player and video player --I never got around to connecting up the digital adaptor I got for it). I thought I'd give it all away but it just sits here unused taking up space. I suppose it's handy to have a TV for DVDs, so I'm still somewhat undecided about giving it up completely, but as for movies I've found more than enough available through Netflix's "Instant Play" that can be watched on the computer monitor -- if your computer can handle it, and mine can. So now I just keep the DVD they send for a while and then send it back unwatched (it's too much for me to try to figure out how to set up the TV system again), but I watch many movies on Instant Play. The quality is great and you can watch a movie more than once at long intervals without having to re-order it through the mail. Of course the titles available this way are limited -- but not VERY limited. There's quite a good selection available.

Many good documentaries for instance. One of the very best is Ken Burns' documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition, "Journey of the Corps of Discovery," about the adventures of the few dozen young men who were commissioned by then-President Thomas Jefferson to explore the unknown territory west of the Mississippi for the very first time (for the white man anyway), all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I've watched it twice now a few months apart. Great way to learn about American history. You feel as if you are on the journey with them.

I also watched Burns' biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and the one of Thomas Hart Benton, the painter, and recently finished the one of Mark Twain, all very well done and full of revelations about American history in the process of exploring the individual's life.

These three men were all American to the core, and all were strong-willed personalities with strong opinions about everything, especially their own importance. What as usual interests me most is their opinions about religion.


Wright was a Unitarian, an apostate by the standard of a Bible-believing Christian, a self-styled "free thinker" of a sort that abounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, quite willing to pontificate for the benefit of all on whatever he happened to be thinking about (kind of like me in my blogs I suppose).










Benton doesn't seem to have had any strong religious opinions. He painted some scenes of American style revivalism but he was clearly not a believer.

Twain for most of his life had a vague idea that there was a God but he did nothing to get to know Him, and when tragedy struck he ended up denying that God exists because the God he'd so vaguely had in mind had turned out not to be much like the true God. One of the commentators said it was because he so much "wanted to believe" that he became so violent against "the Christian God" at the end. This happens to many and nobody bothers to explain that it makes no sense. They get an idea in their head that a "good" God wouldn't allow bad things to happen, having no idea what the Biblical explanation for evil is. Their own imagination becomes the standard for judging God and that's the end of that.

Norman Lebrecht on Herbert Von Karajan: Will the real Nazi please stand up?

Decided to make a separate post about Norman Lebrecht after posting his comments on Susan Boyle. Norman Lebrecht is someone I recently discovered as I developed an interest in the late classical music conductor Herbert Von Karajan, and found that Lebrecht is the leader of a pack of wolves who seem to have set themselves to destroy the man's reputation both in life and death.

Karajan was born in 1908 in Austria and lived through the Nazi era as conductor of orchestras in the German towns of Ulm and Aachen. In the fifties, well after the war, he became world-famous as the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was partly his charisma as a conductor, which can be seen in You Tube videos of various performances, and partly the fact that he had such enemies as Lebrecht, who rarely have a good word to say about him or his music, that made me want to know more about him. As I read about Karajan my admiration for him as a musician and as a personality only grew, and Lebrecht has become to me the embodiment of a virulent destructive form of Political Correctness as he multiplied nasty epithets against the man as a supposed "Nazi," which he wasn't.

I read enough to understand that Karajan joined the Nazi party in 1933, as a young man in his twenties just starting out as a conductor, because he was asked to, but although a membership number was issued the membership didn't go through for some reason, and he never pursued it or bothered to find out why. He was completely apolitical and completely involved in his career and the Nazis were just an obstacle to be gotten around. He also had no clout he could have used to confront them such as some older conductors and musicians had and used, although his not protesting is unfairly held against him by his merciless critics. He would simply have lost his job -- and his musical ambitions utterly dominated his life and eclipsed every other interest. Before he got the post in Aachen he even went through a period of near-starvation for lack of work.

Two years after the first attempt at membership, he was again asked to join the party -- obviously because he was not a member despite the earlier gesture in that direction -- and this time the membership went through. But some will say he's REALLY REALLY REALLY a Nazi because he "joined the party two times" which is ridiculous from any point of view and just shows how eager they are to make him into a villain for some reason. The fact that he never uttered a pro-Nazi word in his life or joined in any of their causes escapes these hateful fingerpointing slandermongers. He played for state events on occasion but never participated in anything but musical events. Hitler in fact, oddly perhaps, hated him from the time a singer missed his cue in an opera Karajan was conducting and the performance never recovered. Karajan's career subsequently suffered from Hitler's dislike of him, which increased when he married a woman with a Jewish grandparent. He was blocked from many career advancements he might have had otherwise. The idea that he was ever in any sense at all a Nazi is evil slander.

Norman Lebrecht is not one of my favorite people for this reason, so I was surprised to find myself appreciating his comments about Susan Boyle. But perhaps I'm fairer to him than he is to Von Karajan.

I don't know exactly what Lebrecht's role is in all this, though he seems to be the leader of the pack, but at least he is one of the more vocal denouncers of Karajan. He seems to hate everything about him and I've found the same attitude in others across the internet. There were pickets against Karajan's appearing in the US the few times he was here, with signs calling him a Nazi. Political Correctness run amok, out to destroy an individual who far from deserving the epithet suffered in his own way under the Nazis. Despicable. The same mentality is also directed against Karajan's young protege the violinist Ann-Sophie Mutter, apparently simply because she was his protege though the charge is that she asks too much money for her performances. The clue is that they call her names as they do Karajan ("The fiddler" is their put-down for her).

The singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf is also spoken of the same way. Apparently she did join in some Nazi organizations when she was a young girl. The zeal with which people are persecuted for their attraction to something that seemed patriotic and wholesome at the time, as if they should have been able to recognize that the Nazis were murderers at that stage, as if they could see into the future, is to my mind as deplorable a human tendency as Nazism itself. Some did recognize the true nature of Nazism quite early; others were swept along with the emotionally charged atmosphere of patriotic fervor.

It happens. I think it's happening in America right now in different enough form to camouflage its basically fascistic character, with people swept up in an emotional embrace of a leader who is not what he seems to them, despite much evidence already that he got into power through deception, and will most probably be the destruction of this country as Hitler was of Germany. This time it's the people who are the most vociferously anti-fascistic fingerpointers who are supporting the real fascists.

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Here's a link to a column by Lebrecht about Karajan. His focus is his music but one has to suspect his judgment is clouded by his belief that he was a Nazi. Here he is passing on the false rumor about his role in Nazi Germany:

On Hitler's rise in 1933 he joined the Nazi party not once but twice and was rewarded with a post at Aachen, the youngest music director in the Reich. Before long he was hailed by the Goebbels-controlled press as "Das Wunder Karajan" – the Karajan Miracle – in contrast to the politically unreliable Wilhelm Furtwängler. Karajan learned from Goebbels how to play one man against another, among other black political arts. He strutted his stuff in occupied Paris and Amsterdam, to all effects the Nazi poster boy.

I read Richard Osborne's biography of Karajan that made it clear that not only is the idea he was a Nazi false -- far from bring a "Nazi poster boy" he was hated by Hitler because of a botched performance, and career advancements were blocked for that reason as well as his marriage to a one-quarter Jewish women -- but such judgments about his music are false as well. He already HAD the post at Aachen too, he wasn't "rewarded" with it, though it would have been threatened if he had not joined the party -- the second time in this case. And really, how ridiculous is it to think of someone joining the party twice as proof of great zeal for it? The only way that could possibly have happened is if the first membership hadn't gone through, and the only way THAT could possibly have happened is if Karajan had no interest in party membership, didn't participate in anything that would have required proof of it, and didn't bother to be sure it was legitimate. Also, although Hitler hated him, the music press thought he was great, and perhaps Goebbels did as well, but there is no evidence that the music critics were influenced by the political leaders.

The music critic, Lebrecht, however, is clearly influenced by his own political beliefs. That diatribe against Karajan has just about no correspondence to the reality of Karajan's life or musical achievements, but such a smear will of course stick unless it's countered by the truth. Lebrecht ought to read Osborne.

Susan Boyle

November 13 update. Well, the people promoting her have done a good job of supporting her through her bad patch, she's been eased into more public performances, recorded an album soon to be released, one song I've heard from it making it clear her beautiful voice is holding up just fine, got herself made over in some basic ways that improve her appearance tremendously, and seems to be well on her way to the career she's always wanted. I wish her success and happiness.

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June 10 I'm one of those who is fascinated with Susan Boyle. I can't really explain it. Everybody's been explaining it but none of it suffices it seems to me. There's an amazing amount of interest in her that just keeps going on and on. I also keep checking in to find out the latest news -- and I don't really know why I do. At the You Tube video that's racked up the biggest number of views of her first performance a little group of fans has collected and I go there to see what they're saying. In the last few days I seem to be losing interest though. Maybe some time I'll figure it all out and say more.

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It occurred to me briefly after watching Susan Boyle's final performance on BGT that she might be vulnerable to a nervous breakdown. I hoped not and let the thought pass. But today we're hearing that may very well have happened to her.

She's clearly a vulnerable personality, innocent of the world, and here the world has fallen on her almost literally, all six billion of us or whatever it is now. Her resolute dedication to keeping an upbeat attitude and a generous spirit toward others started to sound brittle and forced lately, after all the media attention of a sometimes very cruel kind. When I think about the unfamiliar and unwelcome thoughts that must have assaulted her over the last days and weeks I'm not surprised if her mind began to unravel. The only real protection against that sort of thing is faith in Jesus Christ but there is no sign that she believes the gospel. Many times in the last twenty years I could have unraveled out to jibbering sputtering incoherence under pressures in my own life if I hadn't had the Lord to cling to.

I didn't want to pray for her to win; it just doesn't seem right to pray that way, but I pray now for her recovery and for people to rally around her to shield and support her, and, yes, that the Lord would reveal Himself to her.