Bob Dylan: Closet Conservative?

“Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But I own the Sixties I’ll give ‘em to you if you want ‘em. You can have ‘em.” – Bob Dylan, in a recent Rolling Stone interview.

John over at Last Train Out of Hell directed me to this interetsing article about Bob Dylan entitled “What Dylan Is Not: Poet Laureate of the Left, for one” at the Weekly Standard.

[T]he Vietnam war is the seemingly unbreakable link that ties Dylan to the left in the popular consciousness. Consider: Dylan wrote no songs about the Vietnam war during the 1960s. Zero. The songs Dylan wrote that antiwar protesters later seized upon (from Blowin’ in the Wind on down) were written when the Vietnam war was little more than a twinkle in John F. Kennedy’s eye. A close study of those songs would also reveal, as Dylan himself has stated in so many words, that they are not “antiwar” songs, as such. Just as with all his best work, they are based upon an almost unerring sense of human nature and a remarkable ability to ask questions that provoke revealing answers in the listener.

Dylan took a lot of flack for not being outspoken about the Vietnam war. He even had protesters outside his house who “were unhappy with the records their ‘leader’ was making” (a country album in 1969? How dare he.) It makes me think of the lesbian backlash against Ani Difranco when she revealed she was dating (gasp!) a man (emphasis added). How dare she go against the lifestyle of her self appointed followers?

Despite the heat he took, he backed down not one bit. In an interview in Sing Out! magazine in 1968, Dylan was pressed on how any artist could be silent in the face of the war. Dylan talked about a painter friend of his who was in favor of the war, and said that he “could comprehend him.” Pressed further on how he could possibly share any values with such a person, Dylan responded: “I’ve known him a long time, he’s a gentleman and I admire him . . . Anyway, how do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

Granted, the writer is not making the point that Dylan is a “conservative” (perish the thought), but that he is potentially at the very least not a leftist/liberal/progressive/whatever they’re branding themselves these days, as has been assumed all these years.  Have a read.

A Question For The Ages

Listening to Air America the other day, the Randi Rhodes fill-in host was making the shakiest of arguments for Bush’s impeachment via the latest “scandal”, entitled “You’re Fired-Gate™”. The dialogue with callers meandered to “the Nixon loophole” and how he slipped into retirement bypassing impeachment altogether, and on to how Nixon started the Vietnam war and he should have been impeached for that.

Now, I’m no scholar, but I’m pretty certain that Nixon did not start the Vietnam war.

That got me wondering: Nixon ended the war, but he’s blamed for starting it. And that is the  “history” accepted by the Air America audience. So, question, when Hillary is president and if she should be lucky enough to end the war in Iraq, will those same people blame her for starting it?

(“You’re Fired-Gate™” is a registered trademark of Donald J. Trump and The Trump Organization. )

San Francisco Bans Plastic Shopping Bags

And thank god for that! I hate those white, plastic bags you get at the supermarket and hope this is the first step to banning them nationwide. It won’t be soon enough.

They’re a useless nuisance. I’ll never understand why people think they’re more convenient. It takes a dozen of those little crap wrappers to carry what you can fit in one paper bag.

And they hurt your hands when you carry them. Cause what’s the point of carrying just one or two of them? Then you’ll have to make 10 trips to and from your car to carry the groceries inside when you could just make one trip if you had a paper bag. So what do you do? You carry a dozen of those little plastic bitches, tucking one under a finger, hanging another over your wrist and looping more over your thumb, and you end up cutting off all circulation to your hand. Then you get them all home and add them to the collection of 100 other white, plastic bags with which you know not what to do.

I wonder sometimes how many of those little bags have been made, distributed and thrown away. There must be hundreds of millions of them floating around garbage dumps not to mention city streets.

And contrary to anything you may have learned from “American Beauty”, there is no beauty in a white, plastic bag floating in the wind in an urban landscape. It’s trash from its inception and litter the moment you accept at the supermarket. yo yo yo, check it out:

I long ago stopped accepting them. I started to ask for paper bags and as few as possible. Then they’d say, “paper and plastic?” And I say, “are you a fucking moron? Did I say paper and plastic? No, I said paper, please.”

Grocery bagging is a lost art. There was a time when there was actually skill involved. But thanks to the white, plastic bag, now all the baggers ever do is toss a couple random items in a bag together and toss it in your cart. No organization. No cans on the bottom, eggs in the middle and bread on the top. Just a mess of plastic chaos.

If they didn’t have paper bags (“umm, sorry we’re all out”), then I would reluctantly accept plastic bags. And I’d have to watch them because otherwise, they’ll double bag them and then I’ve got twice the eco-disaster squeezing the life out of my fingers.

Now I bring my own canvas bags. They’re easiest bags to carry of the triumvirate, I don’t have bags at home that I am bringing in the door only to throw away seconds later, and the joy that comes from confusing the check out clerk and their bagging buddy when I whip out my canvas cannot be quantified.

I urge all of you to go canvas yourselves. And if the stores know what’s good for them, they’ll drop the plastic bags or run the risk of further lawsuits.

According to a two-count civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Westmoreland County, Brenda and Ronald Sager contend a plastic bag they brought home from the East Huntingdon Township store last month was deficient and overstuffed.
 
The bag, which contained a 32-ounce jar of Miracle Whip, a 46-ounce bottle of ketchup, three 15-ounce cans of fruit, an 18-ounce bottle of ranch dressing and a 12-ounce bottle of mustard, broke open when the Sagers returned home and started to put away their groceries.
 
That’s when the handle tore and the bottom of the bag broke, the Sagers claim.
 
“… all of the contents of said small plastic bag immediately fell onto and struck the right ankle, foot and toes of the plaintiff, Brenda Sager,” the lawsuit said.

Idiots.

Crichton’s Global Warming Solution: Ban Private Jets

Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on Global Warming (available for your listening pleasure here or here), asking the audience in attendance to decide whether they agree or disagree with the statement “Global Warming is not a crisis”.

Arguing for the motion were Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott, while arguing against the motion were Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt and Richard Somerville. The outcome was decided by audience polling:

In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.

It’s a fascinating debate with excellent points made by both sides. If you don’t want to listen to it or want to read the full transcript, check it out at Crichton’s site and while you’re there, check out his appearance on Charlie Rose, in which the many fallacies of his critics of his position on Global Warming are revealed as well as interesting info on some of his other recent books.

Getting back to the debate, Crichton, in his closing argument, puts forth a simple, inexpensive and immediate solution to the Global Warming “crisis” – and it’s the best solution I’ve heard yet:

There was a time when I worked in a clinic and, uh, one day a young woman came in, she was in her early twenties for a routine checkup and, I said what’s going on with you and she said I’ve just become blind. And, I said, oh my gosh, really, when did it happen, she said, well just, uh, coming into the clinic, walking up the steps of the clinic I became blind. And I said, oh, and I’m by now I’m looking through the chart and I said, well, has this happened before, she said yes, it’s happened before. I’ve become blind in the past, and, what she had of course was hysterical blindness. And the characteristic of that, is that, the severity of the symptom is not matched by the emotional response that’s, that’s being presented. Most people would be screaming about that but she was very calm, oh yes, I’m blind again. And I’m reminded of that whenever I hear, that we’re facing, whether we wanna call it a crisis or not, a significant global event, of, of importance where we’re gonna have species lost and so on and so forth, that we can really address this by changing our light bulbs. Or that we can really make an impact by unplugging our appliances when we’re not using them. It’s very much out of whack. And so if we’re only gonna do symbolic actions, I would like to suggest a few symbolic actions that might really mean something. One of them, which is very simple, 99% of the American population doesn’t care, is ban private jets. Nobody needs to fly in them, ban them now. And, and in addition, [APPLAUSE] let’s have the NRDC, the, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their, all of their members, cannot fly on private jets, they must get their houses off the grid, they must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we.  And why should we take them seriously. [APPLAUSE]

Hillary’s Enlarged Prostate

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but I couldn’t help being amused by the advertisement directly below Breitbart’s “secret video” of Hillary’s Hollywood fundraiser.

It reminds me of a joke I heard on evil, arch conservative, ultra right-wing conspiracy talk radio: All the potential “first ever minority” presidential Democrat candidates are only half minorities – Richardson is only half Hispanic, Obama is only half African-American, and Hillary…

In case it’s changed overnight, here’s a screengrab:

(click to enlarge). (pun intended)

Even 6th Graders Get It

Global Warming On Trial.

Open Letter To President Felipe Calderon

John W. Lillpop at Wizbang Bomb Squad posts this must-read open letter to Mexican President Felipe Calderon entitled “‘Undocumented Boomers’ Coming to Mexico!”

“The Great Global Warming Swindle” on UK Channel 4

Lies! It’s all lies! The producers have a political agenda. Don’t believe it. In fact, don’t even watch it. No one should be able to watch it! Ban it, censor it, damn your eyes!

Update: