Brutally Honest

Proud Dad looking to promote youngest son's music (UPDATED)

A departure at Brutally Honest from the normal fare and I hope you regulars will indulge a proud pappy.

My youngest son is a music lover though I confess that the music he loves isn't always the music I love.  I think frankly that this is simply something generational, something traditional, something that happens more times than not, something neither of us frets over.

He tends, for example, to love Dave Matthews.  I think he's ok (though I think his politics suck).  I tend to love some country music.  My son thinks it's ok (though he thinks too much of it is a tad redneck-ish).

We do however share a musical love. 

He loves to create original songs.  I (and his mom) love to hear them. 

Both his mom and I think him to be genuinely talented (though I recognize that we have a built in bias) and we'd love for him to pursue this love and perhaps make some sort of living out of it but we are, quite honestly (and no less brutally) ignorant as to how to promote his creations.

Today he sent us his latest piece, a yet to be titled song, that I think to be his best thus far.  Click the play button below and know that I post it here for a few reasons. 

1. I want all to hear it.
2. I want to know what others think about it
3. I want to know how to expose his music to those who might hear his talents and who might be interested in more of his creations.

So... without further adieu... Richard's latest masterpiece, one I think you'll enjoy.

UPDATED: Reacting to a comment or two, Richard has sent word that he's added the bridge and asked me to update the post.  So I have and will feature it at the top of the blog while we solicit continued feedback. Also, he passes along that he's using FL Studio to create his pieces.

Poor wittle Hiwary

This  just makes me want to vote for her.  You?

In an interview with ABC News' Cynthia McFadden to air on this evening's "Nightline," Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., says it's tougher for her to run as a woman than it is for her male opponent.

Asked why she thinks so many women may be feeling sorry for her, Clinton said, "I think a lot of women project their own feelings and their lives onto me, and they see how hard this is.  It's hard.  It's hard being a woman out there.  It is obviously challenging with some of the things that are said that are not even personal to me so much as they are about women.

"And I think women just sort of shake their head," Clinton continued. "My friends do.  They say, 'Oh, my gosh, this is so hard.' Well, it's supposed to be hard.  I'm running for the hardest job in the world.  No one has ever done this.  No woman has ever won a presidential primary before I won New Hampshire.  This is hard. And I don't expect any sympathy, I don't expect any kind of, you know, allowances or special privileges, because I knew what I was getting myself into.

"Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field," she said, "but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there."

Once again going big time after the emote vote.  And that vote's out there folks.  A bunch of emoters, many of them men.

Sigh.

I don't think I've seen a pile of crap heaped this high before.  And yet, it's crap some will fall for.  Sad state of affairs folks.  Seriously sad.

Supporting the troops

BLACKFIVE's got a way. Do check it out and help.

Loving this Brit

Big time:

The secret is out: Prince Harry has been serving on the front line with his British army unit in one of Afghanistan's most lawless and barren provinces. Harry is the first royal to serve in a combat zone since his uncle Prince Andrew flew helicopters during Britain's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982.

British officials had hoped to keep the 23-year-old's deployment secret until he had safely returned, but they released video of Harry serving in Helmand Province after a leak appeared on the U.S. Web site the Drudge Report.

The planned deployment had been disclosed to reporters, with no specific date, but was not reported previously under a pool agreement between the Ministry of Defense and all major news organizations operating in Britain, including The Associated Press. The news blackout was intended to reduce the risk to the prince and his regiment.

"I got here on Christmas Eve. And going from bullet magnet to anti-bullet magnet, most of the guys were pretty bummed that I was here because nothing was happening for the first few days that I was here. But things are picking up again now because it's obviously quite boring when nothing is happening," Harry said in one video.

Although he is still in Afghanistan, military chiefs are angry over the leak and are considering if he should be moved. Tours to Afghanistan usually last six months, but Harry has served just 10 weeks.

"I will take advice from the operational commanders about whether his deployment can continue," said the army's commander, Gen. Richard Dannatt.

Hats of to the young man.  May he and all who serve with him and on his side in this war be kept safe and be guided in what I believe to be a fight between good and evil.

Geldof praises Bush's African policy

Where's the Religious Left on this story?

I have always wondered why it was never told properly to the American people, who were paying for it. It was, for example, Bush who initiated the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with cross-party support led by Senators John Kerry and Bill Frist. In 2003, only 50,000 Africans were on HIV antiretroviral drugs — and they had to pay for their own medicine. Today, 1.3 million are receiving medicines free of charge. The U.S. also contributes one-third of the money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which treats another 1.5 million. It contributes 50% of all food aid (though some critics find the mechanism of contribution controversial). On a seven-day trip through Africa, Bush announced a fantastic new $350 million fund for other neglected tropical diseases that can be easily eradicated; a program to distribute 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanian kids; and contracts worth around $1.2 billion in Tanzania and Ghana from the Millennium Challenge Account, another initiative of the Bush Administration.

So why doesn't America know about this? "I tried to tell them. But the press weren't much interested," says Bush. It's half true. There are always a couple of lines in the State of the Union, but not enough so that anyone noticed, and the press really isn't interested. For them, like America itself, Africa is a continent of which little is known save the odd horror.

The odd horror usually used in some Bash America soliloquy by the Left, especially the Religious Left, who seem more interested in making political points than they are actually making a difference in Africa.  So along comes Chimp Bushitler and actually makes a difference and it's ignored.  So typical.

Hats off to Mr. Geldoff whose piece should be read by all but especially those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.  A particularly good excerpt follows:

I have always heard that Bush mangles language and I've laughed at the satires of his diction. He shrugs them off, but I think he's sensitive about it. He has some verbal tics, but in public and with me he speaks fluently and in wonderful aphorisms, like:

"Stop coming to Africa feeling guilty. Come with love and feeling confident for its future."

"When we see hunger we feed them. Not to spread our influence, but because they're hungry."

"U.S. solutions should not be imposed on African leaders."

"Africa has changed since I've become President. Not because of me, but because of African leaders."

Good stuff.  Good read.

Al Gore's been pretty quiet of late

I wonder why?

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Well... I'm sure it has something to do with my riding the Harley less of late.  Or turning the thermostat down a few degrees.  Or maybe the fact that I'm using two of those funky looking light bulbs.  Yea, that's it.  Something I did, and all those like me, is responsible for completely turning around the whole global warming threat.

Excuse me while I pat myself on the back.

'"I've had it with McCain. I'm going to throw my support to Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Voting for John McCain is going to be extremely difficult.  Extremely:

Radio talk show host Bill Cunningham's mocking and harsh criticism of Democrat Barack Obama upstaged Republican presidential candidate John McCain's rally today in Cincinnati.

Sen. McCain apologized for the remarks by the WLW radio talk show host.

"I take responsibility and I repudiate what he said," Sen. McCain told reporters after the rally at Memorial Hall.

Cunningham came out on stage to whip up the crowd as he often does at Republican campaign events in Cincinnati.

Cunningham was critical of the national news media, saying that sooner or later, the media would begin covering Obama's "sweetheart deals in Chicago and the illegal loans he got in Chicago."

He also called Obama a "hack Chicago-style Daley politican" and twice used Obama's middle name Hussein, referring to him as "Barack Hussein Obama."

McCain was not on stage when these remarks were made but was told of them later.

"I will not tolerate anything in this campaign that denigrates either Sen. Obama or Sen. (Hillary) Clinton," McCain said after the rally.

Cunningham's blistering comments were carried by national news media, including CNN.

Cunningham said later that he stood by his comments. He told his listeners: '"I've had it with McCain. I'm going to throw my support to Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Cunningham, a conservative Republican who also hosts a Sunday night syndicated radio show, said he was asked Monday "by a McCain operative" to introduce the Republican front-runner.

He spoke to the crowd and left, without meeting or speaking to the candidate. McCain also said he had never met Cunningham.

Cunningham said his talk about Obama was "the same stuff" that he says "to you listeners" on radio, including referring to Obama by his middle name, Hussein.

Cunningham also mocked the Illinois senator's foreign policy statements about his willingness to meet with the leaders of rogue nations. He said he envisions a future in which "the great prophet from Chicago takes the stand and the world leaders who want to kill us will simply be singing Kumbaya together around the table with Barack Obama."

No one should be surprised by John McCain's actions here.  No one. 

He's doing what he does best, run and I do mean run, from a conservative perspective.  And to think that he'd run from stuff said at a political rally where the words he's running from are said purposely to distinguish himself from his opponent and to pump up the audience.

It's just pathetic.  Seriously pathetic.

We're probably looking at an Obama landslide in the fall folks.

Sickening.

Global warming my...

... rear-end:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

Read it all and educate yourself.

Then head over to Blue Crab Boulevard and learn even more.

A painful, yet filling, Lent

The Anchoress is getting what she's prayed for this Lent.  And it hurts:

Pain can exist without love, but not the reverse.

All creation is loved into being. Did that make the Creator vulnerable, too?

At the Incarnation, God-with-us came helpless, for us, with us, to us.

The reassuring love…

But did Christ also need to come to tell us God hurt?

To show us the hurt, and expose the pain - to show God alive, and hurt?

Once the great pope, John Paul II was found, embracing the Tabernacle in his arms, and crooning a Polish song as a parent would use to comfort a child. When asked about it, he replied, “I don’t know how else to comfort Him…”

Was the tree of knowledge off-limits to keep us from knowing love the way God knew it - love so full of the ache of longing, of such be-longing - as might break our hearts and leave us broken.  So, broken. 

Saved, but broken.  Mended, but never whole.

Did wisdom bring the awareness of love, and love the knowledge of hurt?

Did God try to shield us from knowing what He knew - the way we know (the way we’ve learned) - how to bring it; the pain.

This Lent has brought it - the searing lesson I am better for learning but wish I had never known.

In my less than humble view, you should prayerfully read the rest.

"And Yet I Didn't Find You"

Matteo at Cartago Delenda Est has a worthwhile parable up:

From my various readings (and attempted debatings) on the internet, I find myself genuinely grieved by the attitude of my atheist brothers. The mildest attempt to invite them to think more seriously about the arguments in favor of theism, and more critically about those in favor of atheism, are generally met with complete incomprehension, contempt, the spouting of worn-out, philosophically invalid cliches, general derision, and often, after a furious display of intellectual superiority, the immediate demand to rigorously prove everything under the sun. It is my fervent wish for these brothers that they avoid finding themselves in the following logically possible position:

The rest is worthy.