From earlier this year, the late Norm Geras on communist cool: 

Born in communist Czechoslovakia, Dalibor Rohac is unsettled by the continued displays of the symbols of communism by people on the political left. In view of the millions of victims of communist regimes, he finds it difficult to understand the surviving taste for the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara t-shirts and the like. Rohac mentions some possible explanations for this: that few people grasp the magnitude of the crimes of communism; that, whereas totalitarian fascism was always a poisonous idea, communism may be seen as a good idea that went wrong… A good idea gone wrong as may be, communism didn’t just go wrong in some minor or insignificant detail, but on a vast scale, and the manner in which it went wrong wasn’t only the manner of what one calls a ‘mistake’… No one with a genuine attachment to humane ideals should want to be associated with, much less bear upon their person, the iconography in question. It should have been completely discredited.

At the same time, for my part I do not find it so difficult to understand why this hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, because the left is far from having rid itself of those tendencies towards apologia for dictatorship and disregard for human rights that prevailed in the mid-20th century… Moreover, we are not talking here, as is sometimes alleged, of only a small fraction of the left – the far left: unreconstructed Stalinists, the SWP and its penumbra, and so forth. They form, to be sure, a core region of the anti-democratic indulgence I mean. But it also has a large hinterland among well-meaning ‘liberals’… The regrettable fact of the matter is that too much of the left still gives anti-capitalism and/or equality priority over the norms of democracy, liberty and human rights; and this is why the iconography tainted by the deaths of millions of innocent people is still seen as being cool where it no longer should be.

Unsurprisingly, I differ from Norm on one point, a point I think of as quite important. Communism – Marxism and its variants – was never a good idea. It is, and always was, a monstrous idea, a license for coercion, atrocity and horror – predictably so. And not coincidentally, it was conceived by, and has since entranced, some very unpleasant people. 

Mark Steyn on being sued by a fool: 

I’m currently being sued… by Dr Michael Mann, the eminent global warm-monger, for mocking his increasingly discredited climate-change “hockey stick.” So Dr Mann has sued for what his complaint to the court called “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.” In fact, Dr Mann is not a “Nobel prize recipient.” But, as Donna LaFramboise recently pointed out, he has spent many years passing himself off as one. The nearest he got to a Nobel was as one of several thousand contributors to one of various reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 shared a Nobel Peace Prize. So Dr Mann is a Nobel laureate in the same sense that my mother is: She’s Belgian, and Belgium is in the European Union, and the European Union was collectively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. My mum does not claim to be a Nobel prize winner, but Dr Mann did, on an industrial scale, including in his publicist’s bio, his book jackets and his website — until, in the wake of his false complaint, the Nobel Institute in Oslo declared that he was not a Nobel laureate at all. In that sense, Dr Mann is, indeed, a fraud. It is a fascinating legal question whether a man guilty of serial misrepresentation can, in fact, be defamed.

John Hinderaker on Big Government economics: 

“We must increase our debt limit so that we can pay our bills.” As Tyler Durden notes, this is the “most disturbing sentence uttered during the debt ceiling debate/government shut down.” […] There are around 72 million American children under the age of 18. If you do the maths, assuming they are on the hook for our debts, that means that currently each American child is around $236,000 in debt. Since only around one-half of Americans are federal income taxpayers, it would be more accurate to say that each future taxpayer owes $472,000. If two of them get married, they owe just short of $1 million, with more debt being piled up every day and with interest costs sure to increase. These numbers can be sliced and diced in various ways, but any way you look at it, it is insane that those in Washington who wanted to blow past the statutory debt limit without hesitation so that we can “pay our bills” are hailed as responsible. Here is a hint: if you have to borrow money to pay your bills, you aren’t paying your bills.

Somewhat related: 

“The federal government is America’s largest employer,” Obama said.

Watch carefully. Something will happen. 

Via MeFi, via Althouse. 

Brace yourselves, people, I’m elevating the tone and it’s a steep incline. Prepare to weep with delight as your very soul is embiggened. Thanks, of course, to our old friend the “much praised” Bulgarian performance artist Mr Ivo Dimchev, whose theatrical stylings, “impressive physical idiom” and “gripping sensitivity” have thrilled us previously. Here, we turn to Mr Dimchev’s epic 75-minute collaboration with sculptor and fellow artistic titan Mr Franz West. The project, titled X-ON, features the bare-breasted gyrations of Yen Yi-Tzu, Veronika Zott, Christian Bakalov and of course Mr Dimchev, who also had a hand in the musical score and whose talents clearly extend beyond mere human measurement. The piece – of which the video below is, sadly, but a small taste – will be featured at the Vienna International Dance Festival on Sunday July 21st, and is summarised thusly:

Dressed only in high heels and sumptuously decorated panties, bald-headed and endowed with the voice of an opera singer, the queer diva Lili Handel moves about and manipulates sculptures by the famous Austrian artist Franz West. And three figures, who are tourists at first but then mutate into muse-like creatures, dance with her to the spherical and powerful music by Philipp Quehenberger. According to Ivo Dimchev – alias Lili Handel – the point is not “to find ways to accommodate West’s works to the dancers’ bodies and the stage but to find out in what way ideas of the theatre, of music and of the performative body must adapt and transform themselves to establish contact with these sculptures.”

Unlike in his previous offering, Mr Dimchev doesn’t masturbate with a wig. He does, however, extract some of his own blood before smearing it on a chair. So there’s that. Yes, I know. You’re champing at the bit, itching to become one with the cultural elite. And stocked up on liquor, I hope. So. On with the show…

The Heresiarch ponders the Chinese market for human milk: 

Apparently – well, according to the South China Morning Post, as retailed in shocked tones to readers of Telegraph Online by Tim Stanley – there’s a trend among China’s increasingly prosperous and fashion-conscious middle classes to hire wet-nurses. Only not all the milk is intended for babes in arms… Yes, it’s unconventional. But you may reasonably wonder why it’s normal for people to consume milk intended by nature to feed baby cows, yet enjoying milk intended for human beings should be considered disgusting and wrong… Leaving aside the yuck factor, it is of course impractical (and morally unacceptable) to milk women in the same way that cows are milked commercially: human milk as such will only ever be a niche product.

For those sufficiently curious, recipes are provided. Via sk60 in the comments here. 

Scenes from the nine-day National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico.