February 19

The problem with defining terrorism is that most people believe that certain extreme actions are permissible under certain circumstances -- but which actions, and which circumstances? You'll get no agreement on that. Was John Brown a terrorist? He seems to have been pretty unhinged to me, but his cause was just, and many still consider him a hero. Were the American revolutionists terrorists, at least some of them? Darned if I know, and I've studied the Revolution my whole life. How, as an American, could I look at that question in an objective manner? Would assassinating Hitler have been a moral act? Many would say so.

Another problem is that we habitually underrate "non-violent" but systemic crime. Who is the worse criminal -- someone who snaps and takes five lives in a mass killing, or a white-collar criminal such as Jeffrey Skilling whose actions negatively effect the lives of millions of people, even arguably the whole world? Skilling didn't snap; he calculated. Although both are terrible criminals that society needs to deal with harshly, I know which I think is morally more heinous and merits the greater punishment and censure. Joseph Stack snapped, and it is deplorable. But Lloyd Blankfein calculates, and that is beyond deplorable. People who snap are a symptom; people who calculate are a cause. Let's proportion our outrage correctly.

Speaking of Goldman Sachs, The Epicurean Dealmaker has a blistering post on GS spokesperson Lucas van Praag, titled, I kid you not, "The Mouth of Sauron":

http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2010/02/mouth-of-sauron.html

By the way, I must say that The Epicurean Dealmaker is, whether you agree or disagree with him on specific points, one of the very best writers in the blogosphere, on any topic whatsoever.

As a long-time devotee of World War I poetry, I read Professor Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry with pleasure. He deals not just with the big names such as Wilfred Owen, but also with the comparatively obscure poets like Patrick Shaw-Stewart (who, in fact, wrote only one surviving poem, given in full here):

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2010/01/patrick-shaw-stewart-i-saw-man-this.html

Shaw-Stewart was an Old Etonian, and a Classics scholar of legendary genius. [Elizabeth] Vandiver makes the point enjoyably and in revealingly excessive detail [in her book Stand in the Trench, Achilles] when she quotes at length a letter which Shaw-Stewart wrote to the most celebrated beauty of her age, Lady Diana Manners. Explaining how Lady Diana might enjoy sexual relations with him while preserving her virginity, Shaw-Stewart has recourse to the Classics, quoting liberally (in what Vandiver calls 'ascending order of erotic satisfaction') various sexual practices as described in Aristophanes, Theocritus and Ovid. It seems that much of this may have been lost on Lady Diana, who did not have the Greek or Latin to be able to translate. Perhaps she asked her parents.

Animal Watch: "Caplin Rous, the world's most famous capybara, is an ambassador for giant rodents everywhere." I love this guy! (Hat tip to Bill Crider on this one.)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2010/02/caplin-rous-the-worlds-most-famous-capybara-is-an-ambassador-for-giant-rodents-everywhere.html

The Herald, Glasgow's newspaper, offers a pleasant profile of children's book illustrator Michael Foreman:

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/book-features/drawing-on-a-zest-for-life-1.1006701?localLinksEnabled=false

The Los Angeles Times discovers artists for me every week! -- this time, painter Daniel Dove:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/art-review-daniel-dove-at-cherry-and-martin-gallery.html

Cinebeats pays tribute to the late Emilio Vieyra, "the Roger Corman of Argentina":

http://cinebeats.blogsome.com/2010/02/09/emilio-vieyra-1920-2010/

David Cairns, one of our very best film bloggers, unearths another Curiosity of World Cinema, Ion Popescu-Gopo's 1961 Romanian science fiction spoof A Bomb Was Stolen:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1469

Among notables born on this date are astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, novelists Carson McCullers, Jonathan Lethem, Kay Boyle, Amy Tan, Jose Eustasio Rivera (Colombia), Yuri Olesha (Russia), and Jaan Kross (Estonia), crime novelist Stephen Dobyns, poet Andre Breton, Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, legendary stage actor David Garrick, composer Luigi Boccherini, explorer Sven Hedin, activist Karen Silkwood, violinist Gil Shaham, memoirist Homer Hickam, singers Lou Christie, Smokey Robinson, and Seal, German painter Gabriele Munter, film directors John Frankenheimer, Jacques Deray, and Frantisek Vlacil, actors Cedric Hardwicke, Merle Oberon, Louis Calhern, Lee Marvin, Jeff Daniels, Benicio del Toro, and Ray Winstone, and Peruvian-born rapper Immortal Technique, whom I must love for his name alone.

The greatest American network news program ever aired, NBC News Overnight, hosted by Linda Ellerbee, Lloyd Dobyns, and Bill Schechner, only lasted a year and a half, from mid 1982 to late 1983; it was simply too literate, informed, and irreverent to persist in any corporate setting, even in a 1:30 AM time-slot, but for these very reasons has become legendary and a touchstone for newspeople and newshounds to this day. ("Possible the best-written and most intelligent news program ever" was how the duPont-Columbia broadcast journalism awards put it.) The last broadcast featured a wonderfully upbeat montage, set to Lou Christie's ecstatic 1974 version of "Beyond the Blue Horizon":

I'm the producer who created the video. We used Lou Christie's version of the song. We looped a verse to play twice so as to have more time for video. Every frame of the piece came from spots that had aired on NBC News Overnight--network pieces or pieces sent in by affiliates. This video aired twice. The 1st time was for the 1 year anniversary.We all liked it so much that when Overnight was cancelled, we decided to air this again on our last show.