Liberty DeVitto, former drummer for Billy Joel, is suing Joel for unpaid royalties. I love a lot of Joel's work from the 1970s and '80s, and DeVitto was an important element of it.

I don't know the grounds for DeVitto's suit, but Terry Teachout noted a couple of years ago that the definition of intellectual property is changing. For instance,

[In December 2006] a London judge awarded 40% of the copyright of Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" to Matthew Fisher, the group's ex-organist. Mr. Fisher, who had asked for 50%, doesn't claim to have written the song, but he did write the Bach-like organ countermelody heard on the group's 1967 recording of "A Whiter Shade of Pale," which sold 10 million copies. Judge William Blackburne called the countermelody "a distinctive and significant contribution to the overall composition and, quite obviously, the product of skill and labor on the part of the person who created it."

By that standard DeVitto may be entitled to some of Joel's profits. DeVitto's playing on "Just The Way You Are," for instance, helped keep the track from sagging into sappiness (to my ears). With a lesser drummer it might've been a lesser hit, or no hit. He gave similarly inventive, flavorful performances on other songs ("Only The Good Die Young," also from The Stranger, comes first to mind).

Anyway, sad to see a musical partnership and friendship wind up in lawyers' hands. Hardly unprecedented, but sad.

All you non-leftists who chose not to vote for McCain: Happy now? Feeling pure and virtuous?
 
Idiots.

Theodore Dalrymple, considering the work of 19th-century critic and journalist George Bagehot:

What is the point of reading the essays of a Victorian writer, now known only to specialists in his period, about the writings of others? . . . [C]an there be any justification in a world of ceaseless activity for spending several hours of so short a span, several precious and never-to-be recovered hours, on the idle perusal of dusty and forgotten essays, however charming they might be?

Actually, I think there can. . . .

By a certain age, one does not so much wish to learn as to be consoled. . . . [T]hings are neither as good as one once hoped for, nor as bad as one once feared, which induces a consoling state of calm; and certainly, to read of the repetition of Man’s mistakes reduces one’s regret that one will not live to see the future golden age, because there will be no such golden age.

Ship a few million crazy rasberry ants there. I'm not kidding. Land them near the nuclear facilities and let them do their stuff:

It sounds like the plot of a farfetched science fiction movie. Unfortunately for the residents of Texas, it is very much a reality: billions of tiny reddish-brown ants have arrived onshore from a cargo ship and are hell-bent on eating anything electronic.

Computers, burglar alarm systems, gas and electricity meters, iPods, telephone exchanges – all are considered food by the flea-sized ants, for reasons that have left scientists baffled.

Having ruined pumps at a sewage facility, the ants are now marching towards Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre and William P. Hobby airport, Houston, putting state officials in a panic. “They’re itty-bitty things, and they’re just running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew, a resident of Pearland, on the Gulf Coast.

She spends hours sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. “There’s just thousands and thousands of them. If you’ve seen a car racing, that’s how they are. They’re going fast, fast, fast. They’re crazy.”

. . . Pest control specialists say that they are inundated with calls from homes and businesses now that the warm, humid season has begun, with literally billions of the ants wreaking havoc across the state. Worse, the ants refuse to die when sprayed with over-the-counter poison. Even killing the queen of a colony doesn’t do any good, because each colony has multiple queens.

The Texas Department of Agriculture said that it was working with researchers from A&M University and the Environmental Protection Agency to find new ways to stop the ants.

(Via, indirectly, Dave Barry, who's supposed to make me laugh, not give me nightmares.)

A witness to a nonfatal shooting, and our esteemed Vice President.

A warning from geophysicist David Deming that deserves wide circulation:

Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate.

* * * * *

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age.

* * * * *

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models. . . . In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

Michael Ledeen:

When the Europeans killed and expelled the Jews during the Holocaust, it marked a watershed in their history, from which they never recovered, just as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 marked the beginning of the end of that great Empire. For the Jews, with their remarkable wit, energy and creativity, had truly transformed the old continent. . . .

[A] couple of years ago I was in Krakow, Poland, and several of the town leaders said they were looking for a way to convince Jews to return. They had seen and understood the consequences of the destruction of the Jews.

I wonder if we Americans do. One has to be struck by the remarkable animus toward Israel demonstrated by some of the leaders of this administration, as by various pundits and politicians. . . .

There are those who like to say that the Jews are the canaries in the global mine shaft–an alarm of impending danger–but I think that misses the central point. When societies turn against the Jews, they seal their own doom, by depriving themselves of the creative energy that Jews have so often provided to Western civilization.

The evil of Jew-hatred is right in front of our noses . . . and as so often in the past, we prefer not to see it (it is the central theme of my forthcoming book Accomplice to Evil). Even most Jews deliberately blind themselves to it, as they did before and during the Holocaust, and so often before that. I do not think that the Jews will ever be destroyed; far more powerful forces than those arrayed against us today have tried and failed. But I do fear that far too many of our leaders are falling prey to the ancient evil. The Europeans fell for it in the last century, and are passing from the stage of world history. Let us fight against it here and now.

Because were she telling the truth she'd be admitting to unforgivable incompetence. Pelosi says—this is what her defense amounts to—that less than a year after 9/11, when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, she didn't care enough to learn exactly how the agencies she helped oversee were protecting the nation. Talk about a losing argument.

(Link via NRO.)

Later: The kind of thing I was thinking of (the quote refers to a period in 2003, not 2002, but shows her priorities):

Pelosi defended her own lack of action on the issue, saying her focus at the time was on wresting congressional control from Republicans so her party could change course.

Later still: Newt Gingrich (audio interview):

[T]he fact is she either didn't do her job, or she did do her job and she's now afraid to tell the truth. . . . [S]he either comes across as incompetent or dishonest. Those are the only two defenses she's got.

Gingrich's remarks are scalding and dead-on.

I think this post is holding up well.

Randall Parker has thoughts and suggestions prompted by the Santa Barbara fires.

The Business Insider:

If any part of Lauria's story holds up, Obama's reputation for honesty will be tarnished.

Obama has a reputation for honesty? Since when? Among whom?

(Link via Instapundit.)

Take a look at TheReligionOfPeace.com's picture of the week. (I've reposted the photo here because it's too good to lose when they post the next one.)

Charles Murray, in an NRO symposium on Obama's first hundred days:

We have a president who, from the time he entered Honolulu’s Punahou School as a teenager, has lived a magical life. Everything has gone right for decades now. Nor are any of his aides crouching beside him in the chariot whispering, “You too are mortal.” On the contrary, if we are to judge by Larry Summers, even his most astute advisers suppress what they know to be true to accommodate Mr. Obama’s wishes.

Down the road, the president’s economic policy will engender a new crisis that, to be met, will require him to reassess his assumptions and to defy his political base — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do either of those things. Down the road, a hostile world will require him to make a foreign-policy decision with no good option, only a choice among bad options, in the face of horrific consequences if he is wrong — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do that. Worst of all, he will come to those pivotal moments serenely confident that whatever he decides will work out.

How do I think about the Obama presidency as I look ahead? I’m scared stiff.