The great Scot and poet Robert Burns would be two hundred and fifty-five-six years old today. Of his poems that you will find set to music on YouTube Ae Fond Kiss could be my favorite.
I would love to see Address to the Toothache set to metal, but you can’t always get what you want.
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Snarki, child of Loki
“…but you can’t always get what you want.”
Can you get what you need?
Amir Khalid
@Snarki, child of Loki:
If you try, sometimes you do.
OzarkHillbilly
Tim, thank you for this.
celticdragonchick
Haggis pockets for everybody! (They are actually quite good )
mellowjohn
from Krugman’s blog last thursday:
Paging Mr. Burns
This Bloomberg report from Davos is making the rounds:
Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics.
“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”
Later in the article:
Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week …
SiubhanDuinne
Lang may yer lum reek!
JPL
OT.. Does anyone have news on John’s pups?
Beautiful poem and beautiful song
Pogonip
And happy Robert Burns Day to you too! If I could, I’d have some Scotch in his honor.
It’s been an auld lang time since we’ve had a pupdate.
BGinCHI
I love me some Robbie Burns.
OT, but answer me this….What the fuck is wrong with people named Bachmann?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/21/lutz-bachmann-pegida-hitler-photo_n_6515542.html?cps=gravity_2684_-1270345980006163866
Tree With Water
“The great Scot and poet Robert Burns would be two hundred and fifty-five years old today”.
As historian Gordon Wood reminds readers of his book Revolutionary Characters, Scotland was a particularly interesting place during the that century. The American colonies shared much in common with it (both were geographic outposts of a powerful England), and our founders were profoundly influenced by Scottish intellectual movements. Wonder what Burns thought of the American experiment? Paging Mr. Google…
SiubhanDuinne
This is one of my favourites:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Z8f42fF8M
(Sorry again for the ugly link; I don’t know what has happened, but for the past month or two I have been completely unable to use the link function. Apologies.)
Svensker
@JPL:
They ate John. Apparently.
HRA
Happy Robert Burns Day in memory of Grandma Burns.
Corner Stone
“Release the hounds!”
OzarkHillbilly
@Pogonip:
Damn it, I knew I was missing something this morn.
rikyrah
smartypants pointing out the obvious, but it still needs to be said:
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Dog Whistles from the Left (updated)
I’ve written before about how uncomfortable I am with the idea that Democrats need to figure out how to appeal to working class white voters. It’s not that I object to building a bigger coalition. My concern is the often unspoken message that appealing to the unique concerns of people of color is the wrong message.
In an op-ed in the NYT today, Noam Scheiber makes that often unspoken argument overtly. He’s writing about Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s drop in the polls. But I don’t want to get distracted with analyzing DeBlasio’s performance. Instead, let’s pay attention to the overall message.
What Scheiber is basically saying is that if you want to unite whites and minority voters, you have to focus on the issues that are a priority to whites. That’s pretty much white supremacy in a nutshell.
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2015/01/dog-whistles-from-left.html?spref=tw
catclub
@mellowjohn: An excellent case for shooting the messenger.
Guest
My favorite is Burn’s autobiographical “Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin” as done by an early incarnation of the Battlefeld Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrhCYr1jNlQ
Lyrics here:
http://www.chivalry.com/cantaria/lyrics/rantin-rovin-robin.html
Tommy
So happy to see a shout-out to Soctland. Here is a little more Scotland for you. A dude in the Isle of Skye, where my family is literally from, doing things on a mountain bike that should not be humanly possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_IQS3VKjA
When I watch this I think there is a reason I am a hiker/camper. That I prefer mountains to beaches. Maybe it is something in my DNA :)!
raven
No Pro Bowl thread> (:
Origuy
@Tree With Water:
Mr Google offered up “Ballad on the American War“, which isn’t particularly pro-America:
The Battle of Guilford County Courthouse was one of the pivotal battles of the Southern campaign.
JPL
@raven: Sag awards on too but of course, I can’t watch either one. Fortunately, Downton Abby is on.
raven
@Origuy: We had passed the exit for Cowpens a zillion times and, after working on an open source American History text, my interest was piqued and we stopped. It’s a nice National Battlefield and I’m glad we stopped.
“In the opinion of John Marshall,[61] “Seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens.” It gave General Nathanael Greene his chance to conduct a campaign of “dazzling shiftiness” that led Cornwallis by “an unbroken chain of consequences to the catastrophe at Yorktown which finally separated America from the British crown.”[62]”
WaterGirl
Tim, can I just say how glad I am that you un-retired from blogging?
raven
@JPL: Stupid ass listings had two “New” episodes and the fist is the installment from last week.
rikyrah
water is wet news
……………..
Black Workers With Advanced Degrees, White Workers With B.A.’s Make Roughly the Same
by Julianne Hing, Friday, January 23 2015, 4:44 PM EST
You’ve heard of the racial wealth gap, the racial employment gap, and surely also about racial job callback disparities. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers an updated look at another dynamic of our racialized economy: the racial income gap.
As in: In 2014, while white workers 25 years or older with at least an undergrad degree took home median earnings of $1,219 per week, similarly aged and educated Latino workers made $1,007, and Asian workers made $1,328 per week. Black workers with at least a college degree, meanwhile, posted median earnings of $970 per week.
The racial income gap is so pronounced that black workers with an advanced degree made $1,149—roughly the same as white workers who had only a bachelor’s degree ($1,132).
For more on what this kind of economic inequality means for the country, read Kai Wright’s in-depth look at young black men’s struggle for employment. As Wright wrote last June, “This is an inequity that grows from tangled roots—historic labor market discrimination, ongoing residential segregation, stubborn racial biases among employers. But it’s also one with consequences that stretch out beyond the men themselves, and that will linger long past today’s troubled economy.”
http://colorlines.com/archives/2015/01/black_workers_with_advanced_degrees_white_workers_with_bas_make_roughly_the_same.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28Colorlines.com%29
Tree With Water
@raven: Assuming you haven’t yet read it, there’s a contemporaneous account of the battle by a British soldier you’d probably find interesting (paging Mr. Google). In it, he wrote what a nasty shock it was to march into sight of the colonial riflemen resting their shooters on the wood railings of the pens..
raven
@Tree With Water: Ooo, sounds good.They have a really cool presentation at the battlefield and they emphasized how worn out the Limey’s were after marching from King’s Mountain. What I found interesting was how the Americans were able to put out a call and dudes came from Georgia and Virginia. How did they do that? How did they get there?
Cervantes
@Tree With Water:
He was, with others, a radical supporter of the universal rights of man, at home and in the American Revolution. If I recall correctly, he even bought a cannon once and sent it to Paris to aid in the storming of the Bastille.
Tree With Water
@raven: My father used to wonder essentially the same thing about Kit Carson. How on earth that man got around all points of the compass in the frontier west is awe inspiring, but he did it.
By the way, their was only a single British regular at King’s Mountain. It was more of a family squabble. The redcoats who got shot up at Cowpens were marching north from Charleston (on their way to Yorktown, I’m pleased to say).
Cervantes
Two hundred and fifty-six.
Thanks for the video.
Tree With Water
@Cervantes: My kind of guy.
Tim F.
@Cervantes: Fixd. Thanks for the correction!
Bobby B.
“Ode To a Haggis” Great chieftain ‘o the pudding race!
The Other Bob
Happy Birthday to me….kinda.
Signed,
Robert Burns.