Positive Liberty

This is shameful, and I am deeply disappointed to read it. Pam’s House Blend reports,

The Smith College Republicans sponsored a speaking event featuring Ryan Sorba, author of the upcoming book The Born Gay Hoax. After about twenty minutes he was forced to abandon his speech after protesters forced their way into the room and drowned him out. I’ll send videos and articles when they are available, but I thought I’d give you a heads up and ask you to please cover this action. I couldn’t be more proud to be a Smithie right now, after I saw so many amazing young feminists come together to stand up against this asshat and his hate.

I haven’t read the book, but I suspect from the clips I have seen of Mr. Sorba speaking that I probably would disagree with most of it and find the rest of it tendentious nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’m even gay, I’m pretty sure I’ve always been that way, and even that doesn’t matter. This is America, and we don’t answer bad ideas in the public square with violence. The rot in our political culture runs deep these days, and it’s hardly conservatives alone who are responsible (though they are, in part). Real Americans shouldn’t behave this way no matter what policy outcomes they favor.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Sorba was there legally. There is no hint in any of the coverage that I can find on the story that would suggest Sorba was trespassing at the university, however questionable the choice may have been to invite him. A university is a place where people come together precisely so that they may encounter many different ideas, and often highly disagreeable ones. A principled response might have included some non-disruptive demonstration of disagreement, perhaps a few very pointed questions, and maybe a counter-lecture the following day or week aimed at rebutting the claims Mr. Sorba made.

The answer to an event like this is never to shout down the speaker. Not even if it were Hitler himself: Shouting down people you disagree with is the essence of the fascist method, regardless of the message on your lips. It fits badly with civilized behavior and reflects only the protesters’ own lack of faith in their cause.

Whether Mr. Sorba is right or wrong — and privately, I think he’s very likely a loon — what the protesters did here only ended up making him look right. Kudos to Pam’s commentators, who have overwhelmingly agreed that this is not the way to go.

Here’s a fascinating exchange between Kerry Howley and Timothy Sandefur regarding the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (noted previously here and here). I should add that subsequent details about police and court procedure both before and after the raid on the FLDS compound have been very troubling to me, making me doubt my previous, uncomplicated endorsement of the state’s actions.

However, being troubled by both the state and the FLDS does not make one any less a radical for individualism. It’s perfectly conceivable that giving more control to either one means that individualism loses. Highly controlling environments like the FLDS may indeed approach the status of a government, Howley argues, and I’m certainly prepared to think of them this way. But then, there’s an actual government on the scene, too, and it’s worth worrying about that as well.

I’ve also long thought that libertarianism is the most humane way to view adults in society, but that it breaks down when applied to children. This need not be a problem with libertarianism in itself, but only an admission that all great explanatory models have their limits. One simply can’t presume that a child has the autonomy or independent decisionmaking skills necessary to act as an agent of her own self-interest. This is what libertarianism demands of adults, and I believe that virtually all adults can do it, even if many adults aren’t willing to, and even if many others are convinced that they can run other people’s lives just a little bit better. The adults who want to run things they shouldn’t are the more profound or radical challenges to libertarianism; for libertarians, deciding the status of children will always be at best a question of where to draw the borders, not a challenge to the fundamentals.

I don’t have much of a problem, then, in saying that children have a limited set of positive rights — that is, of social obligations that adults need to provide to them, for a limited time, until they reach adulthood. A newborn baby can’t feed itself, after all, and from that point forward children in some sense must have positive rights, otherwise we would simply be bringing them into the world to let them die — an absurdity.

It’s not at all ridiculous to think that children also have to be taught how to use their rationality. They must be taught to speak and to read, at the bare minimum. These things aren’t automatic, and so much less are highly abstract concepts like freedom, justice, or the rule of law.

I am well aware that there is some paradox involved in an authority figure teaching a child to value independence and even to question authority figures. But this kind of teaching is clearly not impossible. Clearly some societies have done a good job of this kind of teaching, while many others have taught near-total submission to authority. To keep the freedoms that we have, it is important that our children learn the values of liberty — among them being able to question received social conventions.

Worth noting: Much of the best children’s and young-adult literature does this very well. Consider “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Horton Hears a Who!” and (though not all) of Robert Heinlein’s young-adult fiction. This is not to say of course that the FLDS is out there teaching their kids — as I will — to think for themselves. It’s only to note that the love of liberty isn’t mystically acquired out of the ether.

Update: Howley responds, reminding readers of the other side of intensively polygynous marriage — the discarded boys. If you don’t throw them out by the dozen, the math just doesn’t add up. She quotes from this AP story:

Damned by his religion, denied by his family and left with nowhere else to go, the teenager slept in a cold tool shed just steps from a company owned by his relatives.

They went home at night to warm, cozy beds while Tom Sam Steed stole bread, cereal and nutrition bars from a gas station just to survive. He tried, several times, to kill himself, convinced that he was worth nothing.

His salvation came when he got a job cleaning carpets and finally left the control of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its leader, Warren Jeffs.

Former members describe a religion that thrives on domination. Every detail of their life was scripted—from plural marriages to what they could wear, who they could associate with and what job they could have. In the last 4 1/2 years, more than 400 teenage boys have been excommunicated, many for seemingly minor infractions such as watching a movie or talking to a girl.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but our society would never tolerate this being done to girls. And I hope this doesn’t sound like overly facile atheism, but our society likewise would never tolerate this if the agent were a business rather than a religion.

I think it would be fantastic if the federal government could be made smaller than, oh, say… this blog.

Achieving my goal would entail a massive decrease in the size of the government, a massive increase in the social resources devoted to this blog (and to compensating the authors!), or some amount of both. Obviously either would be a very good thing.

Yet Technorati says that my dream may already be a reality: In blogosphere influence, this blog is already bigger than the federal government’s blog.

Your tax dollars would like to inform you, in their small, uninfluential voice, that allergies are no fun and — oh the irony — that it sucks to have your wallet stolen. Also, don’t kill the widdle fuzzy aminuls.

Guitar connoisseur Billy Beck inspires this post where he leaves a comment discussing his past work with the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. Most of us have never been so lucky. Vaughn was a blues guitar virtuoso. He wasn’t one of those shredders who played scale like licks and patterns until he was faster than anyone else, but his playing could be just as challenging and virtuostic. Many of the electric guitar virtuosos play relatively thin gauge strings, much easier on your tendons than acoustic guitar strings; many of them can’t razzle or dazzle playing acoustic. Some fusion guitarists like John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola and Steve Morse have outstanding acoustic chops as well. Vaughn apparently played with really heavy gauge electric strings (for the tone), very muscular. His physical power over the instrument shows in this 12 string acoustic version of Pride and Joy. And be sure to check out this one as well.

Tom Van Dyke leaves a thoughtful comment on whether the God of the American Founding is the God of Abraham:

I’m not aware of any other monotheistic, providential Creator God that can be remotely construed to endow man with certain unalienable rights.

All this talk of syncretism must acknowledge that the syncresis took place within a very narrow milieu of a Judeo-Christian European culture with, admittedly, the acknowledged philosophical influence of the Enlightenment and the Greeks [with a dash of the Romans thrown in].

But there is no new God of the Enlightenment except perhaps for man himself, and the gods of the Romans and Greeks are nowhere to be found here except on the edges, and only rhetorically.

The God of the Founding is not a new one, fabricated from whole cloth. He may not be Abraham’s, strictly speaking, but He is none other, either.

I see his point — that though America’s Founders pretended the Native Americans with their “Great Spirit,” the Hindus, the pagan-Greco-Romans, and other non-Judeo-Christian faiths worshipped a common “Providence,” carefully examining the attributes of these non-Judeo-Christian deities belies such a notion. Michael Novak makes a similar point that an active, personal, intervening monotheistic God is uniquely characteristic of Judaism and Christianity (he doesn’t add Islam, but I will). Continue Reading »

Writing for the Village Voice (!), reviewer J. Hoberman says Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay “is a largely mind-numbing experience.”

[Insert obvious and entirely unnecessary stoner joke here.]

Letting their freak flags fly in the most mainstream of Mainstream Media, Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (which one is Felix and which is Oscar?) grace the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with a paean to Dallas. No, not the next door neighbor of the NFL’s soon-to-be Arlington Cowboys, but the execrable prime time soap opera that premiered 30 years ago and, as Gillespie and Welch would have it, helped the West win the Cold War and, alas, abetted the political ascension of George W. Bush. Every silver lining must have its cloud, I suppose.

Dallas’s contribution to the decline of both communism and presidential “couthness” aside, one point Gillespie and Welch failed to mention was how much the Ewing’s iconic Southfork Ranch was and still is a Potemkin Village. The ‘Mansion’ at Southfork Ranch is in fact a 4800 sq. ft. house with a 960 sq. ft. enclosed garage. Hardly a hovel but frankly smallish by comparison with some nearby Plano, TX neighborhoods and positively snug compared to the actual Dallas’s ostentatious Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Southfork serves today as a conference center and tourist attraction. I admit to not having made the trek, myself; but my wife has been to several events there and, at the risk of putting words in her mouth, described the facility as surprisingly small and unimpressive. Then again, having been chauffeured through a part of rural Russia a few years ago where our driver pulled over to negotiate at length, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with a roadside truck stand selling cabbage, what impresses is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dallas may have been, as Texans are wont to say, all hat and no cattle, but at least it showed the rest of the world what it was like to live in America always having more than enough cabbage.

A reader recently bemoaned the tendency of some actors to take virtually any role, and it must certainly be admitted that some have made poor career choices over the years. Then, too, some actors simply get hot for a while and, having wandered in the wilderness for so long, understandably cash in while the cashing in is good. For example, there was a time not so long ago when it seemed like Samuel L. Jackson was in every new movie almost by act of law. And one would have to note that the admittedly quirky but wonderfully talented Michael Keaton, once considered as bright a star as Tom Hanks, has done himself no great favor by taking some of the roles he has played over the years.

But probably no other working actor can seriously rival the now seventy-five year old Michael Caine when it comes to his thoroughly working-class attitude toward his career. “You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one,” he’s been quoted as saying. It isn’t true, of course, especially if people begin to believe you’re the reason the film is bad; but, still, he has a point. Having already acted in nearly forty movies before his mid-1960s breakout roles in The Ipcress File and Alfie, Caine has gone on to work in nearly a hundred movies since. “I’ve made an awful lot of films. In fact, I’ve made a lot of awful films.” Indeed he has. Then again, only Jack Nicholson can also brag of having been nominated for an acting Oscar in every decade since the 1960s. Caine has been nominated four times for best leading actor and won twice for best supporting actor in Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) and The Cider House Rules (1999).

Caine once famously contended that his fellow British actors Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris were all drunks whose love of the bottle had harmed their careers. There is certainly some truth to this, at least in the case of the wonderfully double-phallic monikered O’Toole. Still, Richard Harris’s retort that Caine was “an over-fat, flatulent … windbag, a master of inconsequence now masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues” probably served as good publicity for both men. And say whatever ill you might about Michael Caine, he never subjected the world to anything nearly as hideous as Harris’s tortured ’singing’ of MacArthur Park.

In 2007, Caine pretty much closed the circle of his career, playing Andrew to Jude Law’s Milo in a regrettably forgettable remake of Harold Pinter’s Sleuth. Thirty-five years earlier, Caine played Milo to Laurence Olivier’s Andrew in the far better 1972 original film version. Oh well. Another day, another dollar.

Yet another small movie Caine filmed in 2007 but which was only recently and not widely released is Flawless. As heist movies, period movies or Demi Moore movies go, probably the most significant thing about Flawless is that it conclusively marks Moore’s transition in her mid-forties to more, well, more mature roles. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Lord knows Moore is a talented enough actor to deserve that sort of second-stage career usually denied most screen actresses and CV thinks she is quite good here. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with and much to commend about Flawless, including a fine performance by the under-appreciated Joss Ackland. But what makes the movie so much more fun than, taken as a whole, it probably should is Caine’s wonderful and seemingly effortless performance. (CV won’t stoop to calling it flawless; even CV has some standards!) You’ll probably miss Flawless at the Bijou, but it’s worth a rental when the DVD is released just to appreciate Caine’s quiet mastery of his trade.

How fun it must be to wake up in the morning as a seventy-five year old and know that as long as your physical and mental health hold out there are films still to be made, a job of work yet to be done for which, by the way, the pay ain’t half bad. Later this year Caine will reprise his role as Batman’s butler, Alfred. It’s not, perhaps, the sort of role one could ever imagine seeing Burton or Olivier play. But John Gielgud, another English actor whose Hamlet was considered better than Burton’s or Olivier’s and who won an Oscar in his mid-70s playing a butler, went on acting for nearly another 20 years after that. After all, as the Prince of Denmark was so fond of saying, the play’s the thing.

88 Minutes opened last week to what can only be called abysmal reviews, earning Metacritic’s Critic composite score of 17 out of 100 with a barely better User rating of 2 out of 10. For example, the New York Post’s Kyle Smith writes that “88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.”

This leads Constant Viewer to assume, by the way, that Kyle Smith is among the vast majority of Americans who never actually watched Gigli and who, thankfully, long ago forgot Scent of a Woman. However, having now actually watched 88 Minutes, CV is nonetheless inclined to find fault in Mr. Smith’s clever summary only in that 88 Minutes barely qualifies as a movie at all.

Let’s be clear about this: if Al Pacino was not in this movie, it would be neck and neck with Paris Hilton’s laughably pathetic The Hottie and The Nottie in opening box office gross receipts. As it is, a couple more dogs like this and Mr. Pacino might just as well co-star with Ms Hilton in a sequel to her sex tape yelling “Hoo Haw!” as he rides her like an anorexic bucking bronco.

But enough of 88 Minute’s high points, let us move on to note its screenplay, which is complete rubbish, and its directing, which is painfully inept. If CV didn’t know better, he’d think both screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson and director Jon Avnet were pseudonyms for M. Night Shyamalan.

Picture, if you will, a rich and famous forensic psychiatrist — because, as we all know, the big money in medicine is in giving expert testimony for the prosecution in serial killers’ trials — situated in Seattle because, aside from some family unpleasantness back in New York, all that coffee makes Seattle’s high serial killer population unusually jittery and thus more likely to throw Pacino’s character some business. Beautiful, young women throw themselves at him because, um, because, well, maybe because he’s a rich and famous doctor and then again maybe just because he’s Al Pacino, whose 68th birthday just happens to be today and who thirty-five years ago looked like Michael Corleone.

Public servant to the end, our hero divides his time between his fabulously successful and ultra modern private forensic psychiatry practice complete with beautiful lesbian administrative assistant and his teaching gig at Northern Washington University. (How bad does a film have to be before Seattle’s University of Washington refuses the free publicity of letting its name be used? Whatever the benchmark, 88 Minutes easily surpasses it.) Sure he’s a hard grader but he’s also a hard partier, gosh darn it, and his students, who are all so physically attractive that they got a wonderful group deal on Apple Power Macs, include a young and beautiful teaching assistant. Alas, our hero soon discovers that one of his not quite yet executed serial killers oddly enough still holds a grudge against him and, as they say in the trade, preposterous complications ensue.

The best thing that can be said about 88 Minutes is that it provides 108 minutes worth of distractions. The viewer is distracted, for example, from the completely incredible plot by the outrageously over-the-top acting, then suddenly distracted by the stilted and entirely unrealistic dialog, only to be distracted by the awkward camera work and so on and so forth until, in what seems like little more than four or five hours, 88 Minutes is finally over. Hoo Haw!

My buddy Jay informs me that Kenneth Keith Kallenbach has died at 39.

A member of Stern’s “Wack Pack”, he was like a real life Beavis and Butthead, and is interesting only to folks who are amused by the modern-day “carnival” like atmosphere of the Stern show. Here is the first time Kallenbach was on the Stern show.

Libertarians might be familiar with Kallenbach. While Stern ran for governor of New York under the Libertarian Party ticket, Kallenbach seconded Stern’s nomination at the convention after Fred the Elephant Boy. As Nick Gillespie recounted the event:

Kallenbach seemed less interested in the nominating process per se than in sharing personal thoughts with the crowd. After nominating Stern, he produced a large rubber phallus and repeatedly asked the incredulous audience, “Hey, who wants to see my dildo, who wants to see my dildo?”

May he rest in peace.

Here is the first chapter from John Dilulio’s “Godly Republic.”

I agree that his centrist-civil religion approach is consistent with America’s Founding (that America’s public institution’s presuppose a Supreme Being, and therefore supplications to such ought to be constitutional). However, I think the scholarly case made by such figures as Steven Waldman and Jon Meacham is more accurate. Here is Dilulio’s thesis:

The truth, however, is that present-day America is blessed to be in religious terms pretty much what Madison and most of the other framers intended it to be. It is a godly republic with governmental institutions that (as Justice Douglas phrased it) “presuppose” monotheistic belief in the “Supreme Being” known to Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the God of Abraham. It is a godly republic that affords a special civic status to nondenominational and interfaith (God-centered) religious expression. It is a godly republic that respects, promotes, and protects religious pluralism: Methodists, Muslims, Mormons, and all other faiths are welcome. It is a godly republic in which both the Constitution and federal laws prohibit government from discriminating against citizens who profess no faith at all (atheists have the same constitutional standing as Anglicans) or who are actively, but peacefully, hostile to all religion or to all church-state collaboration (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is no more or less entitled to tax-exempt nonprofit status than the National Association of Evangelicals).

Continue Reading »

Divided We Stand supports divided government. I do too — divided government slows things down, and we desperately need to slow down the pace of government encroachment into civil society.

But here’s the dilemma, and it’s not an easy one:

The libertarian swing vote, organized around the concept of divided government, was instrumental in determining the outcome of the 2006 mid-term election. If this election becomes a Democratic Party rout, then the libertarian swing vote simply will not matter, it’ll just get swamped. However, if it is a close election, it could be determinative in 2008 as it was in 2006. If - and it is a big “If” - the libertarian swing vote remains consistent and committed to divided government. While it is the right question to ask, I suggest it is too early to ask it. We need to get past the Democratic primary sideshow, find out who the candidate will be, and learn whether events in Basra will overtake the the campaigns.

MW of Divided We Stand also frames the question by quoting Todd Seavey as follows:

So, to my libertarian friends who are either indifferent to the Dem/GOP distinction or who actively root for “divided government”: Are you still happier with a Democratic rather than Republican Congress after the Dems’ torpedoing of a free trade deal with Colombia — the sort of deal that at least some of my Dem/GOP-indifferent libertarian pals have rightly pointed to as more important than tiny variations in the size of the federal budget and thus a good indicator of whether the government is moving in the right direction? And if you still prefer divided government, are you consistent enough to be eagerly rooting for McCain rather than for NAFTA-bashing Obama/Clinton? Or, if not, are you de facto supporters of the Democrats (and thus opponents of trade — and thus not clearly libertarians) when you get right down to it?”

It’s a tough question. It’s worth noting that some libertarians incline against free trade via treaties and would have us just unilaterally drop all of our own trade barriers, regardless of what other countries may do. These libertarians’ economic case is rock-solid, but their practical political sense amounts to a lot of wishful thinking. I tend to favor trade deals of the type that recently failed, because even incremental improvements still make a real difference in the well-being of actual human individuals. Trade isn’t purely a theoretical matter, and if it means helping more poor people right now, then I’m all for it. I’m likewise very disappointed at both Obama and Clinton on NAFTA, and on this issue I find myself wishing that Bill, rather than Hillary, were the one running for president.

But all this ignores an important and maybe decisive issue, regardless of what one thinks about trade — the war in Iraq. I do not think that continuing this war does much to help anyone, whether here, or in Iraq, or anywhere else, except perhaps that it helps the leadership of Iran. It may in fact be worth voting against a free-trade candidate if it ends the war sooner rather than later. This is a difficult dilemma, and saying that libertarians are anti-free trade for being anti-war is rather like remarking on the generosity of the man who hands over his wallet rather than being stabbed. Neither is an appealing alternative, but the menu of choices… is limited.

I have to say I’m very angry that the Democrats in Congress have done squat to get us out out of Iraq. On this I may also be a victim of wishful thinking (kinda goes with being a libertarian, I hear), but it’s possible that if the Dems had the White House too, we would see an end to the war during the next administration. It’s not definite, but it’s far more likely I think than with McCain as president.

So… depending on one’s priorities, a libertarian swing voter who assumes the Democrats will extend their control of Congress has two choices:

a) Divided government, with McCain as president, NAFTA likely unchallenged, no new trade treaties forthcoming (thanks, Democrats!), and the Iraq War continuing indefinitely. The Republican “security” state marches on unbowed.

b) Unified government, with Obama as the likely president, NAFTA facing a challenge of yet-to-be-determined strength, a socialized healthcare bill that will be deeply repugnant to every libertarian political principle, and the Iraq War possibly — gosh we hope — coming to its inevitable end sooner rather than later.

When you throw in McCain’s antilibertarian views on campaign finance, national greatness, and the like, the choice is (yet again) Southparkesque. (Footnote: McCain in office with a veto-proof Democratic majority may yield many of the bad effects of McCain-Bushism as well as a socialized healthcare bill, and great harms done to free trade, both passed over the president’s veto. This would be the worst of all worlds.)

Seavey adds:

I would just like occasional acknowledgment, though, of the fact that the Dems are the consciously anti-market party, not just the hypocritically-and-absent-mindedly-statist party that the GOP is becoming.

But I don’t think that the Republicans are being absent minded. And if they are being hypocritical, then we should be doubly disappointed in them, because at least they know the case for small-government well enough to fake it, and this ought to mean that they are capable of understanding it. Further, libertarians should want to punish anyone who gives their philosophy a bad name. (Would that this were applied more consistently, and to certain minor parties as well as the major ones, but there I go again with that wishful thinking stuff.)

Yet Seavey is completely right that there’s a strong divided-government case to be made for voting for McCain, a case I made some months ago about a different but also distasteful Republican.

The simple answer is that none of the candidates are appealing, that they are bad for different reasons, that to my mind McCain is the worst of the lot, but that we don’t have a Republican-controlled Congress that would make voting for a Democrat the divided-government strategy.

Now for two easy dodges. You’ll thank me for not taking either of them:

1. I live in Maryland, which goes to the Democrat no matter what I do.

2. I can’t rule out voting for (or against) the yet-to-be-determined Libertarian candidate.

And the final verdict is… I’m still undecided. Divided government is a very, very powerful incentive to vote Republican, but it may well be the only one.

Via Eyeteeth, well on its way to becoming my favorite midsized blog:

CNN has launched a new feature that allows online readers to get t-shirts made from headlines. Just click on the icon beside certain headlines to order. But I noted yesterday that not all heads could be printed off and sold. Was it a matter of taste? Apparently not. While, appropriately, one couldn’t make a t-shirt from yesterday’s sad headline about the Coast Guard finding the bodies of 20 Haitians floating near the Bahamas, one could make one bearing news of a local tragedy, the Belle Plaines man who accidentally shot and killed his son while hunting. (Shirts can only be purchased as long as headlines are in the front page “latest news” section; these two stories are not any longer.) A more likely reason is that perhaps only CNN’s proprietary stories, as opposed to wire pieces, can be made into tees.

This is a real pity. Other recent headlines in the “Latest News” category include…

National Snoring Week
All Hail the King of Comedy Kung Fu
Cops: Gangster video stars gun-waving granny

…and my personal favorite…

One Word to Describe Your Mom

None, alas, are t-shirtable, or I’d be placing some orders. Wouldn’t want to document the decline and fall of the American intellect, now would we?

The Alabama homebrewer visited by ABC agents has given up the hobby, a local beer activism bulletin board reports:

Scott [Oberman] met with the agent and was told that there was a complaint filed in Montgomery. He was given a copy of the Alabama code and that was pretty much the end of it. However, he has decided to give up homebrewing until such time as it is legal. Now that he is on the radar, he has too much to lose if they decide to make another visit.

It’s enough to make a northerner want to travel down south (not necessarily on a bus), set up some brewing equipment, and systematically break the law.

A commenter named hupur inspired this. He commented on a post featuring Gary Moore’s cover of Roy Buchanan’s “The Messiah Will Come Again.” Reading their opinions in the comments, I don’t get the how Sandefur, Brayton and Matt Kuznicki don’t “get” Gary Moore’s authentic bluesiness.

Well here is another try. The following is a truly beautiful song Gary Moore did with the late Phil Lynott while they were in Thin Lizzy - “Parisienne Walkways.” This was taken from Moore’s solo tour after Thin Lizzy disbanded and shortly before Lynott died (this may be one of Lynott’s last recorded performances). Moore’s playing/phrasing is obviously inspired by Buchanan here as well.