N.Z Bear (the other newly and happily married guy…) has launched the amazing and – as we say in California – bitchen’ new ecosystem/ blog data site at www.truthlaidbear.com.

He’s a resource to us all, which is why he’s been a Blogosphere Medal of Service listee on our blogroll for a long, long time. And he’s a nice guy.

Are you in Southern California? Want to meet Armed Liberal and TG and be amazed by some culture while you’re doing it?

In my spare time, I am on the board of the Long Beach Opera – a local avant-garde opera company – “an edgy, endlessly creative little company,” as the Orange County Register puts it.

Saturday June 11, at 2 and 8pm they will present their production of Kurt Weill & Berthold Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera.” Sunday at 2pm, they will present Handel’s “Semele.”

Their season so far has been great – and don’t believe me just because I’m on the board.

The L.A. Times’ Marc Swed on Semele:

“Handel’s opera (first given as an oratorio only because the opera business wasn’t so good in 1744) is a morality tale. And in this brilliantly bratty, cynically clever production, mean Texas oilmen and their vain women who thought themselves godlike are shown, in fact, to be gods and goddesses — the vainglorious ones of Greek myth.”

OC Register on Semele:

“Long Beach Opera, an edgy, endlessly creative little company, has gone and done what would seem impossible. It has taken Handel’s 1744 opera/oratorio “Semele,” with its superannuated libretto by William Congreve involving battling gods, the mortals who get in their way and rhyming couplets, and turned it into “Dallas” with better music. What could have been an endless evening of secco recitatives and da capo arias in pretty costumes – and characters exchanging such Yoda-esque pith as “O Prodigy, to me of dire Portent!,” “To me, I hope, of fortunate Event” – becomes an evening of clever, amusing and compelling theater that keeps a viewer guessing what will happen next.”

Patterico joined us at a performance of Winterreisse, and called it “…a performance that really, really worked — due in large part to Werner’s charismatic performance, as well as his excellent voice.”

The Times liked the production as well, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram said:

“…the result is a musical drama, not quite perhaps an opera, of stunning musical and dramatic beauty, presented in a refined, simple and effective production that used subtle lighting, minimalist furnishing and props and Schubert’s extraordinarily beautiful music to tell a story of grand passion, sadness, loneliness and grief. Two performances remain this week, and if you are the kind of music lover who wants to see history in the making, this is your chance.”

But enough appeals to authority. I’ve been a fan of LBO’s for almost ten years, and find that everything they’ve done has been imaginative and surprising – the opposite of the boring opera that so many expect and too often get at the mainstream opera houses.

Come out Saturday night and see Threepenny Opera or Sunday afternoon and see Semele and meet me and TG.

Call the Carpenter Center box office at (562) 985-7000.

Brave the 405. Come out and see some opera that will surprise you.

Leave a comment or drop an email if you’re thinking of coming out.

[Update: Kevin answers with a crushing blow via Prudhoe Bay…]

I’ve been following Kevin Drum’s excellent series on ‘peak oil’ with a lot of interest; I think that Kevin’s interest in the strategic issues around energy policy is appropriate and significant.

But I’m less certain that his point – that we’re at or near an absolute level of peak oil production, and that an absolute decline in oil produced matched with increasing demand from an industrializing Asia risks severe economic dislocation – stands up.

I’m not an oil economist, but my guess is that as technology improves and prices rise, supplies do move upward. And we don’t eat oil. Economic efficiency – the unit of productivity per BTU – just keeps moving up.This weekend, I noticed a casual side note in an article about a local oil company, Occidental Petroleum:

Although the U.S. fields are mature, Occidental is known for using cutting-edge technologies to find more oil and pull it from the ground. It’s a key reason why its reserves keep growing faster than its production.

Take Elk Hills. When Occidental bought the field seven years ago from the U.S. government, its proven reserves were the equivalent of 425 million barrels of oil. Since then, the company has produced about 235 million equivalent barrels, yet its proven reserves now total 462 million barrels.

Occidental credits an aggressive program that included using 3D seismic surveys to find oil, drilling 1,200 new wells on the property and injecting water, carbon dioxide and acid into wells to stimulate output.

This doesn’t put paid to the concept of peak oil, nor to the very real issues our over-reliance on oil and particularly imported oil presents to our economy, environment, and security.

But my guess is that the notion of commodity catastrophe – one that has been raised since the 18th century – is one that takes place gradually, not in the short time span that leads to social collapse.

In a simple form, the auto dealership row near our home is a good example of that gradual change. All the SUV’s have promotional pricing on them. Good riddance.

If you’ve read my stuff for a while, or participated in one of my discussion threads, you’ll know that to me, one of the core values I promote is civility; we may disagree – even violently – but we acknowledge each other as human and worthwhile, and accept that we’re “in this together” – we’re all part of a civitas, or as defined from Latin (a) a community of citizens, a body-politic, a state, and (b) the condition of a citizen, citizenship, membership in the community. We’re all members of this political and social community, and we need to remember that.

That’s an important political value for me, and this morning I just had my face rubbed in why it’s an important social and intellectual one as well.

I may have grown a little bit today, and that’s my good news.I’m in New York for some family business, and this morning had breakfast with Adam Bellow…yes, that Adam Bellow. Through Roger, he’s come up with some genius ideas for Pajamas and the intersection of blogging and publishing. TG and I met him this morning to discuss them, which is a post for another day.

Today, as we wrapped up our discussion, I felt I had to apologize for the tone of my posts. When we’d arranged to meet, I’d suggested to the friends we’re staying with that I hoped he hadn’t actually read what I’d written about him. But after such a positive meeting, I felt I couldn’t avoid responsibility for what I’d written, and apologized for the tone of it.

Adam laughed, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a copy of the book he’d obviously meant to give me as a parting gift.

TG insisted that he sign it, which he did.

He suggested that the Atlantic article and oped which I’d lambasted didn’t fairly represent his premise, and suggested that I read the whole thing and see what I thought.

And lest you think I’m a whore for free books (why yes, I am) the real point to make is this:

When you disagree with people, it’s dangerous to do so in terms that – while seductively self-confident – really move to end debate, rather than encourage it. I don’t like it when people do that in discussions, I don’t like it when people do it on televisions or in opeds, and – in retrospect – I particularly don’t like it when I do it.

I may or may not change my views on nepotism when I’ve read the whole book. I have changed my views on what tone is acceptable to take in debating the issue, and I hope that my small reconciliation is something that leads all of you to think about your style of argument as well.

“When this movie is over, you’ll forget me. The only ones who will remember are us.”

– from Gunner Palace

It’s Memorial Day weekend, and as usual, we’re spending it in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on a motorcycle-riding weekend with our friends.

It’s funny how in small towns, this weekend means more than it does at home in the city, where it’s largely an excuse for a long weekend. They seem to remember things better, for some reason.

One of my personal projects is learning to remember better as well.This weekend is set aside as a holiday to encourage us to remember the simple fact that we have what we have today – freedom, prosperity, hope – because people sacrificed their lives for it.

Today, we are asking people to sacrifice themselves so that our children and the children of others can have those things, and it’s important that we not ignore the harsh reality of that sacrifice and make sure to always ask ourselves whether the things we will gain are worth the cost.

This isn’t the place – the post – for that debate. But it is the place to take a moment and remember what the debate is really about, outside our egos and our politics and words.

It’s about the men and women who gave everything – and those who risked giving everything – for us and ask more than anything that we remember them.

Roger Simon is working out some questions about Pajamas Media in public over on his site – “What is Fair and Balanced?” – a discussion and comment thread which came to the interesting conclusion that a better motto would be “honest and transparent” as well as “How can we be an online Joe Friday?” If you haven’t already, go over and join the conversation.

I’ll comment on the broader meta-issue which I think is important, which is Pajamas’ commitment to take some of the basic questions and exercise them in public. I am and have been a big believer in dialog – both in terms of using this blog as a way of triggering and promoting dialog (as opposed to pronouncements) and in terms of the power of blogs in general as being the power of dialog.

In my day job as a technology manager, I’ve been introducing the concepts of ‘open-ended’ solutions which we can distribute to be developed from the bottom up rather than trying constantly to build them from the top down.

I’ve spread a lot of copies of fellow firearms owner Eric Raymond’s work around – specifically the updated versions of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar.’

He has a great chapter title in it – “How Many Eyeballs Tame Complexity”. He’s talking about testing and QA specifically, but the same principle, carefully applied, can also help resolve complex business and social issues.

How do you test and grow ideas within a community? How do you keep the community broad and inclusive enough not to become an echo chamber while keeping it cohesive enough to make sure that all points of view are listened to?

I’ll throw those out as my questions about something like Pajamas Media, and I’m obviously interested in what folks have to say.

I saw a screening of Revenge of the Sith this week. No tickets, no waiting, free snacks, $1 for parking.

I paid too much.

I’ll have to see it again with the boys, but I can still save you.I haven’t seen acting or dialog this wooden since the last porn or traffic safety film I saw. The porn was less boring, because it was shorter, better acted, and involved gratuitous nudity. I had to sit through the traffic safety film because I was in traffic school. The effects don’t save it, because they make up in laborious effort what they lack in grandeur.

Even great actors like Ewan McGregor and Sam Jackson get buried in this. Jackson dies with a look of gratitude on his face…”I’m finally out of the picture!” I imagined him thinking.

Wait for the highlight reel of lightsaber fights. Don’t wait in line.

“Here then are these facts, as we know them without his help. In 1998, Galloway founded something, easily confused with a charity, known as the Mariam Appeal.”

Christopher Hitchens, in the Weekly Standard

Ali – ‘A Free Iraqi’ – has a telling post up about perception and media. And perception without media.

Go read the whole thing. Especially the last part of the interview.

I challenged conservative historian Niall Ferguson’s misinterpretation of World War II’s cost below; Robin Burk added a great precis of Walzer on war afterwards.

But it takes one of the original idiotarians, Pat Buchanan, to misinterpret the end of that war.

Stephen Green shows Buchanan for the fool his arguments make him. My favorite line:

It took 40 years, but today Pat Buchanan hit bottom on the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte.