Odysseus Found?

Like Pejman, I will take this story with a grain of salt. But fun to think about Ithaka.

Hillary Concerned about Free Speech on Internet

From Drudge: "I don't have any clue about what we're going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically -- I don't have a clue. But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance."

Meaning her interests, no doubt. Honestly, I do not like the sound of this. Wonder whether she might like the Chinese approach.

Choooo chooo

Good timeline of railroad history. And the Central Pacific Railroad photo history website.

Man thinks; God laughs.

Yiddish saying

Admiral Nelson's t-shirt

and other personal items to be auctioned. His undershirt expected to bring $500,000. Says Sotheby's re the Admiral:

"He was remarkably brave in battle, but he also wanted recognition for this, and was remarkably weak in his personal life," Grist said. "He'd face the French and Spanish fleet much easier than he would face his first wife."

Who wouldn't? Piece here.

Canada's GunScam, at Captain Ed

Killer Dolphins Missing?  At Ex-Donk.

Howler reports on Ed Decker. Who he? Find out, and watch Howler rip the poor soul a new one.

Photos from the Anti-War protest

Photos here. Gives you a good sense of who these people are. Thanks, Powerline. Protest posting from No OIl, too. Definitely Moonbats on Parade - their signs are revealing. Respectful disagreement, people?

The Coalition Against Civilization

Even wackier than the anti-war crowd. Thanks, LGF

Men outnumbered by women on campus. This has got to be fun for the guys, unless half the women are transgender whatevers. At Instapundit

Dylan Fest

Seven short Dylan-related videos at BBC. And BBC's Dylan page here.

You can follow the "Endless Tour" here.

A piece by Scott, and a special Dylan page at The Independent.

Mark your calendars, if you have not done so already. The Scorsese film "No Direction Home" will be on PBS Sept. 26 and 27. The DVD should be available around Sept. 20 on Amazon. The No Direction Home CD is available at Amazon. The Gaslight CD is at Starbucks.

The Dylanologist and I were talking yesterday, wondering why Dylan has quit his guitar and returned to his first instrument, piano. We decided it was whim - not arthritis, as has been speculated. We also wondered whether his current touring band will ever reach the heights of his past bands. And we decided that, regardless of the interest in the Scorsese film, we'd be more interested in a current documentary about this fascinating and enigmatic character.

An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto one blade of grass to keep from falling off the earth.

Irish Saying

Matthew 21: 23-32

And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching and said "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" Jesus answered them "I will also give you a question; and if you will tell me the answer, then I will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?" And they argued with one another, saying "If we answer 'from heaven', then he will say to us 'Then why did you not believe him?'  But if we say 'From men,' we are afraid of the multitude; for all hold that John was a prophet." So they answered Jesus "We do not know." And he said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things."

"What do you think? A man had two sons, and he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' And he answered 'I will not'; but afterwards he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir', but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him; and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him."

Photo of the Norfolk, CT, Congregational Church, on a rainy day

Flood Insurance

Pennywit revisits the issue, one which always deserves revisiting. Morgagees must always have it - what bank would not insist? There is a larger question: Why do local governments permit building on flood plains and coastlines where flooding is certain? Well, we know the answer: It's about development and real estate. My opinion: I hate the idea that my taxes might be subsidizing insurance that permits people to live in zones where commercial insurors are unwilling to assume the risk. In the part of Cape Cod that I tend to visit, we see houses disappear into the ocean every winter. There's an expression: "Cape Cod Real Estate - Going Fast." The Atlantic is eroding the shoreline at an average of 3 feet per year. Got to accept nature's power.

A Link between Warming and Hurricanes?

Nope, reports Grist magazine hurricane expert.

Why Citizens must be Armed, #2

Part 1 here. Part 2 here - thanks, Instapundit.

Cancelling the New York Times

I read the Times since a kid (yeah, one of those uncool kids), and I have gotten my own daily NYT since a callow youth in prep school. It arrived on a huge library table, labeled by name, each morning as you entered the main building on the way from morning Chapel to the dining hall. (Back then, about half of us got the NY Herald Tribune and half the NYT, and each half viewed the other half as benighted.) It has been part of my daily morning life ever since, wherever I have lived.

 But I have had enough of their propaganda, their selective choice of facts, their tilting of front page stories, their condescension, the smugly virtuous attitude, their preference for sentiment over economic facts, the predictably party-line editorials, their writers' total ignorance of even introductory statistics (they seem to hire people who can write, but who don't know anything about history, math, economics, science, warfare, or anything else), and, finally, their embarassing op-ed team which is as deficient in common sense and in respect for the USA as it is in testosterone. The NYT is no longer the "newspaper of record," but a loyal agent (or "useful idiot"?) of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, stuck in a combination of moldy rhetoric of the 1960s, the moldy statist politics of the 1930s, the cocktail party anti-American "radical chic" of the goofy, cocaine-addled NYC of the 1970s, and adolescent-style reflexive anti-traditionalism. Test it for yourself: How long has it been since you have been surprised by a NYT editorial? How long since a NYT editorial has provoked you to thought? Q.E.D.

For this post, I had saved about ten recent examples of the above, but decided that would be beating a dead horse, and their editorial on John Roberts pushed me over the edge: it was indistinguishable from a Scrapple Face satire of the NYT. They have a socio-political agenda, and do not let confusing facts or intellectual integrity get in their way...I guess they imagine that they are in the noble vanguard of something wonderful (!), but sometimes I think they aren't even aware of what they are doing, because their prejudice is second nature. They have become a joke, but they don't know it yet. I hope they are beginning to get the joke, because newspapers are fine things. "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

I kept putting the deed off, like delaying putting down a sick old dog, but I finally I cut the cord this week. But I cheat a little: I can read the Tuesday Science Times online, and I kept the delivery of the Sunday for the Book Review, etc. Plus folks email me pieces I should see. For those who need a New York newspaper to survive, try The New York Sun. They are equally good at letting you know what music, dance, gallery shows, restaurants, etc. you are missing, and they do not throw curve balls.

Well, I am not alone. I had an elegant dinner at the home of long-time NYC Democrats last night, prominent in NYC business and politics and charity, supporters of the arts, but old-style Dems - Moynihan Dems, JFK Dems. Smart, lovely, gracious, refined people who would not consider the Clintons to be socially appropriate, but might vote for them. The hostess confessed to me that she had cancelled their NYT too, and replaced it with the Sun. I was amazed. The same week, this story comes out. Other newspapers may blame their circulation declines on a number of causes, but everyone I know who has quit it has done so for the same reasons I have, and with a similar reluctance and a similar feeling of abandoning an old companion - but why begin one's day agitated by a newspaper's transparently biased and manipulative decisions?

To paraphrase Reagan, I did not leave the NYT; the NYT left me. I do not miss it, yet, anyway. Give me the whole truth, people of the NYT, with knowledge and fact rather than partisan opinion and propaganda behind it, and I will come back home to you, old gal.

Here's the hard part - Stop the ACLU's Trackback Party.

Unbelievable

Chirac's face on new Palestinian stamp. Atlas.

Told Ya So

Anyone who would live in New Orleans is a Total Moron and deserves these consequences. Make it a national park for ducks and gators, and ivorybills. Or a Disney thing to celebrate Cajun coonass culture - best food in the USA. Let the mighty Mississippi run wherever it wants to. Or, hey, move back in...there's always next year to ride your roof again.

Someone, please tell me why I should support such below-sea-level idiocy with my taxes...this isn't just below normal sea-level, it's below normal IQ level.

And for those Brit idiots who blame US-caused global warming for hurricanes, check here.

And for those scumbags like Rangel and Mr. Hillary who attack Bush for hurricanes, check here.

And hey, you ignorant emailers who never sucked the yellow fat out of a crawfish shell - learn about coonass.

Time to Cash in on your Blog?

Who wouldn't want to? WSJ has story today. We will entertain any offers over ten million for Maggie's Farm, as of today. Cash only. I told you we were cyber-sluts.

Update: 24 hours and still no emails with offers to buy...I do not understand that at all.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

P. J. O'Rourke

You may be an ambassador to England or France,
You may like to gamble, you may like to dance,
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

From Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody, on Slow Train Coming 

Bird Dog's New Nephew

Nathaniel is famous already with this Maggie's debut, with a Keith Richards hairdo and Yoda mannerisms, and getting used to a windy Cape Cod beach a couple of weeks ago.

Nat? Gnat? Nate? Yoda?

May the Force be with you, little fella.

Smallest robots built by Dartmouth researchers.  

Positive review of Stones new album: A Bigger Bang. In The Week.

Soros is back. Is this guy an American citizen and, if so, why?

Why engineering is a lousy career path, by Kern at TCS.

The Krugman Report, by Luskin.

Merkel's failure: Not much of a politician, I guess. NYT

VDH on Katrina Reporting:

There you have one of the media's favorite devices for disguising opinion as news, one on display in the coverage of the disaster in New Orleans. At the very height of the disaster reporters solicited opinions from people about what was happening and why, and unsurprisingly, the majority of poor black people asked said Bush and the federal government were to blame, a perception echoed by Democrats and black politicians for obvious partisan reasons. These perceptions of reality were then reported day after day, and not long after there followed the “scientific” poll to solicit even more perceptions based on the earlier perceptions publicized by the media. The result is then reported as news, and thus through the magic of media alchemy subjective perceptions become facts in the minds of many.

Read entire predictably good piece.

Darkness at Noon

Hitchins has done us a favor by highlighting Arthur Koestler in Slate magazine. Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who spent much of his life searching for something to believe in: Marxism, Zionism, hedonism, and who ultimately committed suicide. His disillusionment with Marxism resulted in the anti-Stalinist Darkness at Noon which is, or was, on every high school reading list.

A couple of quotes from Hitchin's piece:

From the first page of Darkness at Noon you become aware that the daily realization of impending execution is a powerful stimulus, both to reflection and to fatalism. Koestler's chief character, Nicholas Rubashov, is modeled on those former Bolshevik intellectuals who made full "confessions" of fantastic and abominable crimes at the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. And, because Koestler had by no means forgotten what he had learned about the dialectic, he decided to place Rubashov in a dilemma from which he himself had escaped. What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be "historically" right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide.

Another:

Orwell's more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don't just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them.

One more:

Throughout the novel, Koestler is at pains to stress the similarity of totalitarianism to religion and to make the related comparison between dissent and heresy. It was actually his co-editor, Richard Crossman, who came up with the title The God That Failed for the anthology that included the ex-communists Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and many others. Memorable though the title proved to be, a better one might have been Another God That Failed. For the rest of his life, Koestler swung between various forms of rationalism and pseudo-science. He was one of those people who is so intelligent and polymathic—and, one suspects, so easily bored—that no topic could detain him for long.

Read the whole thing.

Rita Update

Go to Stormtrack for details. And scroll down a bit to see his school bus posting.

More Tax Revenue

Since our so-called conservatives have become big-govt conservatives, Kudlow offers the solution.

Why Citizens Need to be Armed, Part 18

Right equals Might explains it, in NO

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

Walt Whitman