Piper's fault was thinking that twitter is a proper medium to communicate anything serious.

I find even the boilerplate "sympathy" tweets--"Our prayers for the victims," for example--to be embarrassing. They are indications of vanity more than anything else: a desire to be seen as on the "right side" of some development.

It's beyond me how anyone could hear of a disaster like this, and think to himself, "Here's a chance for me to tweet!" If that's the way you think, you deserve whatever scorn comes your way, no matter how "right" or "wrong" the sentiment expressed.

Please take a moment to see how the story is being treated on MSN . It's instructive of the way information is withheld, and cast in ambiguous ways, to avoid reporting reality.

A link in the news banner on the MSN homepage has a picture of a police barricade and the caption: "Suspects shot by London police." No mention of what the crime might be--indeed, one could assume it was a police brutality story.

Click the link and you go to a "news" page with the headline: "'Sickening and barbaric': Man killed in suspected London terror attack". Still no clue about what it means--or whether the "man killed" was a victim or one of the "suspects" mentioned in the homepage teaser. (How bizarre that the teaser is more concerned with the suspects than the gruesome crime itself.)

The story's lead paragraph reads: "A man, reported to be a British soldier, was attacked and killed by knife-wielding assailants on a London street in broad daylight Wednesday in what is being investigated as an ideologically motivated terror attack."

Ideologically motivated? Search in vain for an identification of the "ideology", let alone of the words Allahu Akbar.

A great Cold War author describes the very look you've illustrated.

When Ian Fleming has James Bond reflect on the malleable looks of Blofeld, he takes special note of the villain's eyes, the whites of which are exposed around the entirety of the pupils. Bond considers this the characteristic look of a megalomaniac, shared by all the great enemies of mankind. Blofeld has the uncanny ability to alter his physical looks dramatically from one scheme to another; but his eyes never change, and reveal his true monstrous nature.

I think the passage appears in "You Only Live Twice." As I look art this picture of Lenin, it seems to me that Fleming must have written with this (and other) pictures in mind.

It wouldn't be ungracious of you to collect that $50, and you shouldn't be hesitant about doing so. In fact, you'd be doing a public service.

One of the things I can't abide about our "pundit class" is that there's no consequence to their failure. So go enrich yourself to the tune of 50 bucks, and teach a valuable lesson in humility to your friend at Heritage. We'll all be the richer for it.

I would add to this (and any similar) discussion the affirmation that the educated individual is one of the goals of a good society, and the fulfillment of a precious human potential.

The problem in our culture right now is that attendance at an "elite" school does not necessarily equal being an educated person. I am continually astonished at how little actual education young people seem to receive nowadays. Often these folks give an impression of confidence and fluidity of speech--they're clearly intelligent and accomplished in certain ways. But it's all "method," and underneath I find there's a paucity of broad factual knowledge that is the foundation for real learning.

Conservatives need to get this point right, and not deride the goal/attainment of education per se as the province of a bunch of worthless pointy-heads. We need to stand for TRUE education, against its various false apparitions in the culture. But that's a tall order, I know. And made harder because some of the false apparitions are, I'm sorry to say, promulgated via "conservative" outlets.

Look, a traditional equalizer between the credentialed crowd and the regular workaday stiff used to have a name: the free market.  It used to kill the professoriate that business gave people with educationally "pedestrian" backgrounds the chance to become wealthy and influential--wealthier and more influential than the professoriate itself.  The past four years have been payback time, with our "credentialed elites" taking out their resentments on the old business class.  (It's really been going on since the Clinton era; the Obama era is just "resentement" in overdrive.)

But the main thing is that elites are always going to degrade into dysfunctionality: some faster than others, and the current one doesn't seem to have much durability. And while some elites are better than others, none is perfect or entirely admirable. The beauty of America is (or used to be?) that we could largely ignore them and go about our lives.

With great respect, these are moving accounts--and troubling, too.  But the conclusion--"remember ... pray ... speak"--is just indicative to me of the weakness and defeatism of contemporary Christian thinking.

Obviously we're not going send in troops or missiles (or drones)--despite the fact that a species of genocide seems to be occurring in North Korea (and elsewhere). But if our only resource is prayer, can't we at least explicitly ask God to show mercy on His dutiful children, and bring justice, and even punishment, to the monsters destroying them?

Or if we're squeamish about the label "monsters," how about praying for the ignominious fall of the monstrous regimes that promote the martyrdom of innocent Christians? We should be humble and acknowledge that ultimately God alone can resolve such problems; but if we don't ask him to do so, who will?

Tom, what do you mean: "I don’t relish Democrat McBride’s embarrassment and don’t mean to rub her nose in it"?!

Relish it! Rub away!!

She's a buffoon, and a dangerous one, given that she's close to levers of political influence and power. If WE don't call such people to account--and remind our country what phonies and jokers they are--then who will? (Answer: Nobody!)

It's a pathology of our side that we feel a need to mitigate, even apologize for, drawing attention to the buffoonery that passes for wisdom, justice, compassion and concern on the Left. It's a syndrome whose consequences are worse than Blue Waffle disease.

Count Grecula's last point in his powerful post is the most important observation in the present marriage debate.

To wit: That for the most part, today's friends of same-sex marriage were, only the day before yesterday, the ridiculers, the minimizers, the opponants and even enemies of traditional marriage. Now, suddenly, they wax poetic about how nurturing and desireable the state of marriage is--and how unjust the society that witholds its comforts in any way.

One might be forgiven for being suspicious about the motives behind such a turn.

Incidentally, the only useful take-away from this story might well be: Fathers, don't send your sons to Yale.

Moral reasoning is not all abstract calculation, and I would expect experience in general to play a role--it's one of the elements of wisdom, and of conservatism for that matter. For most people, our personal experiences are the starting point.

But let's not fool ourselves in this case. This very forum testifies to the fact that intelligent people generally test their conclusions against some kind of "What if" scenario: in this case, "I oppose on moral/rational grounds the idea of same-sex marriage; but what if my own child came to me...?"

Now are we supposed to believe that Portman--who by all accounts is serious person--never considered this? More likely he never had strong views on the question, has sensed a change in public opinion, and has used his family's personal drama to (a) provide an occasion for his adoption of a new policy stand, and (b) insulate him from the idiotic charge of "flip-flopping."

That he is using his own son's personal situation in such a cynical way does not speak well of Portman. And that, moreso than any stand he might take, is the worst part of it all.

A thousand years from now, the thing people will remember about Rome and America is that they both existed, and they both ended.

I'm grateful for Hartmann's anecdote. And I agree with Tom Meyer and She on the simply amazing quality of this discovery--as well as on the way "Daughter of Time" will make you a lifelong devotee of the quest for the real Richard.  The author, Josephine Tey, under the name Gordon Daviot, also wrote a play which could be considered the "anti-matter" version of Shakespeare's "Richard III."  It's titled "Dickon," after Richard Plantagenet's boyhood nickname.

I find myself quite touched by the thought that after half a millennium Richard has reappeared and may receive some measure of justice--and certainly burial in dignified and holy manner.

And perhaps that scheming villain Henry Tudor will receive a comeuppance for making his slanders against Richard the foundation of his own reign, and the pretext for any evil he wished to inflict on his subjects.  I daresay he was the Obama of the 15th century!

And by the way, as conservatives, doesn't it make you proud that our patron saint, Bill Buckley, was a great and learned Bach aficionado?  American conservatism should always be guided by the star of a man with such taste and discernment.

Brandenburg 3, 3rd movement (Allegro): the soundtrack to a house full of kids.  (With 4 of our own, we're not in JSB's league, though.)

I defy anyone to listen to the Brandenburgs and not come away smiling, if not laughing.  Bach must have been one happy fellow, to write such music.

The fact that the greatest composer of the Western canon was a deeply devoted Christian with a happy marriage, a bunch of children, and a satisfying home life--the very soul of bourgeois contentedness--must kill the academic left.  How do they account for it?

May I suggest that your entire question is misguided?

There is NO magic sword or ring or talisman that can confer unearned power in this way. If there were, it would almost certainly--indeed, given time and human nature, inevitably--be used for inhuman purposes. To imagine that you or I, by dint of our piety or good opinions, would wield it "wisely," is really an illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-republican fantasy (note all the lower-case initials: I'm using these terms in their general, not partisan, senses).

In asking the question you're merely expressing a childish daydream of authoritarianism. The same goes for magic swords, superheroes, even over-reliance on statistical models to "predict" how real people will act. All are instruments to wield coercive power over people, instead of treating them as individuals who deserve the benefit of persuasion and argument. That amounts to the power fantasy of a losing side: a side without confidence in the future, which has no idea how to prevail in the real world.

Leave your magic powers to fiction. It's not part of the conservatism I signed on for.