Okay. Let’s discuss the devastation of an eco-system, an economy and a damn pretty place. Why is Obama hanging all his hopes on BP and not turning to every oil company who has had experience in capping and containing oil spills? There’s certainly enough of them. This could turn from catastrophe to triumph for him. Even the liberal blogs are asking these questions. He’s acting more like an “oil man” than that “oil man” who last resided in the White House. Someone illuminate me.
I’ve spent the entire morning congratulating myself on not having watched Lost. Does that make me shallow? (If not, how can I become shallow?) I stopped watching after the first six episodes when it became clear to me (as a certified professional maker-up of things) that the conclusion could only be 1) it was all a dream or 2) everyone was dead. The only thing that would have redeemed it is if the entire cast had awakened in bed with Bob Newhart.
Ah, heaven for New York Post readers like myself: a budding Kennedy scandal, a true-blue royal one, and the French Open.
Not just yet. But North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean vessel raises yet another round of grim questions about how long Pyongyang can perpetuate its national hell without lurching into open, general hostilities. What to do? Read Michael Magan at Foreign Policy‘s outstanding Shadow Government blog.
Update: Outside the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis gives pause.
I’ve managed to watch exactly zero minutes and zero seconds of LOST, the supposedly gripping series which has, apparently, now come to an end. Lest I seem anti-TV, let me emphasize that I’ve made time in my life for The X-Files, Deadwood, Project Runway, and many other shows great and small. I’m susceptible to hype. I’m inclined to trust my friends’ judgments. But I never felt even a shiver of longing to dip into Lost. And with reactions like this coming in from trusted sources, I’m feeling certain of my final verdict on the end of Lost: no big loss.
By way of an introduction to the rest of Ricochet’s intrepid contributors, I’d like to share my delight with the LA Times. It always lightens my day. It took but three short minutes to get a couple of laughs on this dreary Monday morn.
I hooted with when I saw a below-the-fold 10 paragraph story that “Survivor” producer and chief suspect in his wife’s murder, Bruce Beresford-Redman, has just waltzed right back into his comfy LA lifestyle. No problems at the border for him….even after they took his passport. See, we don’t stop anyone illegally leaving Mexico, even those polluting our society with reality TV. And how about that pathetically incompetetent Mexican justice system? All this after the Times lauded Mexican President Felipe Calderon for lambasting the U.S. to the standing ovation of congressional Dems.
Okay, so I did that thing where I forwarded an email and the chain went with it. I had written something dopey — and a little snotty — early in the chain. I feel pretty bad about it. Do I try to apologize? Ignore it and hope no one bothered to scroll down through boring emails to see the one incriminating one? No state secrets involved. Just might make my child’s teacher think I’m a little selfish. *Sigh* Not the best Monday morning.
Yes, says Nick Carr, in a forthcoming book. Russell Arben Fox has deep thoughts:
we become habituated to viewing all information — literature, science, journalism, scholarship, whatever — as something to be “strip-mined [for] relevant content” (p. 164), and rather than thereby supposedly refining our ability to recognize (in classic marketplace of ideas fashion) good information from bad, in fact our capacity to make learned judgments is physically undermined.
Judging by the careful and qualified reactions of the left-friendly Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel, the answer might just be yes. It’s a truism nowadays that everything wrong with American culture is driving us deeper and deeper into narrow, self-selecting, self-congratulatory cubbyholes. There’s no doubt that the distinctions among our political alternatives are, like our tongues, getting sharper and sharper. But at the same time, the old battle lines are shifting as circumstances change and fertile new ideas spread and interact. Our national arguments are becoming less productive in some ways and more productive in others. And that’s not a wash; the phenomenon points toward some of the productive political ground of the next several years — if not beyond.
“This book,” Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “is about…the larger forces…that have left Europe…enfeebled….The key factors are: 1. Demographic decline; 2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state; 3. Civilizational exhaustion.” Today, four years after the publication of America Alone, the New York Times confirms the enfeeblement of Europe in every particular. Excerpts:
In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70….”
We’re all familiar with the decline in quality, relative to market choices, associated with government-supplied goods and services. But who could have predicted this?
High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”
That’s what Simon Schama sees coming:
Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that “Someone Else” must have engineered the common misfortune.
