Miles Hilton-Barber, the blind adventurer, adjusts his flying helmet prior to his attempt to break the world air speed record for a blind pilot, flying a Hawker Hunter jet fighter at Kemble airfield near Cirencester, on August 21 2007, United Kingdom. Miles Hilton-Barber, whose most recent feat was a microlight flight from London to Sydney, raises money for the Seeing Is Believing charity. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.
"Given that Gideon Rose deploys ‘anti-war bloggers are like neocons’ as an insult, I suppose he doesn’t admire the neoconservative worldview. And yet he can’t seem to muster the energy to actually oppose it, even at the very time it’s being espoused more loudly than ever by a leading presidential candidate, and the Bush administration itself is once again taking steps to lay a legal predicate for war with Iran. Something is wrong here," – Matt Yglesias.
A skeptic gives the new atheists a word of advice.
He’s playing the anti-illegal card.
He’s more bullish on the ability of the human mind and soul to forgo the political temptations of religion. But that’s a mood for Hitch; he’s written elsewhere of its astounding and resilient power. I found Mark’s book an enormous relief – a relief that I’m not as isolated as I feared in respecting both faith and secularism, and not so perverse in believing that the Western experiment in secular politics is a terribly fragile one. It takes a willful ignorance of history to believe otherwise – or mere political opportunism. But there’s plenty of both to go around.
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the biggest eye-sore on Cape Cod: the hideous, ungainly, Italianate monstrosity that has blighted the sky-line of Provincetown for almost a century. Andy Towle has a lovely photo of a sun pillar synching with it a few years ago. Well, the sun is lovely. Here’s the Cape Cod Times piece and the Boston Herald piece. Why do I hate it so? The architecture so glaringly out of tune with the Cape and utterly alien to the Pilgrims it’s supposed to commemmorate; the silliness of trying to claim the Pilgrims, when they had the good sense to move on to Plymouth pronto; the waste of money (it was a government project, of course); and the whole civic uplift that accompanied its Teddy Roosevelt beginnings. Yes, I loathe "national greatness conservatism." A great country needn’t build some stupid Siena knock-off to remind itself of its origins. The one saving grace is that if you look at it with its side straight on, the top of the tower looks like Donald Duck. My only regret is that they didn’t take the 100th anniversary to blow the thing up. Alas, it’s here to stay.
Here he is exposing the insanity of the drug war on the Morton Downey show (jeez – remember that?) – with a nice dig at the questioner at the end. (Hat tip: David Harsanyi.)
"Hey, Stella!" "A Streetcar Named Desire."
The US is top of the world charts. Just one thing that isn’t wrong with American healthcare.
It is an illness beset by stigma, which compounds the illness. I was happy to link to an essay yesterday on the subject. A reader who deals with the illness also recommends this Stephen Fry BBC special on the subject, "The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive." Here’s Part One. The rest is on YouTube.
