Instapunk explains how the MSM did it.

while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be fair, it doesn’t have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush’s approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It’s taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points.

He’s perfectly right. Bush survived well enough until the Hurricane Katrina gave the MSM what it needed, a spectacular disaster story, in which exaggerations and distortions could be disseminated day after day after day with no possibility of factual correction. Bush might have prevented their success with a better public relations campaign, but he doesn’t do very much of that sort of thing or do it all that well.

Differences among conservatives nationally on the Immigration issue are beginning to produce a genuine rift. We can see the impact of these tensions today on the right-side of the Blogosphere, where late last night Lori Byrd, a popular guest blogger on Polipundit, informed readers at her own site:

I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: “From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com.” I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: “It’s over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It’s time to go our own separate ways.”

And Polipundit replied:

The blog has focused on various issues, but one issue on which I cannot give in to the elites is illegal immigration. On that, this blog’s position must be clear, not ambivalent. As a legal immigrant, I feel very, very, strongly about this. Back in 2004, I nearly withdrew my support for Bush’s re-election when he came out with his suicidal immigration “reform” plan.

So far, I’ve allowed the guest bloggers here to write pretty much what they pleased about all issues, including illegal immigration.

But on the illegal immigration issue, I now find myself having to contend with at least three out of four guest bloggers who will reflexively try to poke holes in any argument I make.

Suppose three out of four columnists at the Old York Times were pro-Republican. You can bet publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger would do something about that right quick.

Suppose a Bush administration official came out openly against amnesty. The Bushies would show him the door.

Similarly, the writers at PoliPundit.com need to respect the editorial position of PoliPundit.com on the most important issue to this blog, as the “publisher” sees it – illegal immigration.

I’d say that Polipundit and others deciding to make a fight over this are making a very serious mistake. A lot of people on the Right, myself included, have said very little about this issue to date, out of affection and respect for some of the people on the Right who have strong negative opinions on Immigration, combined with confidence in the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to acquiese to a Nativist crackdown.

If the anti-Immigration side of the Conservative Movement continues to try to operate under the erroneous impression that it has any prospect whatsoever of calling the shots on this issue, it is only going to succeed in underminding the respect of their readers for the good judgement of certain commentators. There is no prospect of the anti-Immigration Right compelling either the Administration, or the libertarian portion of the Conservative Movement, to join in opposition to naturalizing people already here.

And don’t give me any of Polipundit’s “I’m a legal immigrant, and I feel strongly” stuff; my grandparents were legal immigrants. It was obviously a lot easier for them to immigrate legally in the 1890s than it is for Hispanic immigrants today, but the basic circumstances are much the same. American needs cheap labor, and people living in unfavorable conditions abroad are willing to come here to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do in return for a better life. In the context of existing American labor market demand, there is no valid reason that it should be any more difficult for a Mexican or Salvadoran immigrant to come to the United States to work in 2006 than it was for a Pole or Italian in 1906.

Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments as high school comedy: Ten Things I Hate About Commandments.

Even in Western states where lions are still hunted, mountain lion numbers are up, and the big cats are being forced to hunt more widely and more frequently by competition from (now completely protected) scavenger species. Dick Ray, a lion hunting outfiter, believes:

pressure from other predators and scavengers is causing the big cats to kill on a more frequent basis today than they have in the past. Dick and I have shared a number of lion chases together and it used to be, when you found a fresh lion kill it was generally a partially eaten deer carcass covered by raked up pine duff, sticks and leaves. In most cases the satiated cat would stay in the vicinity of the kill until the carcass was consumed, before hunting again. Such isn’t the case today.

With the proliferation of the protected scavenger birds such as ravens, crows and magpies, a fresh cougar kill is located by the keen eyed birds within a short time and their raucous racket soon attracts the attention of opportunistic coyotes that key on the boisterous birds to locate carrion or kills. (Every magpie may not have a lion or coyote following it, but you can bet every coyote or lion has a magpie.) The constant harassment by a few determined coyotes quickly drives the frustrated cat from its fresh kill. Under the onslaught from coyotes and flocks of voracious scavenger birds, within forty eight hours or less the only thing left at the site of the cougar kill is a few scraps of hide and scattered bones, forcing the cat to kill again.

This Sunday, a young mountain lion entered a North Boulder home through a pet door, killed and ate the family cat, then went back outside and curled up for a nap on the lawn.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine describes in yesterday’s New York Times magazine the impending electronic Universal Library:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now…

..Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn’t make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you’ll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

The only fly in the ointment of Kelly’s optimism is the enormous extension in recent years (in a series of concession to corporate interests) by Congress of the duration of copyright.

(Amazon-US is using the wrong book picture. This correct one is from Amazon-UK.)

Former Monty Python comedy troop member Terry Jones has developed a latter-day career producing popularizing history programs for British television. Jones is trying to offer an original and witty version of history, but the result (being representative of the contemporary leftwing demotic culture of which Jones himself is a product) inevitably proves fragmentary, misleading, and vulgar.

His latest (a sequel to an earlier series on the Middle Ages) focuses on the Roman Empire. Jones proposes to tell the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. His approach consists of serving up selected anecdotal details (typically obtained from recent academic papers) designed to support arguments for barbarian cultural equality, and moral superiority, to Roman Civilization.

A Times press release associated with the impending book pubication provides the central Jones thesis:

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change.

There you have it. Rome did not triumph over the barbarians by virtue of superior civilization. It was just that same evil Western militarism, overcoming peaceful (morally superior) agrarian societies. Why, the Britons, Jones contends, had better shield, helmets, and chariots than the Romans, built roads (alas, with wooden, not stone foundations, old boy), and (assuming somebody’s interpretation of a bas relief is correct) may have developed some sort of wooden harvesting contraption.

Jones overarching thesis rests on his ability to persuade his audience that the existence of some vestigial technology, in the Celtic case, establishes the equality of illiterate wooden-road-building Celtic barbarism to the Classical Civilization which read Homer and Virgil and built in marble and concrete.

Such is contemporary trans-Atlantic culture. A state-funded national television network provides a platform for an utterly unqualified celebrity to dispense competently-assembled, but factually dubious “histories” arriving at politically correct conclusions.

RevolutionSF chooses.

Varifrank has been following news reports and listening to Congressional democrats, and is able to sum up the rules.

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

And so on.

Eric Phillips writing at the Ludwig von Mises Institute wishes we were still a Republic, not a Democracy.

Suppose there existed a world democracy with one vote for each person in the population. Is it not obvious, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out, that the world would adopt a flagrantly favorable policy towards China and India at everyone else’s expense?

On the other hand, suppose two robbers break into a house and start ransacking the place. When the owner comes down to protest, the robbers, if abiding strictly by the rules of democracy, could simply hold an election to determine whose property the belongings actually are, and with their superior numbers, outvote the legitimate owner.

These examples may seem theoretical, but our government today abides by this exact philosophy. As Murray Rothbard said, “On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.”

Indeed, it is not capitalism that leads to exploitation as the Left contends; it is democracy.

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Hat tip to Chris Meisenzahl who was brought to our attention by Morgan at YARGB.

“Papa likes to know what a man is going to say to him before he starts to talk,” Cathy told Christopher. “If there’s no horse in the first sentence, he knows he’s in the wrong company.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 65.

———————————

The male parent seldom spoke. On first meeting he had established that he and Christopher had been in the same regiment of Marines in different wars and in the same house at Harvard; he had never asked Christopher another question. “He knows everything about you, knowing those two things, that he needs to know,” Cathy said.

— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 103.

———————————

“I come from the most anti-American country on earth.”

“Canada? Ah, no, America is the most anti-American country on earth. When you speak of public opinion, young man, you speak of the opinions of the intellectuals because they are the only ones who publish and broadcast. The masses are dumb. Intellectuals always hate their own country, but the United States has produced an intelligentsia which is positively bloodthirsty.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 127.

———————————

In Spain the Germans tested aerial bombing tactics; the Soviets, propaganda. You see who won in the end. In 1945 there was no Luftwaffe. No one has yet found a way to shoot down the illusions of the Left.”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 139.

———————————

“This woman had the greatest private collection in Spain, portraits of her ancestors,” Rodegas said. “She was asked by a journalist if shec was not filled with awe, to possess the works of all those dead geniuses. ‘Awe?’ she replied, ‘Genius? Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, were simply the people my family hired before the invention of photography.’”
— The Secret Lovers, 1977, p. 250.

Capital Online reports:

When a shabbily dressed man ran out of a Westfield Annapolis jewelry store followed by an employee screaming for help, Erik McInnis didn’t think twice.

“Anybody sprinting out of a store like that is guilty until proven innocent,” the 39-year-old Marine major said.

He immediately left his two children, ages 9 and 2, in the mall’s play area and chased Timothy A. Laboard, 40, of Baltimore, through the back corridors of the mall.

Jonathan Neff, another father in the play area, said Maj. McInnis “hurdled the row of seats and hit the ground at an all out sprint behind the thief … He was through the doors in hot pursuit before anyone else knew what was happening.”

Maj. McInnis followed Mr. Laboard back into the mall, grabbed his collar, and put him in a rear figure-four choke hold on the ground.

“It was kind of surreal. There I was laying on top of this guy and everyone just kept walking by like nothing had happened,” said the Naval Academy math instructor.

After a few moments, an off-duty FBI agent walked up and handcuffed Mr. Laboard.

Mr. Laboard was charged with theft over $500 after the incident on Monday. Police allege he snatched a $28,000 diamond ring out of a person’s hand inside the Helzberg Diamonds. After Mr. Laboard was arrested, police said he pulled the ring from his mouth and handed it over to an officer.

“I’m a drug addict and I need help,” Mr. Laboard said, according to a police report.

Officials at Helzberg Diamonds were not available for comment.

While Maj. McInnis might teach calculus during the day, he’s still a Marine. He said he also teaches martial arts at the academy and is the officer representative for the school’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club. That, he said, is where he learned the submission and grappling moves he used at the mall.

“I’ve been teaching the stuff to midshipmen for years. I had a better than average chance to catch him,” said Maj. McInnis…

“As hokey as this sounds, I consider apprehending scum bags to be an unwritten statement in my general job description of being a Marine,” he said.

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. You can actually see it grow in this very brief time-lapse photopgraphy video. Hit replay, and watch closely a few times.