Island Passage

Peg' O My Heart has this observation on our New Gilded Age: The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again. A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a bi...

Noted with only this comment: Jake lived only because of the love and dedication of Mary Flood. Good, human, Mary. Good Human. Click on the image to see a slideshow . Sept. 11 rescue dog with cancer dies NEW YORK - A black Labrador that burrowed through smoking debris after Sept. 11 and flooded rubble after Hurricane Katrina in search of survivors has died after developing cancer. Owner Mary Flood had 12-year-old Jake put to sleep Wednesday after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah . Flood said Jake had been in pain, shaking with a 105-degree fever as he lay on the lawn... ...Flood adopted Jake as a 10-month-old puppy. He had been abandoned on a street with a broken leg and a dislocated hip. "But against all odds he became a world-class rescue dog," said Flood, a member of Utah Task Force 1, a federal search-and-rescue team that looked for human remains a...

Bumped into this image at National Review Online . Ha!

With all of the to-do over the Heinlein Centennial , the Wall Street Journal has a nice tribute by Taylor Dinerman available on-line. Mr. Dinerman writes: "The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story "Blowups Happen," the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein--decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House--introduced the idea that a president's wife might try to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein's best known "inventions" is the water bed, though he never took out a patent... [One of Heinlein's characters says] "The power to tax, once conceded,...

Alas, the print business has been hard, lately. All of the great metropolitan dailies have been suffering with dropping readership. The New York Times has tracked more and more liberal to try and staunch it's loss of paying customers. It seems as though that collection of tubes, the Internets, is claiming yet another victim . The Weekly World News: Weekly World News, the tabloid that for 28 years has chronicled sightings of Elvis, extraterrestrial activity and the exploits of Bat Boy, is no more. Its publisher said Tuesday it would put out its last issue next month, maintaining only a Web presence. The Constant Reader knows of my near squeamish fascination with the Weekly World News. One of WWN's writers, Bob Greenberger, did not return a telephone call seeking comment, but he wrote on his blog that the paper's staff was alerted of the closure Friday. "The reasons given make no sense," he wrote. "We're stunned and shell-shocked." I don't know wh...

Anyone who understands the meaning of the word debate knows that what are heralded as " Candidate's Debates " are anything but. They are really more of a joint press conference where the point isn't to exchange ideas or test ideas against one another, but to provide a pulpit for a recital of sound bites and stump-speech homilies to the media. (Any real give-and-take occurs later in the spin rooms.) This Monday, the Democratic Party is holding a debate with the most foolish of premises: that one-shot questions from average folks will penetrate the hard shells of candidate's handlers, PR flacks and advisers, and will actually provoke them to say something honest and unguarded. Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit , has submitted his hard-hitting, no-holds-barred question. In fact, he's zeroed in on what's been keeping me awake at nights as I contemplate the question "Who will next steer this mighty ship of state?"

The Bald Eagle may be rescued from endangered status , but that doesn't mean that Bald is Beautiful electorally. The Economist points out that Fred Thompson has one underreported handicap: Americans haven't elected a bald man since I was a boy--Dwight Eisenhower. To illustrate how Americans prefer a hirsute chief executive, they provide comparison images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. By all means--click on over to a disturbing rogue's gallery .

Here they are, the Wholey Trinity of Democratic front-runners, Barak, Hillary!, and John. " Polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans believe the Democrats to be less friendly to faith than they had been even a few years ago. Yet a donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles "How the Democrats Got Religion." From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is "a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party." -- Wall Street Journal Is this the end of the Republican lock on Evangelicals? " Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in a speech, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now." I ...

I wonder these days how many people know the first verse of the national anthem? I wonder how many people know that The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses? I know, friends and neighbors, because I once sang all four verses to get out of a tight spot. I was a young fellow, and a trainee at the U.S. Army Signal School's Ceremonial Unit. The unit was run like a kind of fraternity with several weeks of initiation where the pledge's lives were made miserable by the older team members. A common punishment was to order the trainees to drop for endless pushups. (I left the unit a year later with arms like Popeye.) One particular fellow, PFC Peake, had made it his mission to make me spend as much time as possible doing pushups. After three weeks I knew that the situation couldn't go on. I knew that we were headed for a showdown. And so I began to memorize the entire national anthem. Sure enough, a few days later I walked into the unit's dayroom and into a circle of older te...