I missed this scary story last month: An 82-year-old Argentine woman who attracted media attention last month when she married a 24-year-old man has died as a result of heart problems. The article doesn't say what induced the heart attack.
__________
Want to know more about the Drudge? Excerpt:
Seems like the consensus is it's Matt Drudge, the reclusive mastermind behind the Drudge Report, which first came to prominence during the Lewinsky scandal and has been my internet home page - and that of hundreds of thousands of others - for eight years now.
Today the New York Times carried a page one report - linked, naturally, by Drudge - which breathlessly reported how Drudge was now in league with Hillary Clinton as well as various shadily-portrayed Republican operatives.
__________
Ohmygosh, I'm in league with Timothy Robbins. He's attacking pervasive noise: "Noise", Bean's provocative second film, casts Tim Robbins as David, an upper-class family man driven insane by New York's loud sounds -- grinding garbage trucks, horns honking, back-up beepers and worst of all, car alarms squealing at all hours. But I'm more of the rural version: grinding lawn mowers, power edgers, leaf blowers, and motorcycles blaring at all hours.
My thoughts on noise.
__________
Lew Rockwell addresses The Inferno:
In these wretched infernos that consume civilization, we see the truth about nature. It is beautiful when it is controlled and owned and put to our use. When it is left to its own devices, it is mean, dangerous, cruel, and often thoroughly evil. It is, as Albert Jay Nock said, the enemy.
The fires force us to choose. We thrive and rule nature, or nature rules and eats us alive. The tendency nowadays is to believe we can have it both ways. We can build great cities and gorgeous suburbs, amass glorious wealth, live in comfort, and meanwhile let the surrounding areas take their natural course. This allows us to sit in the safety of our homes with a pious sense that we have done right by Mother Nature and she will bless us.
In fact, she has not blessed Southern California. She has been unleashed, and she is gorging herself on civilization itself.
What went wrong? The problem is in the theory of environmentalism. Under it, ownership is the enemy. Nature is an end in itself. So it must be owned publicly, that is, by the state. The state, in its management of this land, must not do anything to it. There must not be controlled burning, brush clearing, clear cutting, or even tourism. We can admire it from afar, but the work of human hands must never intervene.
__________
A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave – and faces possible criminal charges – after a student's parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims' bodies. I have no opinion on the book (by a Pulitzer winner, named Child of God), but it sounds a bit over the top. Of course, his moronic defenders are resorting to moral equivalence and slippery slopisms: "If you're trying to protect your kids from things in books, you may as well turn off the TV and video games. You try to protect them as much as you can, but these days kids are just exposed to so much." "Parents have sought to ban various books, including John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, as well as books on Cuba or gay penguins, according to the American Library Association."
