“People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

--Joseph Cambell, American mythologist

Michael Medved: If we go ahead with war against Iraq, it will represent a betrayal of our values and mark the first time in history that we attacked another country that never attacked us first.

Only those with a truly pathetic public-school education could believe such rubbish, since we fought the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, our campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many lesser engagements – all with no direct attack on the United States. Great powers face great threats – and dangerous enemies. Why would a war prove easier or more appropriate after Saddam develops, or uses, nuclear weapons – rather than before he's completed such deadly development?

Jon Udell: I was shocked to discover a nest of pirates yesterday, operating brazenly right here in my hometown. They were gathered in a large nondescript building, reading and talking quietly and in some cases listening to music. Some kind of social club, perhaps? Yes, but with a profoundly subversive theme: "sharing" content. This establishment houses large collections of books, magazines, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs. And it "shares" these with its patrons. I watched in amazement as people left the building carrying armloads of these content assets, which they "borrow" without paying a nickel to the copyright holders. It's frightening, really. Who knew?

Charles Krauthammer: This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda--the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine")--are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.

Rebecca Blood: "I think that at some point, turning off information is going to be a huge luxury. But it's clear that a shift has occurred. The game is no longer about access to information, it's about access to reliable, pertinent information. Filters will become more and more important. And, at some point, people will start trying to identify what level of information is optimal. My hunch is that there is a rate at which even useful information moves into diminishing returns. At a certain point, the man who knows less is better equipped to make a good decision."

Cory Doctorow: "Feeding the query string 'http' to Google causes it to barf up all the pages in its database in order of their PageRank value."

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek: “HELLO? ANYONE HOME? I’m not quite sure to whom I should address this, considering that you have no leadership right now. Nancy Pelosi? Tom Daschle? The 42d president turned Harlem globe-trotter? You lost only two seats in the Senate and five in the House, but the situation is much grimmer than those numbers suggest. Democrats actually have some good ideas lying around, but in last week’s election you lacked the vision and guts to offer them to the voters. What we have here, as the warden in ‘Cool Hand Luke’ put it, is a failure to communicate.

“At least after the 1994 wipeout (53 seats lost in the House, 10 in the Senate) you controlled the presidency.”

Common Sense and Wonder: “Another reason the EU is against military action is that any fight would show how woefully unprepared they are for battle. As this piece in The Guardian, of all places, says ‘America does the fighting, Europe does the dishes.’ NATO without the US is a fiction. The EU and Canada have been living off the American taxpayer for decades. Perhaps we should tax them for services provided.”

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised."
--from "The Green Fields of the Mind," by A. Bartlett Giamatti link

Sniper Hunt Culminates in 2 Arrests

One of America's most extraordinary manhunts culminated Thursday in the arrests of an Army veteran and a teenager, asleep at a roadside rest stop — perpetrators, authorities believe, of a bloody, three-week sniping spree that left 10 people dead and multitudes paralyzed by fear.