What Don DeLillo's Books Tell Him (WSJ)

Wood Toys by Anna Mezenova

Landon Donovan: First EPL goal at Everton

Labels: books, soccer, toys, weekend

(1) The world's flags given letter grades

(2) Dr. Barber

(3) Highly Recommended: Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

Labels: books, weekend

It starts when I say so.

(1) World's Fastest Superliner Awaits Rebirth—or the Scrap Yard
Out of service for 40 years, the SS United States still holds speed records. But what fate awaits this storied piece of naval history?

(2) Braves' Hudson signs three-year extension

(3) U.S. player Charlie Davies released from D.C. hospital

(4) THE VENTURE BROS.: It's Side 2 of Dark Side of the Moon! He's in a Floyd Hole.

(5) Rebel clubs plan breakaway North American league

(6) Microsoft Protection Center: Win32/FakeSpypro - This is a real nasty bugger.

(7) Bill Gates comments on the folly of government regulation in economic/human activity.

(8) Must Read Book: The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System by Charles Gasparino

Labels: baseball, books, microsoft, soccer, weekend

In Soccer, It's Manchester Divided: A Gritty Town Finds Itself With Two of the World's Richest Teams—and an Epic Rivalry (WSJ)

Grave Matters: The surprising origins and enduring importance of Arlington National Cemetery. (WSJ)

Labels: books, history, soccer, weekend

"At a time when most homes received just three television channels, more than forty million people watched Disney's forecast for the future...It filled our dreams and fueled our expectations."

- Brian Fies, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow

Jeff Pepper from 2719 HYPERION reviews Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow in Ad Astra Per Aspera. Jeff bottles the ephemeral in his closing sentence...

If Disney's original EPCOT film gave you goosebumps, or if you ever emerged excited and energized after riding Spaceship Earth or Horizons at EPCOT Center, you will no doubt be similarly thrilled and motivated by Brian Fies amazing journey across the 20th century.

Labels: books, disney, quotes, weekend

(1) Airport Check-in: The Palm among new JFK eateries

(2) Another quote from How Rome Fell...

"There were no hordes of barbarians hurling themselves time and again against the walls of civilisation."

(3)


(4) A quote from Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morison...

"The northeastern shore of this gulf is noted for the subterranean streams that flow down through the limestone and break out under the sea not far from the shore, welling forth such a volume of sweet water that that swarms of manatee are attracted to quest their thirst, and seamen may fill water casks without the trouble of going ashore."

I'll be quoting from this Pulitzer Prize winning book again in September.

Labels: airports, books, quotes, signage, weekend

Adrian Goldsworthy could be writing about Obama:

Diocletian's government lacked the machinery to enforce such a rigid pricing system on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps the most striking thing about the edict was its ambition - even if it was economically naive. Combined with the objective of profound change is the highly moral rhetoric. Talk of the 'peaceful state of the world' now that the 'seething ravages of barbarians peoples' have been restrained by great effort, is followed by outrage at a new evil attacking the soldiers. 'There burns a raging greed, which hastens to its own growth and increase without respect for human kind.' A little later the emperor compared this greed to a religion. The tone is typical of the other legislative activity of the tetrarchs and of their recorded rescripts - replies issued to legal questions and appeals sent to the emperor. The sense of outrage was accompanied by savage and often inventively cruel punishments.

Diocletian may genuinely have believed his own propaganda. He certainly felt that the best way to deal with the empire's problems was to impose strong central control. This was not a new idea. Bureaucracy had been growing in the last decades. The turnover of emperors was do rapid that officials, especially those of middle rank who were less likely to be purged when a regime changed, provided the most stable element in government. Diocletian stayed in power longer than his recent predecessors, his strength increasing with each passing year. He was therefore able to take much further the trend towards centralised government.

Related
Michelle Obama: Barack is the only man who can “heal” this nation and “fix our souls”
Make mine malaise
Obama vs. Carter

Labels: books, obama

As heard on the Bill Bennett radio program: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

You can listen to Bill Bennett interview author Matthew Crawford here. It's okay. I promise I won't tell NPR you listened to this.

Labels: books

"He rode hell for leather to escape..."

This is how Adrian Goldworthy describes the flight of Constantine to Britain in How Rome Fell. What a brilliant use of words.

Labels: books, history, weekend

I've just started this meaty book by Adrian Goldsworthy and will eventually post a full book review. For now, I found this quote in the preface rousing:

The Roman Empire did not fall quickly, but as part of a very slow process, and this should warn us against magnifying current events and their likely consequences on the long-term fortune of countries. Britain has been a fairly depressing place in the last decade or so. Ministers caught out in incompetence, corruption or blatant deceitfulness cling on to power like limpets, first denying everything, before finally apologising and expecting this to be enough. Bureaucracy and regulation continue to grow apace, while the basic efficiency of institutions declines, rendering them incapable of even the apparently simple tasks. Yet while the number of civil servants rises, the size of the armed forces shrinks at the very time they are more committed to serious campaigns. It would be easy to draw parallels with the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The self-righteous tone of so much government legislation certainly chimes with late Late Roman imperial decrees, as does the apparent failure of so much of this to achieve its aim. Such comparisons are unlikely to assist our analysis of the Roman Empire, and would be no more than the author indulging himself. Understanding the history must come first.

And as soon as I read the word limpets I thought about this post at Instapundit (and hyenas).
Our elected officials are like a pack of hyenas (Dodd and his sweetheart loan from Countrywide). I can just see Obey and Waters standing over the carcasses of hard-working taxpayers, forcibly extracting money as payoffs to special interest groups and to engorge their own private coffers. These are filthy people.

en·gorge
- verb (used with object), verb (used without object), -gorged, -gorg·ing.
1. to swallow greedily; glut or gorge.

Labels: books, dodd, history, quotes

I keep coming back to this quote from George Weigel:

...because, for a good postmodern liberal like President Obama, that progressive “consensus” is so self-evidently true that one can afford to be generous in acknowledging that others, less enlightened but arguably sincere, have different views.

I was also re-reading the chapter (22) on Reinhold Niebuhr in Mead's God and Gold and was reminded of how slimy E.J. Dionne and David Brooks are. I'll write more in the coming days but God and Gold is an opposition research must read. Needless to say, Dionne is positively giddy that "Obama has strengthened moderate and liberal forces inside the [Catholic] church." I surmise his feelings are similar to those the writers and editors have at the Connecticut Post when they exhaustively cover church scandals.

Source: Speaking of Dionne by Ramesh Ponnuru

Labels: books, connecticut post, obama

It's not supposed to make any sense.

China's National Space Program Copies Star Trek Logo

Some—But Not All—of the Horrible Motherboard Box Art We Found

Baseball/Books
A League of His Own: Late in a storied baseball career, Branch Rickey threw the sport a curve

Labels: baseball, bermuda, books, weekend

(1) Stalin's Lost Railway

(2) Design Tutorial: Creating a Propaganda Poster

(3) 1984

(4) 30 Worth Seeing Stencil Graffiti Artworks

(5) Good vs. Evil Foosball

Labels: books, railroads, soccer, weekend

Derelict - Vessel abandoned at sea by her master and crew, without hope of recovery.

The Visual Encyclopedia of Nautical Terms Under Sail

Quotes from The Fellowship of the Ring:

"He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and eyes were downward."

"Light, light of Sun and Moon, he still feared and hated, and he always will, I think; but he was cunning. He found he could hide from the daylight and moonshine, and make his way swiftly and softly by dead of night with his pale cold eyes, catch small frightened or unwary things. He grew stronger and bolder with new food and new air."

long may Peace reign here for sure god never intended any war should be carryed on by any other beside the natives for the soldiers are wrought like horses & the officers can acquire no honour in a Country where as the New England people says, every Tree is a fort and every man a Gen[era]ll.

- Redcoats: The British Solider and War in the Americas, 1755-1763

Labels: books, weekend

I'm not a very prolific writer. It takes me a very long time to write what usually amounts to a couple of simple sentences. I would apologize more but just like Del Griffith told Neal Page:

I'm not changing.
I like—I like me.

Now that I've written that little disclaimer I'll write a sentence or two about Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin. His book is a fantastic (and timely) booster shot for those of us dedicated to the cause of private property, free markets, profit and loss, and limited government and alarmed by the growth of Big Government.

It's also a great starter book for new patriots or those recently freed from the bondage of our three main mind-molding establishments (education, entertainment and journalism).

Mark offers enough history to explain how we got to our present condition and what dangers the future may hold for a people dependent on (and enslaved by) Big Government. In the beginning of his book he invokes the ghosts of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and James Madison as testimony to the foundational elements of our national being— prudence, the Constitution, federalism and faith. Always mindful of how Statists are assaulting the permanent things, he moves on to a chapter-by-chapter analysis of how they are retarding free markets, welfare (entitlements), environment, immigration, and national defense as part of a coordinated power grab.

In fact, the egalitarian nature of the Statist's mission is always a rouse for the usurpation of more power—the power to control, consolidate and coerce in his ephemeral quest for Utopia.

For the Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way. The individual must be dehumanized and his nature delegitimized. Through persuasion, deception, and coercion, the individual must be subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state—not family, community, and faith, all of which have the potential of threatening the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state.

A couple of other notes...

The Economics of Private Enterprise in a 12-cell Matrix is hosted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy but it was published by the late Dr. Dale M. Haywood. Mark Levin also quotes Lawrence W. Reed from the Mackinac Center in his chapter on free markets. Lawrence was a guest lecturer at Northwood University (my alma mater) and a key contributor to When We Are Free (the university(s) most important publication). My copy, held together with tape, rubber bands and paper clips, is often cited, referenced and reprinted (selected excerpts) here on Limestone Roof. Lawrence is currently the President of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Labels: books

(1) Thousands in scramble for free books after Amazon supplier abandons warehouse

(2) Microsoft Shows Off More Windows 7 Improvements

(3) 14 Awesome Windows 7 Wallpapers

(4) Ryanair Pay-to-Pee Proposal Pisses Off Customers

(5) Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design (The packaging was the equivalent of the iObama™ European Socialism Plan)

(6) Pulp friction at Tropicana

Labels: airlines, books, microsoft, weekend

"And now, on the train from Paris, where he had stopped off for five weeks, he met some Germans who gave him reassurance. They said there was no longer any confusion or chaos in politics and government, and no longer any fear among the people, because everyone was so happy. This was what George wanted desperately to believe, and he was prepared to be happy, too. For no man ever went to a foreign land under more propitious conditions than those which attended his arrival in Germany early in May, 1936."

"At last he came--and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land."

- Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Labels: books, quotes

When I was in college some thirty years ago, the railroad station in New Haven was a moderately grand affair. It boasted marble floors, elaborate brass clocks, airy ceilings, and pretentious entrances. It was a foyer for a heady trip to the big city and beyond. When I returned for a twenty-fifth reunion, I discovered that the station had been abandoned. All that remained of that elegant monument to travel was a shed attached to the original building. What struck me in the sleepless hour when I concocted the title for this book was that religion seems to have suffered a similar fate. Where Church and Temple were once grandiose constructions suggesting all sorts of adventurous journeys to the beyond, they seem today reduced to humanity's arrivals and departures.

- George Dennis O'Brien, God and the New Haven Railway and Why Neither One Is Doing Very Well

Labels: books, quotes

I just finished Conquering Gotham by Jill Jonnes. It is an historical narrative of the building of Penn Station (and its tunnels) by the Pennsylvania Railroad.

I'm going to skip the review (dirty politicians, distinguished engineers, despicable journalists, dastardly union leaders and a couple of dashing industrialists that make Jeffrey R Immelt look like a dandy) and post links* to some of the main characters.

Alexander J. Cassatt
McKim, Mead and White
Daniel Hudson Burnham
Samuel Rea
Evelyn Nesbit
William Randolph Hearst
Seth Low
Richard Croker
Colonel DeWitt Clinton Haskins
Gustav Lindenthal
Mary Cassatt

This is a gripping tale of blood, toil, tears and sweat and it makes you wonder whether or not we squandered such an embarrassment of riches. I will be taking Burgoyne by rail to the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg, PA this summer to see the statue of Alexander Cassatt that once adorned the steps leading from the Arcade to the General Waiting Room at Penn Station.

Update
I forgot August Belmont Jr.! A big omission considering his namesake is on one of my favorite places to drop some coin.

*Wikipedia Free

Labels: books, history, railroads

"Railroad stations in all their physical immensity and importance had emerged as the cathedrals of the industrial age, monuments to modernity and to the machine that at their best reflected and honored the full panoply of the train station's drama. In what urban crossroads in human history had so many multitudes high and low, so many varied nationalities, converged in such vast numbers for such different purposes? All those often inchoate human emotions tied to departures to far-flung destinations, to new beginnings and romance (had not George Westinghouse famously met his wife on a train?), even to human routine, deserved a suitably noble setting. Every architect who designed terminals coveted this prize."

- Conquering Gotham, Jill Jonnes

Labels: books, quotes, railroads

With his simian air of ferocious, sullen reserve, he exuded an intensely intimidating power dedicated to horses, graft and politics. For decades, Tammany Hall had ruled through a very simple formula, explained by Croker in a rare interview: "Think of the hundreds of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. There is not a mugwump [reformer] who would shake hands with them...Tammany looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes them citizens in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there...If we go down into the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter."

It was really quite elementary, wrote muckraker Lincoln Steffens: Tammany owned the "plain people" because in the absence of government services, Tammany provided a helping hand. "They speak pleasant words, smile friendly smiles, notice the baby, give picnics up the River or the Sound, or a slap on the back; find jobs, most of them at city expense, but they also have news-stands, peddling privileges, railroad and other business places to dispense." And with those votes, Tammany ruled the city government and its tens of thousands of jobs and the vast ocean of boodle harvested from controlling the docks, the police, the health department, and the courts. It was a reliably rich take.

- Conquering Gotham, Jill Jonnes

History Repeats Itself

Christopher Dodd coerced banks via the Community Reinvestment Act to extend loans to uncreditworthy persons. In a free market, unfettered by interlopers, lending institutions would not have assumed such risk.

Thanks to Sen. Christopher Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank and others, the lending industry spent years issuing mortgages to millions of Americans who had no hope of repaying. Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank believe homeownership is a right unfettered by income or credit history, and over time, they were instrumental in forcing the industry to lend to some of the least creditworthy Americans.

As everyone knows, the results were disastrous. The housing bubble they helped create and inflate has burst, driving the economy into recession, the lending industry into chaos and millions of Americans into foreclosure, bankruptcy or both. (But at least Sen. Dodd got his millions in campaign cash from the financial industry and special rates on his mortgages from Countrywide Financial.)

And how about this via Instapundit:

The main problem with a payroll tax holiday is that it minimizes Congressional opportunities for graft and larding out goodies to their contributors. That makes it both wise and politically unfeasible, at least until we get a better class of congresscritter.

How about one more? This one puts the DEMOCRATIC graft in perspective:

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It's they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's hawking of Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel's alleged tax-writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson's business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what's for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption.

The cost of this government largesse/graft is going to come in the form of higher taxes and there are some estimates that taxes as a share of GDP will be 24 percent by 2050!

Labels: books, economics, history, obama, pelosi, reid

Airliner to be a hostel, but will plan take off?

What I'm reading
Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels

World War II posters

Labels: airports, books, weekend

The Limestone Roof Director of Print gave me a review of The Shameful Peace from the WSJ. The book is about the complicity of French intellectuals during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

It reminds me of a book I read once upon a time called The Intellectuals and the Masses which chronicles, among other things, the righteousness of intellectuals. This is from a review in Publishers Weekly:

This scathing critique argues that modernist literature and art arose as a reaction against popular culture and the mass reading public created by late 19th-century educational reforms. Oxford Enlgish professor Carey shows how intellectuals like D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Knut Hamsun, George Gissing and Wyndham Lewis scorned "the masses" as vulgar and trivial while exalting the artist as a natural aristocrat and transmitter of timeless values.

If I were drafting a syllabus for a class on the disease of intellectualism I would include these books and Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg, by reaching into the past, has given us a prophetic play-by-play of the days to come under Obama/Pelosi/Reid.

Related
The Stimulus & The Somme
How many people will have meaningful input in determining the overall allocation of the billion stimulus? 10? 20? It won't be more than 1000. These people—let's say that in the end 500 technocrats will play a meaningful role in writing the bill—will have unimaginable power. Remember that what they are doing is taking our money and deciding for us how to spend it. Presumably, that is because they are wiser at spending our money than we are at spending it ourselves.

Labels: books

Two great books from the Limestone Library by Steven Levy:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

Labels: books