Under protest, it goes without saying, because I’m afraid of the power of the Irish Lobby, I offer the following clip of the redoubtable Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. It’s a song I’m particularly fond of — the kind that might not impress you on first acquaintance, but sticks in your mind after a couple repeats. I particularly like the line, “Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far — truth is a fix-ed star….”

Now an Anthony Sacramone update: He sneaked back into his blog last week, tiptoeing with his shoes off, and did a post. Then he did another yesterday. So we’ve got that. He also links to the web page of the Intercollegiate Review, where he’s got a very amusing cover story right now:

Empire builders and revolutionaries, reformers and moral scolds, civil libertarians and uncivil prohibitionists—all believe History is on their side. Beware anyone who imputes to History an inevitable, self-directed, Forward march, as if it were as fixed as a bar code, as predetermined as male-pattern baldness, as sovereign as any voluntaristic deity. Most risible are atheists, old or new, who act as if the expanding energies of a supposedly random and causeless Big Bang could even possess an ultimate purpose….