The Prowler wrote last month:

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is also looking at how it can put in place policies that would allow it greater oversight of the Internet. “Internet radio is becoming a big deal, and we’re seeing that some web sites are able to control traffic and information, while other sites that may be of interest or use to citizens get limited traffic because of the way the people search and look for information,” says on committee staffer. “We’re at very early stages on this, but the chairman has made it clear that oversight of the Internet is one of his top priorities.”

Many commentators are watching the anti-choice crowd, currently in power in our federal and many state governements, for bills to make the semblance of ideological diversity a legal requirement. Liberal views don’t get enough play on the air or apparently on your blog, you filthy capitalist, so liberals must administer the airways and Internet in order to get their views into your head. I heard on the news several days ago that while Senator Jim DeMint proposed and saw passed an amendment to reject The Fairness Doctrine from the FCC, another amendment passed the Senate to allow the FCC to enforce ethnic diversity in media ownership. If there aren’t enough of the right people running media outlets in a particular area, the Feds will insist that someone sell their company to one of those select people. It’s another reason we call them the anti-choice crowd. If we don’t make the choices they want us to make, they will use legal force to choose for us.

So the current word on the street is that The Fairness Doctrine may be dead, but it’s spirit will live on in many other laws.

In related news, David Limbaugh writes about “The Orwellian Presidential Bully Pulpit.”

According to this report, Hillary Clinton “dropped a brick” (as the English say) when she met with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. She’d had her crack staff put together a joke red button that was supposed to have the word “Reset” printed on it in Russian.

Instead, the word inscribed on the item by the Best and Brightest was one that means “overloaded.”

OK, I’ll cop to it. It’s all my fault.

In their zeal for equal opportunity, the State Department chose not to hire an actual Russian interpreter for this translating exercise, because Russian speakers have an unfair and undemocratic lock on such jobs.

Instead, in a bold affirmative action move, they broke the glass ceiling by hiring a Norwegian translator instead. And that translator was me.

My bad.

The little video Phil posted below advertises a fantasy game set in a sort of imaginary Viking world.

One thing that caught my attention was that the hero wears one of those over-the-shoulder back scabbards.

Allow me to rant about those for a moment. Continue reading Bad buttons and shabby sheaths →

I doubt history plays much into this storyline, and since no character will really die if he gets stabs, the animated violence is pretty thick. Skarin is the hero’s name. That’s Swedish, I believe, but is it Norse?

The city archive of Cologne, Germany collapsed yesterday, in part destroying a very valuable repository of historical documents. The total extent of the damage will not be known for some time.

The AP’s story is here.

Tip: Cronaca.

Thomas Jefferson, who was not always right about things but is still a pretty quotable leader, gave us this bit of ugly word imagery: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

In related news, things in Iraq are on the upswing.

At least, it’s huge news if you’re a Viking buff. Or a Viking buff particularly interested in western Norway, anyway. Karmøy island, specifically.

OK, it’s huge news if you’re me.

You’ve certainly seen pictures of the Oseberg Viking ship. It looks like this.

The Oseberg ship, along with the Gokstad ship, were both discovered in remarkable states of preservation in grave mounds in the eastern part of Norway in the 1880s. They were painstakingly reconstructed, and are now viewed by thousands of visitors annually in the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo. Two women had been buried in the Oseberg ship; a man in the Gokstad.

But nobody knew the Oseberg ship’s secret history. Now it appears that history is coming to light. Continue reading HUUUUGE NEWS!!!!!!! →

So let’s talk about politics and civil government a bit. Do you hope he fails?

Moral relativism has distrubingly clear results when applied by national leaders. Historian Paul Johnson talks about it in context of a feature in The New Criterion. Johnson asks:

What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government. However, this, in turn, is made possible by the second and far more serious evil, moral relativism — the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, good for all human beings everywhere and in all ages, and that there is no such thing as unconditional truth.

Introducing The New Criterion feature, Roger Kimball writes:

It wasn’t that long ago that a responsible educated person in the West was someone who entertained firm moral and political principles. When those principles were challenged, he would typically rise to defend them. The more serious the challenge, the more concerted the defense.

Today, as the Canadian writer William Gairdner reminds us in his little-noticed but excellent new study of relativism, the equivalent educated person is likely to have a very different attitude towards whatever moral and political ideas—”principles” is no longer the right word—he lives by. When those ideas are challenged, deference to the challenger rather than defense of the principles is the order of the day. “While perhaps more broadly learned” than his less forgiving predecessor, such a person, Gairdner writes, “is more likely to think of him or herself as proudly distinguished by the absence of ‘rigid’ opinions and moral values, to be someone ‘tolerant’ and ‘open.'”

BTW, you can support The New Criterion here.

That massive spending bill passed several days ago, the first one not the second one, effectively denies funding for a D.C. area education scholarship program which has been pretty successful in allowing parents to give their children better education. But we already know school choice is not something Democrats favor. They seem to favor submission to their iron fists. Why do the people upset about privacy issues in The Patriot Act not give a rat’s rear-end about families finding the best education they can? (That’s broad-brush, of course. I’m sure some people do want choice in education and take issue with The P.A. and some of those choose homeschooling or unschooling for themselves.)

In other news, “Homeschoolers Save Taxpayers Billions Per Year.”

Also from the Drexel PG blog, a link to a loaded game site, Sporcle. I’m proud to say I could not name all of the U.S. Presidents, and the ones I couldn’t remember are the ones no one else could either, except Chester Arthur. I knew him, and most people don’t apparently. Others people couldn’t name are Pierce, Buchanan, McKinley, um, Taylor . . . Harding . . . Here’s the test, so you play yourself.