Here's a great link from American Thinker on one of the craziest things in the environmental movement: Imagine the world without people! In the eyes of most environmentalists, we are nothing more than a virus on the face of the earth.
Here's the link:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/earth_first_people_later.html
PS: Why do committed Darwinists work so diligently to protect endangered species?
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Titanic, RIP
Ninety-six years ago, on a crystal clear, bracingly cold night in the north Atlantic, the pride of the modern world, the RMS Titanic, grazed an iceberg and went to the bottom of the sea, killing 1,300 people, many of whom were the pride of American society, many of whom were unknowns who were seeking their fortune in a new world.
The Titanic was believed by many to represent the final triumph of man over nature, it's steel hull reflecting the peak of human perfectibility. Instead, the unsinkable sank and as it descended to the bottom of the sea, the Titanic took with it the hope that man could finally defeat the force of nature.
A young writer named Oscar Bane Keeler, known to his friends as "O.B.", was working for the Kansas City Star. Years later he would move to Atlanta, Georgia, and become a sports writer at The Atlanta Journal. He would become the main sportswriter and chaperone to my grandfather, Bobby Jones, as my grandfather won 13 major golf championships and became the only man in history to win the Grand Slam, all four major championships in the same year. But that was still in the future.
On April 16, 1912, Keeler was in shock at the disaster of the Titanic. Keeler sat down to his typewriter and wrote the following words, that, I believe, best summarize the magnitude the disaster and the triumph of the human heart. He wrote:
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
That was what the broad and heavy black headlines said and it was as if the morning papers came to the waiting doors bearing with them a knot of crepe.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
There was a sound in the line as of a bell death tolling somewhere - somewhere out on the broad Atlantic, a thousand fathoms above the sodden, twisted wreck of what had been earth's proudest ship.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
Breakfasts were left untouched after the unfolding paper laid bare the hideous intelligence. There was a hush in the street cars, a suggestive quiet in the subdued greetings at the offices, a dearth of laughter, so that the light unconsciously merry voice of an unthinking child jarred and somehow hurt in the burdened atmosphere of gloom.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
Under the settled melancholy that terrible line hammered away at the imagination with a ceaseless irritation.
How did they meet it, this fearful thing? What did the men do, called on to face a ghastly death in the cold hours before dawn? Were they calm and steady, or were they a shrieking, merciless mob, fighting for places in the lifeboat? Did they help the women and children to places of safety with cheerful, comforting words that it was only a precaution - that nothing was wrong - as men should who face the end as men? Or was the shame of La Furgoyne on their last moments - the beating off of a woman from the crowded boats, the maniacal rage of fear?
Brief as the last dispatches were, they showed there were heroes on the doomed ship.
The survivors were mostly women and children, the dispatches said.
And there in that single line is as fine an epitaph as could be written for the men passengers and crew who went down with the ship. That line tells of a captain with his first and last thoughts for the passengers in his care, of a crew that made ready the lifeboats with never a hint of delay, and sent them clear of the foundering vessel with business-like precision unshaken by the doom their experienced eyes saw only too well.
That line tells of the manhood of Great Britain and America, almost buried, it seems at times, in the sordid struggle of an unromantic and unheroic age, yet flashing out as brightly at the grim need as ever it shown when knighthood was in flower.
The survivors were mostly women and children!
It is the brightest line of the whole grim story: the stirring martial chord in the terrible dirge beginning:
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
The Titanic was believed by many to represent the final triumph of man over nature, it's steel hull reflecting the peak of human perfectibility. Instead, the unsinkable sank and as it descended to the bottom of the sea, the Titanic took with it the hope that man could finally defeat the force of nature.
A young writer named Oscar Bane Keeler, known to his friends as "O.B.", was working for the Kansas City Star. Years later he would move to Atlanta, Georgia, and become a sports writer at The Atlanta Journal. He would become the main sportswriter and chaperone to my grandfather, Bobby Jones, as my grandfather won 13 major golf championships and became the only man in history to win the Grand Slam, all four major championships in the same year. But that was still in the future.
On April 16, 1912, Keeler was in shock at the disaster of the Titanic. Keeler sat down to his typewriter and wrote the following words, that, I believe, best summarize the magnitude the disaster and the triumph of the human heart. He wrote:
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
That was what the broad and heavy black headlines said and it was as if the morning papers came to the waiting doors bearing with them a knot of crepe.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
There was a sound in the line as of a bell death tolling somewhere - somewhere out on the broad Atlantic, a thousand fathoms above the sodden, twisted wreck of what had been earth's proudest ship.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
Breakfasts were left untouched after the unfolding paper laid bare the hideous intelligence. There was a hush in the street cars, a suggestive quiet in the subdued greetings at the offices, a dearth of laughter, so that the light unconsciously merry voice of an unthinking child jarred and somehow hurt in the burdened atmosphere of gloom.
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
Under the settled melancholy that terrible line hammered away at the imagination with a ceaseless irritation.
How did they meet it, this fearful thing? What did the men do, called on to face a ghastly death in the cold hours before dawn? Were they calm and steady, or were they a shrieking, merciless mob, fighting for places in the lifeboat? Did they help the women and children to places of safety with cheerful, comforting words that it was only a precaution - that nothing was wrong - as men should who face the end as men? Or was the shame of La Furgoyne on their last moments - the beating off of a woman from the crowded boats, the maniacal rage of fear?
Brief as the last dispatches were, they showed there were heroes on the doomed ship.
The survivors were mostly women and children, the dispatches said.
And there in that single line is as fine an epitaph as could be written for the men passengers and crew who went down with the ship. That line tells of a captain with his first and last thoughts for the passengers in his care, of a crew that made ready the lifeboats with never a hint of delay, and sent them clear of the foundering vessel with business-like precision unshaken by the doom their experienced eyes saw only too well.
That line tells of the manhood of Great Britain and America, almost buried, it seems at times, in the sordid struggle of an unromantic and unheroic age, yet flashing out as brightly at the grim need as ever it shown when knighthood was in flower.
The survivors were mostly women and children!
It is the brightest line of the whole grim story: the stirring martial chord in the terrible dirge beginning:
The Titanic took 1,300 down!
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Habemus Papam: Albertus Primus!!
Ever wonder what happens when modern people abandon religion? They create a new one. Witness one Al Gore: A man of such profound religious committment that he thought Job was a book in the New Testament. After the American people decided he needed a job change, he seemed to think that environmental messiah might be right up his alley. So he created the religion of Environmentalism and appointed himself it's "Pope." Here is a brief video from those wonderful people at Stoplight on Pope Albert I's latest attempt to increase regulation, increase taxes and decrease personal liberty all in the name of Gaia, whose "Pope" he is. Enjoy it...at least until the carbon footprint of your computer endangers a snail somewhere.
http://www.citizenlink.org/Stoplight/A000007000.cfm
http://www.citizenlink.org/Stoplight/A000007000.cfm
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