I’ve read Alas, Babylon several times over the years. It is always worth picking up again. Pat Frank writes with a distinct style that accurately captures life in 1950’s Florida.

His work starkly highlights how different our racial attitudes, sexual mores and cultural taboos have become since those days. The writing is entertaining, compelling and full of rich characters.

Perhaps most importantly, Frank was one of the first to chronicle a threat that is still with us, the threat of nuclear conflict. In Alas, Babylon, the threat is between superpowers. The bombs of that era pale in comparison to the bombs that exist today which only serves to make the imagined reality of life after nuclear war more sobering for a reader in the year 2007.

Frank knew what he was writing about because his real name was Harry Hart, and Harry Hart was a journalist, government consultant and ultimately a talented writer. I highly recommend spending an evening or two with survivors of Fort Repose, Florida. Alas, Babylon is one of those rare novels that completely transport me out of the room I’m in and into the author’s imagination.

Guy Sorman believes that China is not destined to be the next world superpower. He makes the case in an article entitled The Empire of Lies.

I pieced together the very ordinary reasons that had provoked the uprising from bits of information divulged by the children rather than the adults. The village had a dilapidated school, without heating, chalk, or teacher. In principle, schooling is compulsory and free, but the Party secretary, the village kingpin, made parents pay for the heating and chalk. Then a teacher came from the city. He held that his government wages weren’t commensurate with his status and demanded extra money from the parents. Half of the parents, members of the most prosperous clan, agreed to pay; the other half, belonging to the poorer clan, refused. A skirmish erupted between the two clans, and the teacher fled. The Party secretary tried to intervene and was lynched, the Party office plundered. Then the police roared in with batons and guns. The school has reopened, the teacher replaced with a villager who knows how to read and write but “nothing more than that,” he admits.
The government puts the number of what it calls these “illegal” or “mass” incidents—and they’re occurring in the industrial suburbs, too—at 60,000 a year, doubtless underreporting them. Some experts think that the true figure is upward of 150,000 a year, and increasing.
The uprisings are really mutinies, sporadic and unpremeditated. They express peasant families’ despair over the bleak future that awaits them and their children. Emigration from the countryside might be a way out, but it’s not easy to find a permanent job in the city. All kinds of permits are necessary, and the only way to get them is to bribe bureaucrats. The lot of the peasant migrant—and China now has 200 million of them—is to move from work site to work site, earning a pittance when payment is forthcoming at all. The migrants usually don’t receive permission to bring their families with them, and even if they could, obtaining accommodation and schooling for their children would be virtually impossible. The fate of Chinese citizens often depends on where they come from. Someone born in Shanghai is an aristocrat, with the right to housing and schooling in Shanghai. Someone born in a village, however, can only go to the village school, at least until a university admits him—a rare feat for a peasant. An American scholar, Feiling Wang, had come to China to study this system of discrimination, which few in the West know about, but the government expelled him.

India anyone? 

Or it might as well be. A Democrat is actually running for President on the Fair Tax platform!

The name Mike Gravel doesn’t mean a thing to me, but it is nice to see a Democrat support the Fair Tax. You find the most unexpected things on the Internet.

One of the things I often find myself regretting are all those bookmarks I have lost over the years. I’ll recall some bit of information and want to clarify the hazy details. Because I work from multiple computers in multiple locations, I’m usually not at the computer where the site I have in mind is bookmarked. Or the memory is four years old, and the bookmark has been lost due to a hard drive crash, or some other electronic catastrophe. I end up wasting minutes or sometimes even hours searching the Internet for my lost memory.

No longer. I’ve recently begun using Foxmarks. The company tagline is "the bookmark synchronizer" but if I were in charge of marketing, I’d make the tagline "the life preserver for all your links." Foxmarks is one of those tools you probably won’t realize the value of until you’ve had it a few months or years.

It not only saves links you might want to refer to at some point in the nebulous future, it automatically synchronizes them between browsers you regularly use. What a wonderful tool! Naturally, the product doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, so if you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, you now have another compelling reason to do so.

One has to wonder how many of the recent shootings we’ve seen on the news were inspired by the Virginia Tech madman.

Janet Coleman said she saw "a young man with a sawed-off shotgun" in the parking lot being chased by police.
"I could just see a blunt-sized gun bigger than, like a regular .44," she said, adding that she gained her expertise in weapons from watching "a lot of crime TV."
Inside, clothing store manager Lissa Young said "several rounds of gunfire" were followed by two customers who ran into the store and said shots had been fired.
She said she immediately locked the doors and ordered the customers to the back of the store, where they waited until police gave them the all-clear.

I also wonder how we get a story where "a young man with a sawed-off shotgun" is described as having a gun bigger than a regular .44. A shotgun and a .44 pistol are not remotely similar. Is this just poor reporting or is the woman "expert" just ill informed?

Either way, it sounds like police stopped this incident fairly effectively.

Time for another round of breathless punditry by people who know nothing about weapons or psychology telling us how we should fix all the broken pieces of our society, and the broken minds of our youths.