I knew it was a shocking thing to say. No one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. No one has to pick it up. No one has to open it. If they open and read it they don’t have to like it and if you read it and dislike it you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, write to the publisher, write to the papers, write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published or sold or bought or read and that’s all I have to say on that subject. --Philip Pullman

A record-shattering rainstorm hammered the Northeast on Tuesday, delivering widespread flooding for the second time this month and unleashing particular havoc in Rhode Island, a tiny coastal state already beleaguered by a sagging economy and backbreaking unemployment rate.

The skeptic doesn't deny man's ability to reach discrete truths after significant empirical observation, but he does insist that we recognize any supposedly definitive conclusions as the product of an often faulty biological processor whose contact with the objects of its analyses is mediated through dense and wildly distorting cultural and biological filters. We're working on a second hand basis here -- at best.

The funny thing about devout atheists is that many tend to be human triumphalists, with utopian -- borderline religious -- philosophies of the mind (or brain, depending). This from the same people who conceive of us as beasts pure and simple, the kith and kin of apes. Yet grandiose imaginings of our mental capacity persist in that camp. Consider Hitchens, whose sense of "right" and "wrong" is hyper-cultivated, and who possesses fraternal ideal that would put to shame the most zealous Christian millenarians.

I think science has managed to arrive at a number of impressively sound conclusions. Of course, most every one of them emerged in the last 2 or 3 of our species' 2000 centuries. And only with the ceaseless struggle of a class of highly intelligent specialists working 'round the clock.

Even those truths which appear most secure I take with a large grain of salt. After all, we're frail animals with limited perceptions, unstable starting points, shoddy reasoning powers; animals bound always to look through a mirror, darkly.

Put simply, when it comes to truth, our track record isn't very encouraging.

Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.

James Q. Wilson

Yuppie-in-chief:

In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth [and], remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations.

Another excellent harangue, courtesy of Mr. Farage. Classy, well spoken limey bastards.

I have no doubt that it is your intention to be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of the European nation-states.

My new hero, Nigel Farage.

Meghan McCain is an argument against hereditary government.

While attacking the tea party movement on the View, she said:

Revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English. It’s ridiculous.

Revolutions?

McCain has also repeatedly called for “Old School” Republicans to embrace progressives like herself.

Ol' skooool in da house!

Writes Freddie in an otherwise decent article:

“[T]his is a country born out of violent revolution by men at the absolute vanguard of left-wing philosophy for their times.”

Freddie usually takes care with words. This bit is uncharacteristically sloppy. Perhaps that's the point, to rile folks up? Anyway.

Much of the revolution's foundational rhetoric evinced vivid egalitarianism, but was the struggle’s animating philosophy “left-wing” in any meaningful sense? Perhaps, when he says “left-wing,” Freddie simply means republican, anti-royalist, and (sort of) secular. In that case, America was at the forefront of international leftism in its struggle against the Central Powers. (And anyway, the Romans who overthrew the Etruscans were anti-royalist republicans. Were they "at the absolute vanguard of left-wing philosophy for their times"?)

The revolution had its share of radical democratic cosmopolitans, sure. But for every Tom Paine there was a slave-owning aristocratic quasi-feudalist. Or a bourgeois monarchist in the mold of Hamilton.

Seems to me—and here I know I’m getting away from Freddie’s point—that the driving force behind the revolution was nationalism. There emerged in the thirteen colonies a patriotic sensibility. Home was no longer Britain but America (or Virginia, Massachusetts, whatever). Most partisans fought not out of any commitment to political or economic leveling, but because they were sick of some distant king dispatching goons to thieve their hard-earned pennies and impose arbitrary laws from afar. (Eventually, and soon in some circumstacnes, these impulses coalesced into a general governing philosophy that put a premium on liberty and constitutionalism, with the narrative flourishes coming much later.)

The revolution, for all its liberal trappings, was not an ideological affair, which is why there was a minimum of internecine brutality between patriots and tories. This imagining—pragmatic, nationalistic, and vaguely localist—cuts against both the conceptions of both the left and the right. The spirit of 1776 was neither egalitarian nor libertarian. It was nationalistic. (Which should really make Freddie happy, since his "ultra-leftism" depends upon group consciousness and solidarity and the centralizing impulse to succeed.)

The outcome produced greater equality for a few. Certainly, white males of means witnessed an increase in their political rights and liberties, though in many senses it was not a dramatic expansion. And for blacks, the greatest single oppressed minority in American history, the success of the revolution likely prolonged their bondage. The struggle against Britain was in that sense reactionary, or stereotypically "right-wing."

Old but interesting self-criticism of the NYT's liberal bias by its (now former) ombudsman.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

I once found myself nursing a hangover in Nowhere, Dixie.

The waiter came over, clean-faced and sun-browned. "Mornin', folks," he said in a sunny southern drawl.

"Booze?" I croaked.

"Oh, no, we don't do that," he laughed, sort of.

Fine. Eggs, I ordered, and bacon and biscuits. With "gravy," or whatever.

"That'll be it?" smiled the waiter.

"The paper. The New York Times."

A darkish look settled across his face. "Oh," he said flatly. "Oh, no, we don't do that."

He returned to the counter and whispered with the other waiters, glancing conspiratorially in my direction. Damnyank. The food was fine: heavy, savory, liberally salted. The USA Today was worse than the damn hangover.