The Friday Furo Questus

Wednesday Edition!

Headed to the Windy City, so it'll be brief. [Spontaneous applause breaks out all over.]

Mark Steyn rhaposdizes on the past glories of air travel. "Catch Me If You Can...does a grand job of evoking that era — the jet-age glamour of the air terminals with the flying-saucer shapes; Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” with that marvelous Billy May intro that sounds like an orchestral Boeing taxi-ing down the runway and taking off into the blue; and, of course, the gals. . ." I just want to know something - why in the sixties, you guys got to have Elvis, James Bond, Pan Am, and cute stewardesses dressed up nice, while we got stuck with Eminem, Jack Bauer, Southwest, and flight attendants who treat you with more politness but less regard than cattle. Not that I don't like Jack Bauer and Southwest - but urbanity, class and the meaning of being debonair all disappeared when men stopped wearing hats.

Thought of the Week:

"Moral intuition has had a bad press in recent years. It is felt to be an unsure and variable guide. But is total reliance on rational criticism any safer? A society that seeks to root all its laws in consciously derived rational-critical principles, and to ignore the promptings of moral intuition, will soon find itself wandering down the blind alley of nihilism. ...necrophilia (and cannibalism) are vile, horrible and wrong. We ought to be able to take this truth for granted and to meet these vices with disgust, contempt and at times ridicule. Unless we recover this ability, we will find ourselves terribly satisfied at our own clever debating as we walk into a trackless swamp, starting nervously at the cackling sounds of the night." -- John O'Sullivan

Churchill Quote of the Week:

A two-fer!

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute talk with the average voter."
WSC (attributed)

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
WSC, From a speech in the House of Commons on November 11, 1947.