CORRECTION: In one of my comments below I incorrectly gave the impression that my wife let me sleep in. It was the dogs that let me sleep in.

Reuters reports:

BESLAN, Russia (Reuters) – Gunmen held hundreds of children and adults captive in a school gym into the night in turbulent southern Russia Thursday, but the Kremlin remained silent about an attack amounting to a huge humiliation.

Officials in North Ossetia, a province near unruly Chechnya, were trying to build contacts with 17 attackers who herded pupils, parents and teachers into the gym after bursting into a ceremony marking the start of a new school year Wednesday.

For extensive links and commentary throughout the blogosphere see Backcountry Conservative
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Captain Ed does a little fisking of Tom Shales’s recent column in the Washington Post:

Having read Tom Shales’ review of the Republican convention thus far, I’m not sure whether to be encouraged or irritated. Shales obviously thinks that the GOP has managed to out-stage the Democrats in putting on “rubber-stamp” conventions, as if we have had any other kind in the last five decades. Shales even notes success in impressing the media. However, he takes several opportunities to sneer down his cheaters at Republicans as a bunch of hicks…

Both Shales’s column and Captain Ed’s fisking are well worth reading.

Newspapermen have been sneering at us poor blokes in the booboisie for nearly a hundred years now. Here, for your reading pleasure I present a little sample from the pen of the very type of the modern newspaper man, H. L. Mencken.
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Apparently not everyone agrees with the position I took in the post below:

Apparently, I’m in the minority but I didn’t find his answer to Lauer’s question particularly noteworthy. We will never win the war on terror in the sense that we won, say, World War II.

James Joyner has lots of good links to various viewpoints.
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Glenn Reynolds explains the reasons for the problems in mainstream media as laziness, bias, and ineptitude in his most recent article A Media Meltdown? on Tech Central Station:

Though it’s looking less likely than it was a few weeks ago, John Kerry could still pull off a win in this presidential election. But there’s already one clear loser: the so-called “mainstream media” of network television and major newspapers. Whoever winds up in the White House next year, the position of these traditional media outlets (or “legacy media” as some call them) continues to decline.

I’m not the only one to have noticed Glenn’s article (natch—he posted a link on Instapundit). Steve Taylor, James Joyner, and others have noted it and commented.

I think there’s another reason that Glenn might consider. Call it the “Little Man Behind the Curtain” effect.
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There must be something going around. A few days ago I wrote about a lack of inspiration to blog here. Then yesterday I read Steven Den Beste’s post that he had given up blogging. Possibly forever. That saddened me enormously and I wrote about it.

Now a third of my favorite bloggers, Alice in Texas, has announced a possibly permanent blogging hiatus:

This may be because my own muse has vanished and Not Blogging is the only blog-relevant subject that can interest me right now: who knows. Also, I think I can fashion a passable Last Post from the subject (bear with me- it’s not as negative as it seems…) and I don’t know if a Last Post is what I should write for this place now.

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Pravda and Gazeta (Russian language) are reporting that both flights Tu-134 and Tu-154 experienced midair explosions in the tail sections of the planes and that the explosive used was hexogen. Hexogen was the explosive used in a series of apartment bombings by Chechnyan terrorists in Russia several months ago.

The explosions took place without warning.

The pilots of Tu-154 never pushed the distress button.

Russian transport minister Igor’ Levitin is quoted as saying.

Activation of the SOS button took place at the moment of the destruction of the aircraft.

UPDATE: Tracked-back to Outside the Beltway.

Steven Den Beste has announced that he is taking what I hope is not a permanent hiatus from blogging:

Since then, I’ve realized that I don’t want to write any longer. I’ve been thinking about it, and I realized that I stopped enjoying it about a year ago, which is also about the time that I began to post less and less often. Several times in the last year I’ve tried to tell my readers what I was feeling, in hopes that it might change things, but it didn’t help.

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Yes, there’s something wrong. I’m tired. Does this mean I’ll never post again? Damned if I know. But it won’t be soon.

Hat tip: Steve Green
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My A-#1 main complaint about both Mssrs. Bush and Kerry on the War on Terror is that both have increasingly expressed views that the war is unwinnable:

When asked “Can we win?” the war on terror, Bush said, “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.”

Hat tip: Talking Points Memo

And that was Mr. Bush. That’s too nuanced for me. But it’s very likely to be true. How can you win if you’re willing to fight to a draw?

I never voted for Ronald Reagan. He was just too bellicose for me. But he changed the world by not accepting that a victory in the Cold War could be won rather than passed on as a legacy to his successors as had been done for forty years.

Forty years of War on Terror will almost inevitably result in millions or tens of millions of American civilian dead. That’s simply unacceptable. Have neither Kerry nor Bush learned anything from Reagan?

My last food post The Ultimate Guide to Meatloaf got me to thinking. That post actually was a rule for meatloaf. I believe that the key to being a really good, inventive cook is to cook by rules rather than recipes. The difference between a recipe and a rule is that when you prepare a recipe the result (if your’re lucky) is that you get the dish that the recipe describes. Frequently you’ll get less because you miss something, you’re not as skilled a chef as the author of the recipe, your ingredients aren’t as good as the ingredients used by the chef, or it’s just a bad recipe.

But when you cook by a rule rather than a recipe you can prepare a vast number of different dishes which all follow that rule. You can vary the ingredients and proportions to achieve the results that you want. And, frequently most importantly, you can use the ingredients you have to prepare dishes you’ll like rather than running out to get ingredients you may not have on hand.
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