CHICAGO — A brief earthquake struck the Midwest early Monday, rattling windows and awakening sleeping residents from Wisconsin south to Missouri and from Indiana west to Iowa.
No injuries were reported from the quake, which occurred about 1:11 a.m. CDT.
Brian Lassige, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado, said the quake was magnitude 4.5, and its epicenter was about eight miles northwest of Ottawa in northern Illinois, close to the small village of Troy Grove. The rural area is about 70 miles west of Chicago.
Here’s what the U. S. Geological Survey has to say about the quake.
We don’t have these events very often here in the upper Midwest but we do have them. Whenever one occurs I always wonder if it’s the prelude to The Big One. No, I don’t mean that Big One. Not the San Andreas fault. The New Madrid fault. [continue reading…]
My wife is quite a fan of movie star autobiographies. Not long ago she finished reading Esther Williams’s autobiography Million Dollar Mermaid. I asked her: “Did you underline all the good parts?” She replied “It’s all good parts.” Apparently, pretty salacious.
Instapundit draws our attention to this post at Silflay Hraka:
“For those now experiencing the onset of apoplexy, I have a question. The Bush team that led a righteously angry America into Afghanistan and Iraq has, in the space of a year, managed to horribly tarnish the reputation of the United States in the eyes of her own people. Should GWB win re-election, is it at all realistic to expect that he will have the political capital needed to expand the conflict to Iran, Syria, North Korea or anywhere else should it become necessary? No matter what George Bush does, no matter how long he remains President, about half of America will oppose him, and a significant minority will do so at every turn.
On the other hand, if John Kerry is elected President, and those who now say they support the War on Terrorism continue to do so–even though they might disagree with some of strategies deployed to fight it–then on this question at least the country will be united to a degree not seen since the halcyon days of the late 90s.”
Fair enough. But Bigwig doesn’t address the misgivings that many in the country have about John Kerry. First, regardless of how one may feel about Clinton’s presidency, it’s hard to dispute that Mr. Clinton’s relationship with the military was, shall we say, strained. Will Kerry’s be better? Cf. John Moore of Useful Fools for a review of how quite a few vets feel about Mr. Kerry. Also remember that quite a few of the men that Mr. Kerry was slandering in the 1970’s are the general officers in the Pentagon today. [continue reading…]
Noah Millman has a lovely post in which he brings together Psalm 89/90, a midrash, and Anna Karenina:
But it’s a funny thing about experience: it exists only in the present. Before that it is fantasy; after, nostalgia. It only is for a fleeting instant. So how does it “count.”
I believe I’ve mentioned that Anna Karenina is my favorite novel and, I’d argue, the greatest novel ever. I could muster many arguments for that opinion, but let me present one here: its terrible realism about spiritual experience.
As they say, read the whole thing (and my own, ahem, comment in his comments section). You’ll see why he is on my blogroll.
Some additional pro-war positions on the War on Terror and the war in Iraq have been pointed out to me. The first position is one held by by a number of bloggers who characterize themselves as “liberal hawks” including Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias. Drum writes:
It’s unfortunate that the Bush administration is so suspicious of the value of the UN, because this is a case where UN support would be valuable to us (and, in turn, why UN support for the war would also be valuable). While it’s true that the U.S. is the only country with the military muscle to invade Iraq, the UN is probably a better choice for long term post-war reconstruction because (a) it commits them to helping pay for it, (b) they have more experience at it than we do, and (c) the rest of the Arab world is more likely to cooperate with the UN than with an American administrator that they distrust.
To be honest I thought I had a better citation than this. I would appreciate being directed to similar citations, particularly by Matthew Yglesias or Josh Marshall who appear to have held similar views. [continue reading…]
Scott has updated his election project. It’s a squeaker: 269—269.
Oh my! Call it the Reagan bounce if you will, but Bush’s recent upturn has resulted in a tie here at Election Projection. The electoral votes count stands deadlocked at 269. Kerry is still winning the popular vote, 50.2% – 48.0%, but the margin has tightened considerably over the last couple of weeks.
This story appeared on a Samoyed listserv I’m subscribed to. It was so good I felt I had to pass it on.
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:02:37 -0400
From: Dave Wiley
Subject: packhiking and port-o-lets
I posted this to a couple other lists about two weeks ago, but could not post here because of email problems, so if this is a rerun for anyone, sorry in advance.
Me and the girls(my packhiking sammies and my min-pin, which could be the first packhiking min-pin ever) have seen some incredible things when we go packhiking. Nice scenery, nice walks, good weather, bad weather. We had the weird story of the guy relieving himself which I typed up a couple years ago. Well we’ve now had our second potty encounter on a packhiking adventure. The story is somewhat graphic in nature, so I’ve left a lot of that kind of stuff out. Use your own imagination.
I heard an interview this afternoon on NPR with a NASA expert who scoffed at the flight of SpaceShipOne this morning. “What use is it?”, he said. “Here they’ve spent $20 million to win a $10 million prize. Unless they can develop a new technology for doing the things we do in space—deploying satellites and delivering heavy equipment—it’s just not interesting.”
Not interesting to NASA, perhaps. But think about this. It was more than one hundred years between Columbus’s first voyages to the New World and Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1609—the first privately financed voyage to the New World financed in this case by the Muscovy Company. It’s only been a little more than forty years between Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space on April 12, 1961 and the flight of the SpaceShipOne.
There have been more voyages to the Western Hemisphere, more goods shipped, more people and lives and dreams transported by private companies than all of the world’s governments put together.
I firmly believe that the dreamers who launched SpaceShipOne and their successors will, like the dreamers who came to the New World, do more to explore the universe than the bureaucrats at NASA can even imagine.
SpaceshipOne, the first private spacecraft, has successfully been to space and back. Watching the flight and landing took me back to watching the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launches on TV when I was a kid. Only this time I watched via streaming video on my computer. Happy news. For details go here.
It’s no secret that Americans are divided about the War on Terror and how it’s being conducted. Any country as diverse as the United States is bound to have many differing opinions about so important a topic and what should be done about it. While cruising the comments sections of various blogs I’ve noticed that although the opinions may differ they appear to fall into some regular patterns.
This post is an attempt to identify the more commonly held positions and to associate the positions with prominent blogs or bloggers. I’m not making a critical survey and no attempt is made to evaluate the various positions. I’m just identifying and classifying. I used a combination of approaches in doing this study including reading current postings from a variety of blogs, archived postings, and Google searches. [continue reading…]
The Chicago Tribune reports:
