THIS MODERN WORLD

This was a surprise?

Bryan Carisone, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Raritan, N.J., “absolutely loves” his new GMC Denali XL, an extra-large sport utility vehicle with televisions built into the leather seats. But in June, one week after he bought it, he pulled into a station on a near-empty tank and watched the total climb higher and higher — to $109.

“It just about killed me,” Mr. Carisone said.

At the beginning of June, oil was selling for $138 a barrel. Yet at some point during that month, Mr. Carisone bought an “extra large” SUV, and was then shocked to discover how much it cost to fill the tank.

Wow. Just, wow.

… my wife points out that the name of the SUV is an anagram for “denial”…

On the field before the All-Star Game, Major League Baseball plans to assemble the largest gathering of Hall of Fame players in baseball history. And as fans salute their heroes, the former players will join the crowd in saluting the American flag — one that is roughly 75 feet by 150 feet, as long as a 15-story building is tall, spread horizontally over the Yankee Stadium turf.

Hundreds of volunteers are needed to unfurl and hold an enormous flag. Handlers often shake their arms, creating a ripple effect.

That is a relatively small flag by big-event standards in American sports these days. But it will signal the latest can’t-miss blend of sports and patriotism, a combination increasingly presenting itself through gigantic American flags, unfurled by dozens or hundreds of people in an attempt to elicit a sense of awe and nationalism in the surrounding crowd.

* * *

“People go ape when they see it,” said Jim Alexander, a retired Coast Guard commander who runs Superflag, the company that basically invented the industry and once held the world record for the largest flag, which temporarily hung on the Hoover Dam. It was 255 by 505 feet and has been surpassed by a flag in Israel that measures 2,165 by 330 feet. “It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling that takes over a whole stadium. If anyone in the stands opened their mouth and objected, there would be hell to pay.”

Story.

Just in case the revelation that American torturers took their cues from that model of moral clarity that was the Chinese Communist regime hasn’t fully convinced you that the practice is unquestionably, incontrovertibly evil, Christopher Hitchens’ column in the August 2008 Vanity Fair, “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” ought to drive the point home. That is, if the accompanying video, available online at Vanity Fair’s website, doesn’t do it first.

In the video, Christopher Hitchens is brought, hooded and bound, into an austere looking storage room, and placed on a board, slightly elevated at its foot. He is instructed by the similarly masked interrogators on how to call a halt to the procedure, either through a safe word – “red” – or by releasing the “dead man’s handle” – a metal object placed in each hand. A towel is placed over his face and one of the interrogators begins pouring water on Hitchens’ face from an ordinary-looking milk carton. The interrogators demonstrate no more aggression that one might when watering a houseplant. In fact, the process looks so unremarkable that you begin to wonder if they aren’t simply “warming Hitchens up” for something worse.

Seventeen seconds pass, and then Hitchens drops the dead man’s handle. When the hood is removed, it is jarring to see how panic-stricken Hitchens looks.

The rest.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of children is unconstitutional. Barack Obama immediately said he disagreed with the decision.

Barry Crimmins explains his perspective here:

Does it really matter? The decision has been made and won’t soon be reversed and so Obama’s views don’t particularly matter. Even if the Supremes had ruled the other way, the worst case scenario would only involve the execution of some vicious rapists of children, right? No one else would be affected. No one, that is, except for the raped children and they’d be all for the state-sponsored elimination of these human jackals, wouldn’t they?

I can’t speak on this issue as a raped child. I can only speak as an adult who was raped as a child and I oppose capital punishment for those who rape children. I was much younger than 12 when I was assaulted so in theory, my rapist could have been sent to the death chamber by Sen. Obama’s rules…

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn’t grown into a cruel and heartless man.

The rest.

Thank you, Barry Crimmins. (And thank you, internet, for allowing people to communicate with each other about things that matter.)

A complete puff piece, maybe because the refs have been so thoroughly worked by the likes of Limbaugh that to do anything else would be to betray that famous “liberal bias” that you read so much about, but rarely actually see.

Still, gotta love this:

At dinner the night before, Bill O’Reilly’s name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

This may be the one thing on which Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann are in complete agreement.

… adding, how can you write a feature piece about Limbaugh without even mentioning the possible connection between his drug abuse and his loss of hearing? I mean, the radio host goes deaf, plausibly due to his own weaknesses — the sort of weaknesses he has built an empire out of excoriating in others — and it’s politely overlooked…?

That’s what I mean by puff piece. Whole article is full of omissions like that.