The posts below are too pessimistic and nostalgic to leave by themselves for Holy Week, so I will give you something better to contemplate from a great Christian writer who is strangely not known as well as he should be by Christians today:

“Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.” Blaise Pascal

Here is an amusing feature, by Anna Jane Grossman, of things that have become or are fast becoming obsolete. She adds a list of such things as:

Carbon paper
Wite-Out
Lickable stamps
Printer paper with holes on the sides
Walkmans
Tie tacks
Dial-up
Sound of the modem starting up
Non-wireless Internet
Diaper pins
Wall-mounted pencil sharpeners
Calculator watches
Mimeograph machines
Manual car windows
Getting out to open the garage door
TripTiks
Stovetop popcorn poppers
Film
Flash cubes
Mercurochrome
Water beds
High diving boards

What other things in recent memory that we used to think were high-tech or way cool have faded away?

is collapsing. So the government is working to bail out the big investment firms that have made easy credit possible. It seems that everyone is a free market capitalist during good times, but once a downturn happens, everybody wants to state to intervene into the economy after all.

See E. J. Dionne Jr. - The Street on Welfare - washingtonpost.com

Perhaps these interventions are necessary. (We need our resident economist, EconJeff, to advise us.) But I worry that this is just the beginning of a turn back to a state run economy.

I sense that liberalism is rising from the dead, that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress will re-regulate the whole economy and utterly undo the Reagan revolution.

Supreme Court to Review FCC Ban on Profanity. This refers to the ban on bad words on broadcast television, which has already been loosened quite a bit. I wager that the court will open the floodgates.