ricketyclick

The steps going down to the sea in Zadar, Croatia play music.

Wave action pushes air through organ pipes built into the steps; the pipes are tuned so that wherever you stand, the pipes within your hearing sound good together.

Listen to the Sea Organ Music.

Via Userfriendly’s Link of the Day.

BTW, today’s cartoon is pretty good, too:

The Distributed Republic makes May Day a “Day of Remembrance” for the millions of victims of Communism.

John Wilde’s introduction, “Remembrance”:

Why bring up communism again? Isn’t the idea dead? Haven’t most communist societies collapsed?

The answer is that the tragedy has never been properly memorialized, its victims rarely acknowledged. Too many too easily brush aside the suffering that occurred. Today, we do our small part to remember some of the victims. Keep them in your thoughts–the millions of victims of communism worldwide, the Cossacks extradited to the USSR by nations of the ‘free world’, the victims of the Khmer Rouge, and the North Korean laborers in modern day Russia and Czech Republic.

[links added]

But even in the Gulags, people found a way to love.

Never forgive. Never forget.

Update:
“Victims of Communism Day” over at the Volokh Conspiracy. I’m please to have been early in the pack on this today.

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And Billy Beck at Two–Four points to Reuters video of a 500 year old ritual in the village of Solapur, in western India’s Maharastrawhere district, where infants are dropped from a 15 meter tower (that’s about one and a half stories) into a sheet held by the crowd. This is billed as a Muslim ritual, but frankly, it looks more to me like an Indian ritual. I love it. It’s an annual reminder to parents: “Hey, look folks: the little buggers aren’t all that fragile!”

Frederick W. Kaga provides this handy summary of why the war against Jihad is necessary, despite its financial and human costs:

“Why Iraq Matters: Talking back to antiwar-party talking points.”

Major points:

• The War Costs Too Much
• Recent Progress Really Has Little To Do with the Surge Anyway
• Now that the Surge Is Ending, We’ll Be Right Back Where We Started
• We Should Never Have Fought this War in the First Place
• Iraq Is a Distraction from the Real War on Terror

Some of these have several subheads; it’s a fairly detailed response.

I’m still digesting this, but it feels right to me.

One entry in particular stands out for me, under “We should never had fought this war in the first place”:

• Iraqis are not ready for democracy; it was an error for Bush ever to imagine that the U.S. could impose Western values on an Arab (or Muslim) state.

  As for the notion that democracy is incompatible with Islam, tell it to the hundreds of millions of Muslims in Turkey, India, Indonesia, and Europe who have embraced it. As for the notion that democracy is inappropriate for Arabs, the enthusiasm with which the liberal elite that insists on the universality of its own moral relativism engages in such overtly racist argumentation is astounding. More concretely, the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote in previous elections and the polls showing that upwards of 90 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs intend to vote in upcoming provincial elections suggest that Iraqis don’t agree. Many of the other counts of the inevitability argument spring from some version of this hyper-sophisticated racist viewpoint — Iraqis are too corrupt for legitimate government; they won’t fight because they’re weak, lazy, or just would rather have us do it; they won’t take responsibility for their state or security; and so on. To each argument there is an on-the-ground rebuttal (like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, for instance), but this talking point isn’t really about on-the-ground realities; it’s about preconceptions that can be very hard to sway.

[Emphasis mine.]

Pat Condell’s ever so dignified rants on England, Islam (and other irrational religions, that is, all of them), and Political Correctness. I generally don’t like listening to political podcasts and monologues, I’d rather read the transcripts, but Mr. Condell’s delivery is half the fun. He also keeps a written blog here.

“….If you’re likely to be offended by jokes about religion, please seek psychiatric help.”

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John Stossel explains how “Guns Save Lives”. Except, of course, where they’re banned, in which case, the goblins use them to kill people.

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Commentary on Ridley Scott’s American Gangster:

On the whole, while American Gangster is gripping in its presentation, it falls flat analytically in failing to contextualize the drug problem in Harlem as a product of structural inequalities and the political currents of the time. It misses a larger opportunity to engage with the consequences of conservative fiscal policies that have all but abandoned the poor, choosing instead to sensationalize the gangster life and heroize the role of the police in bringing the main protagonist to justice. The film further promotes the enduring myth that drugs were a product of America’s disastrous intervention in Indochina – thus contributing to the false impression that America was a primary victim of the conflict. It shows a nation still haunted by that dreadful war fought over thirty years ago, yet unable to confront its true horrors from the vantage point of those who felt them the most.