The difference? Almost every one of them, block after block, was staring downward at a tiny box, face blank, thumbs jabbing at little buttons.

What I remember from just a few years before is that, on nearly every corner, at least two of them would've been shoving, fighting, yelling at each other.  Not so any more.  And the thing is, this change isn't actually for the better.

The Mower's Song

How My Mind was once the true survey
Of all these Medows fresh and gay;
And in the greenness of the Grass
Did see its Hopes as in a Glass;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

But these, while I with Sorrow pine,
Grew more luxuriant still and fine;
That not one Blade of Grass you spy'd,
But had a Flower on either side;
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

Unthankful Meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forego,
And in your gawdy May-games meet,
While I lay trodden under feet?
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

But what you in Compassion ought,
Shall now by my Revenge be wrought:
And Flow'rs, and Grass, and I and all,
Will in one common Ruine fall.
For Juliana comes, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

And thus, ye Meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the Heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my Tomb;
For Juliana comes, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

The Mower to the Glow Worms

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

The Mower against Gardens

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified them while it fed.
The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learned to interline its cheek:
Its onion root they then so high did hold,
That one was for a meadow sold.
Another world was searched, through oceans new,
To find the Marvel of Peru.
And yet these rarities might be allowed
To man, that sovereign thing and proud,
Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,
Forbidden mixtures there to see.
No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame:
That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute.
His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,
Lest any tyrant him outdo.
And in the cherry he does nature vex,
To procreate without a sex.
’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoe’er the figures do excel,
The gods themselves with us do dwell.

The defeat of Boris Tadić—amply and inappropriately assisted in the final stages of his campaign by the unspeakable, greasy-haired, gay-pride-marching U.S. ambassadress Mary Worlick—is certainly not the end of the global-imperial lethal grip on Serbia. It is to be hoped that is heralds the beginning of its end, but it certainly is the end of the “pro-Western” regime’s four-year-long exercise in self-abasement abroad and ruthless robbery at home.

The robbery included the regime’s theft of some hundreds of thousands of opposition votes following the parliamentary election on May 6. For reasons too technically complex to elucidate here—the seedy details are available to the curious (provided they are not faint of heart)—the ruling coalition of thieves and traitors seems poised to form the next government of this long-suffering land, regardless of Sunday’s presidential race upset. That upset was only made possible by the fact that in a two-candidate race it is much, much harder to engineer the wholesale robbery (nearing 7 percent of all votes cast) that we have witnessed in the multi-party ballot on May 6.

The yawning gap between Serbia’s popular will and Belgrade’s declared political outcome was brazenly glossed over in the Western media two weeks ago, however. The Leninist dictum that the morality of an act depends on the progressive status of its perpetrator still applies. In that spirit, Mr. Nikolić’s “ultranationalist” credentials of yore are routinely invoked as his defining trait of today. The comparison is somewhat strained, but just imagine our mainstream media insisting that a dubiously reconstructed “Anti-White, Foreign-Born Radical Leftist” was elected President in November 2008.

In media shorthand the accurate description of President-elect Nikolić would be “a pro-EU moderate nationalist.” In reality it is hard to be both, of course, but many decent Europeans are trying to square the circle, from Scotland and Catalonia to Poland and Slovakia. The only issue on which the winner draws the line is “Kosovo or Serbia?” Unlike his defeated opponent, he realizes that it is impossible to compromise on a first-order priority—the country’s territorial integrity—for the sake of what is a second-order objective of joining an organization. (Whether doing so is on offer, and whether it would confer any benefits on the joiner, is another issue—see my Endless Road interview on RT.) How many eminently clubbable “Europeans” would agree to cede their country’s current sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine, or South Tyrol, or Sudetenland, or Transylvania, or Schleswig-Holstein, or South Dobrudja, or Silesia (to name but a few of historically contentious provinces) for the sake of remaining in “Europe”?

Unsurprisingly, Nikolić’s reluctance to do so is deemed extremist and criminal. No Serb unashamed of his name and ancestors will ever be deemed clubbable by those hell-bent on turning Europe into Eurabia and morbidly celebrating the demographic demise of European Americans as a great and glorious historical milestone.

Nikolić is a simple man. He is not a statesman but a politician. He made a shrewd move by splitting away from Vojislav Šešelj and his cult known as the Serbian Radical Party, an increasingly irrelevant cabal of aficionados devoted to the hero-worshipping of their unjustly imprisoned Leader. Does he have the guts and the vision to become a true national leader? It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Suffice to say, he has the guts and stamina to withstand a race that was spectacularly dirty—thanks to Boris Tadić and his Democratic Party—even by the Third World standards.

The Nikolić victory will not alter the catastrophic position of Serbia in the short term, her headlong economic, social, and above all moral downfall engendered by the plutocratic rule of Tadić and his “pro-Western” camarilla. That victory nevertheless matters a great deal because it has fundamentally altered the balance of political power in Serbia. For years Tadić and his kitchen cabinet have run the entire gamut of state institutions. For years he has doubled, incredibly, in the self-excluding roles of the president of his Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS) while performing the functions of the head of state, thus effectively controlling the DS-dominated government in brazen violation of his constitutional prerogatives as president. Such twining of functions used to be the hallmark of Tito, Stalin and Enver Hoxha. It is unknown to the world deemed democratic today.

In the end Tadić suffered the fate of Slobodan Milošević. He became cocky, arrogant, and convinced of his own infallability. Just like Milošević, he cut his presidential mandate short, convinced he could manipulate the electorate by controlled media and pliant institutions. Just like Milošević in the fall of 2000, he lost—only one-fifth of all eligible voters supported him—because Serbia is still a real country composed of real people... the efforts of Ms. Mary Worlick and her paymasters notwithstanding.

The Notre Dame lawsuit will likely draw more attention than the other lawsuits, because in 2009 Notre Dame honored President Obama by inviting him to be its commencement speaker and awarding him an honorary degree, despite Obama's long and vocal support for abortion.  In his speech, Obama promised to look for common ground with those who disagreed with him over abortion.  Three years later, Notre Dame's lawsuit is proof of how valuable Obama's commitment to seeking common ground turned out to be.  Now all that remains is for Notre Dame to rescind the honorary degree Obama should never have been given, preferably in a major ceremony at halftime during the home football game on the Saturday closest to the election.

UPDATE:  Since writing this, I've read two pieces on the issue I'd like to recommend, one by Scott Richert on the substantive issue and one by Ross Douthat on the politics.  Scott's piece may be found here and Douthat's piece may be found here.

That can mean only one thing: a massive federal push for desegregation and busing.  Right on cue, professional mischief-maker David L. Kirp enters, stage left, in the NYT Sunday Review:

The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.

The piece is a real blast from the past, marshaling all sorts of refried arguments, but seasoned with new data that show, among other things, "black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier—the equivalent of being seven years younger."

Kirp's bottom line: Poor black kids who are forced to be in the same room with rich white kids will be smarter, wealthier, and healthier!  You will struggle to find political correctness that is more racist than this.

Lost in the shuffle once again are middle-class kids, about whose education our federal overlords could not give a flip.  Whether it's Romney or Obama, those kids will continue to learn tolerance instead of math.  Neither the liberal arts that undergird civilization nor the vocational training that bolsters a strong manufacturing base is on the radar, let alone a priority.  So get ready, America, to look more and more like Rockford, Illinois, where unemployment is staggering and the largest employer is the public school district.  That's what a decade of federally mandated desegregation bought us.

Look at how much propaganda can be packed into one sentence:  "During the 1990s Balkan wars, Nikolic was the deputy leader of the extremist Serbian Radical Party, which was even more hardline than late strongman Slobodan Milosevic — who plunged the region into its ethnic conflagration."  Note the words extremist, even more hardline, strongman (Slobo was, after all, elected!), and the allegation that Milosevic, coming to power in the middle of a civil war, alone is responsible for  the "ethnic conflagration"--whatever that means.  I wonder if these guys own a dictionary.

You the piece yourselves, but pay attention to this little beauty:

"He supported Serbia’s warmongering in the former Yugoslavia, and even fought briefly in Serbia’s notorious volunteer units during the war in Croatia."

See, it is warmongering if a federal government tries to prevent the violent secession of the members and a war-crime to defend the lives and homes of Serbs who were being slaughtered by the Neo-Nazi regime in Croatia.  (No, I don' hate Croats, quite the contrary, but Tudjman was vile and so were his supporters.)

"People say believe half of what you see,
Son, and none of what you hear."

Sing it Marvin--or rather Barret Strong, who co-wrote the song, but with this addition--"and even less of what you read."

Maybe we can hear about the election from friend George who is over there!

Facebook makes its money the way Google does: through advertising. Google talks about its various properties as "products," but they're simply vehicles for delivering advertising to consumers. Or, rather, they're vehicles for delivering its real products—consumers—to its real customers—the advertisers.

Facebook makes roughly $4 per year per account holder in advertising revenue. With 901 million active users as of April, that's a pretty penny. But in order to justify the $38 opening price (much less anything higher), Facebook needs to bring in quite a bit more. Just as Google ads have become more obtrusive since its IPO, look for Facebook ads—so far, largely a model of restraint—to become more obnoxious.

Historians of the digital age—assuming anyone bothers to chronicle the digital age—will look back at Facebook's IPO as the day the Facebook fantasy died.