Good morning, everybody. Alice is still number one, Jennifer and Jamie broke up, and Jack might be heading over to NBC. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and Syracuse take number one seeds in NCAA men\’s basketball tournament. One of us is officially cheering for a 16-1 upset of UVM over Syracuse. In an op-ed to the Times, Michael Gorbachev defends perestroika and ponders Russia\’s future. San Francisco is experimenting with augmented reality with their BART mass transit system. For instance, hold up your iPhone to a BART station and see when the next trains...
Continue reading...March 2010
Look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice"
As basically an introduction to Q’s letter, here’s the story about how Glenn Beck has advised Christians who hear the words “social justice” or “economic justice” to leave their churches. Watch this, but make sure you read Q’s letter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBFNWqAkoj4&w=425&h=344
Continue reading...A letter to Glenn Beck
A friend of V+V writes a fantastic letter to Glenn Beck over Beck’s admonition that Christians who attend churches that preach social justice should leave: From: Rev. Q Pastor To: Mr. Glenn Beck FOX News Network New York, New York March 14th, 2010 Dear Mr. Beck, Grace and Peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ. I trust this letter finds you well. We’ve never met each other nor do I believe that you’ve ever heard of me. I suppose I would be surprised if you had. I doubt you’ve ever heard of Buckingham VA. That isn’t...
Continue reading...Forget About the Money, I Want My Hour Back
A quick question for a rainy (oh so rainy) Sunday afternoon With all the glibertarian bloggerati* out there, blathering on about the government stealing their prodigious assets and other sundries, and encroaching further and further into our daily affairs, how is it that none of them ever voiced any concern about the fact that the Washington fat cats think they can control time itself? I mean this, mostly, as a joke, but if I were truly concerned about government intervening in things with which it has no rightful business, surely the machinations of the sun and earth...
Continue reading...Walking around the Garden of Eden moaning about the lack of mobile reception
While PM Gordon Brown has yet to officially call a general election in Britain, it is widely assumed that it will happen 56 days from today when the English local elections are scheduled. For two years, the consensus has been that a Tory victory is inevitable. After the failed experiment that was the Iraq War, a faltering economy and a falling pound, fortunes have slightly turned for Labour in the run-up to the Gordon Brown’s first contest as leader. While even now few think Labour will garner enough seats to maintain an outright electoral majority, there is...
Continue reading...And you thought YOU were lonely
In the ridiculously awesome movie Red Dawn, a small, rag-tag crew of red-blooded American high school kids (featuring, yes, Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen) experience a Soviet invasion and are forced into the woods, far away from home and alone. They decide to form a group—the Wolverines, named after their high-school mascot—and fight back against the invaders. They dwindle in number, but no matter how small they become, they end up successful, and, one would expect, lonely. I mention this excellent metaphor of the pride of individualism in American popular—nay, spiritual—culture to introduce yet another. See, a...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Friday, 12 March 2010
Good morning, everyone. Idol\’s down to a dirty dozen, Corey\’s heart was just too big, and Leno\’s back at number one. Now, on to your morning constitutional: From the bad-ass files: In New York state, a 91-year-old pharmacy cashier gets punched fending off a thief, refuses medical attention, says she doesn\’t want to just \”sit there and be bored.\” From the \”Science is freaking crazy\” files, NASA says that the Chilean earthquake may have actually shifted Earth\’s axis. Yesterday, Sens. Dick Durbin and Jeff Sessions announced they had reached a compromise on eliminating the 200-1 sentencing disparity...
Continue reading...Enjoy your brand new Parliament!
So, I read Pop’s post on bipartisanship with interest, and I just wanted to add a comment or two. I mostly want to say that I think Pops is mostly right, but doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that it’s good to have varying viewpoints in the discussion, and he’s right to say that at least to this point that viewpoint has come from conservative Democrats rather than liberal Republicans, but I don’t think that’s due to some coincidence. The fact is that in the initial votes in the Senate and House, the controlling vote was owned...
Continue reading...A two-party system
If the recent debate over health care reform has taught us anything, it is that the U.S. does still have a functional two-party system. The two parties, however, are not the Democrats and Republicans, but the Democrats and the Democrats. This is not to suggest that his is necessarily a bad thing—for the Democratic Party or America. The Republicans may have a substantial 41-member minority in the Senate, but being tied to their strategy of obstruction, just saying no, and refusing to cooperate or even compromise, have rendered themselves utterly and completely irrelevant. Consequently, the two teams...
Continue reading...Pay for sex?
So, I discovered today that the NPR iPod app gives me access to recordings of many recent Intelligence Squared debates, so I spent a good chunk of the day listening to a few of them. Quite a few of them were really interesting and entertaining, and if you haven’t already, I would definitely recommend them. One in particular drew my attention, though not because it was particularly good, but because I felt like the debaters dropped the ball on a key point. The question was “Is it wrong to pay for sex?” The debate broke down along...
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