It is both disheartening and convenient when you are struggling to write an essay, forcibly putting words together that do not work, trying ideas that make almost no sense, and working in a direction that isn’t clear, and finding an essay that says what you are trying to say more clearly and cogently than your efforts could lead you. I was trying to write such an essay recently, when today I came across the following essay by Ken Lowery Eugene Ahn at The Bureau Chiefs. It is a response to Rachael Maddux’s cover story for Paste, “Is...
Continue reading...Morning Consitutional – Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Good morning, everyone. Black Eyed Peas are playing the World Cup Kick-Off Celebration Concert, and that’s just awful. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: Support for health care reform is ticking up, according to some new polls. From the Post, President Obama’s push for health care reform in Ohio convinces a few skeptics. The priest at the center of the sexual abuse scandal in Germany has been suspended. Slate has a piece on the Pope in the Catholic Church’s child abuse problem. The Pope has announced that he will address abuse in a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics...
Continue reading...B-A-N-A-N-A-S
Finally, bananas might be good for something after all: A simple fruit that many of us eat every day could soon prove to be a powerful new inhibitor of HIV, and lead to new treatments to prevent sexual transmission of the virus. Bananas, according to new research of the University of Michigan Medical School, might be good for you in an exciting new way. Lectins, naturally occurring chemicals in plants, are drawing the interest of scientists because they can stop the chain reactions that lead to a variety of infections. In laboratory tests, BanLec, the lectin found...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Good morning, everybody. Beckham’s Achilles’ tendon is really torn, Ovechkin is out for two games, and Spencer Pratt is taking some time off to fight cyber crime. Now, enjoy your morning constitutional: California felt some tremors this morning as a 4.4 magnitude earthquake hit about a mile away from Pico Rivera. The Los Angeles Fire Department has received no reports of damage so far. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has released their State of the News Media 2010 report. It claims to be the most interactive it has ever been. President Obama’s exhaustive plan for...
Continue reading...Saving daylight
Over at Greater Greater Washington, Matt Johnson seems to accidentally make a argument for Daylight Saving Time: In 1895, George Vernon Hudson first proposed Daylight Saving Time, the idea was to make use of an hour of morning daylight which people tended to sleep through. In the modern era, this was thought to save energy by reducing the need for household lighting in the evenings (the lights would not have been on in the mornings because residents were still asleep). Studies by the Department of Transportation and the National Bureau of Standards in the mid-1970s indicated that...
Continue reading...Meet me at the combination doughnut shop and Chinese joint
Over at the Atlantic, Katie Robbins explores the mystery of the Californian combination doughnut shops and Chinese restaurants: Like any good investigator, I searched for patterns, and a few quickly emerged. The establishments tended to be in working-class neighborhoods. As I’d noted at that first sighting in LA, most of the restaurants kept the Chinese food and the donuts in separate counters, and while I occasionally spotted someone with both a chocolate-glazed orb and a plate of Kung Pao on his table, patrons tended to stick to sweet or savory. According to the folks behind the counters,...
Continue reading...Morning Constitutional – Monday, 15 March 2010
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...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.
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...
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