Ted, Ted, Ted

Well-being

It’s funny how discussions of child well-being policies seem to attract both the smartest, most compassionate commentators and the most self-absorbed idiots. This one is not an exception.

2006 09 19

Craig Murray - Hitting a nerve
“I have just checked, and our flat contains nail polish remover, sports drinks, and a variety of household cleaning products. Also MP3 players and mobile phones. So the authorities could announce - as they have whispered to the media in this case - that potential ingredients of a liquid bomb, and potential timing devices, have been discovered. It rather lowers the bar, doesn’t it?”

2006 08 18

Delegate

I’m glad that this guy still reads Newsweek, so the rest of us don’t have to.

2001 12 20

Mary
Not funny

Arabica

I point out this new culture site, even though it is a little off-topic here, for the obvious reasons.

2001 12 18

Death games

Let me paraphrase Lyndon Johnson and say Alexander Cockburn is wacko, but he’s our wacko. Here he weighs in, perhaps a little more heavily than necessary, on the Potter iconography and current events: “In the death games played by adults, children are always the pawns.” Courtesy of Gail.

2001 12 14

Shame II

Stephy Says: Aw, Ted, it’s an accident of birth. It could have happened to anybody. (and did, to many others.You all survived and got out.) It might have been a port wine stain in the shape of the crucifixion across your forehead. (Or butt!) Your true friends don’t hold it against you. Though you had a conservative religious upbringing, few of even the worst Christian Conservatives are as megalomaniacal as John Ashcroft and his ilk. Your shame is one of the sad holdovers from your upbringing. Play with your kids a while. It will pass.

2001 12 06

The long run

And speaking of geekery: Amen. “I have never ever met a technical person (including me) whom I would trust to know what is really the right thing to do in the long run.” — Linus Torvalds last weekend.
If you are interested in software design and stuff like that, you might find this exchange pretty interesting. If you aren’t, don’t touch that link, could be dangerous.

2001 12 04

Shame

I’ve never been ashamed of my conservative religious upbringing. I just figured it was something that happens to some people, like rainy weather or a toothache. Today, driving to work and listening to John Ashcroft testifying at the Senate hearings, I realized what it must be like for those people who do feel ashamed. I heard that sad, hostile, hateful man gloating about the recent advances in his lifelong mission to return the freedoms summarized in the Bill of Rights (except No. 2, of course) to the ornamental status they enjoy in most other countries, and I felt ashamed of everything about me that had anything in common with him. I had always been pretty confident that the religious conservative was a complex phenomenon, containing some honor and caring mixed in with the fear and hate. I’ve argued that with other open-minded people who don’t know them as well as I feel I do: yes, parts of their minds are still in the caves, but it’s not that simple, and besides, many of them eventually come out and join the rest of us. Listening to Ashcroft explicitly and directly lie about the plain English in his military tribunals order, then decline to answer questions from Senators whose patriotism he openly didn’t trust (any one of whom with half the guts of even a Stevenson could have moved to hold him in contempt), I felt that conviction dissolving. Before this fall, it was possible to act like Ashcroft and his strange, complicated, semi-medieval constituency were, as scary as they might sound, ultimately just one of the more colorful slices of our diverse civil society. Today he made it clear that he is abandoning that pose and making a grab for the whole pie. The idea that I came from somewhere a little like the place this man lives in just makes me feel awful.

2001 12 03

Rot

Sens. Graham and Shelby have decided to let the CIA take the wrist-slap for that missionary airplane their minions shot down in April. This being the Senate Intelligence Committee, it would be too much to expect them to actually tell the truth — that the whole drugs-and-spies concept is irredeemably corrupt and destructive and needs to be scrapped — but they do give a nod to the growing general awareness of the agency’s essential rottenness. The able Michael Smith is staying on top of all this Peru stuff for us.

2001 11 28

Indictment

For reasons no one needs to be reminded of, the Organization of American States prohibits forced disappearance, which it defines as “the act of depriving a person or persons of … their freedom, in whatever way, perpetrated by agents of the state … followed by an absence of information or a refusal to … give information on the whereabouts of that person, thereby impeding his or her recourse to the applicable legal remedies and procedural guarantees.” The U.N. General Assembly classified forced disappearance as a crime against humanity in 1992. I’m sure one of my many international-lawyer readers will correct me on this, but it looks to me like every time John Ashcroft refuses to answer a question about one of the 600-some people he is holding incommunicado, he adds another line to the eventual indictment at the Hague.

2001 11 28

Cui bono

Much as it pains me to admit it, for a clear-headed take on international events these days you can usually count on the Trotskyists. My favorite leftist web site is carrying a piece on Afghanistan that lays out the cui bono question about as clearly as I’ve seen it done anywhere (relying heavily on Ahmed Rashid’s work), plus another piece that gives voice to everything you’ve been suspecting (admit it) about the free ride our Doofus-in-Chief is getting from reporters.

2001 11 21

Durban

I don’t think I’ve said here how proud I am to know Linda Burnham, who gave this remarkable speech last month.

2001 11 20

Brezhnev’s shooters

I’m as surprised as you are that we dragged our sorry selves out of bed at 1:30 a.m. Sunday to watch the Leonid meteor shower. It turned out to be worth the pain. It looked kind of like this, except the picture is a three-minute exposure. We really only saw about one shooting star every 30 seconds or so. Only the very brightest ones could shine through all the city lights all around us. Watching Laura drink it in, I found myself thinking of two things from my own childhood: all those Easter Sunday sunrise services we stumbled through, and (more pleasantly) the morning my parents kept us out of school to watch Apollo 11 take off for the moon.

2001 11 19