Archive for July, 2005
Don't Eat It!
Sometimes it irritates me when I can't remember who pointed out some blog to me that I end up wanting to point out but then, in a sort of anti-anal-retentive moment, can't point out the pointer out. There are other times when we might be better off, though. It's very, very hard, I think, to [...]
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Notes from Waxman's Office
With some regularity I get these interesting little statements from U.S. Representative Henry Waxman's Government Reform Minority Office. Here are the two most recent ones. Permanent Estate Tax Repeal Would Save President, Cabinet Millions of Dollars Monday, July 25, 2005 — Rep. Waxman has released a new fact sheet showing that a permanent estate tax [...]
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Pink Lemons
The inimitable snopes.com, on their "Unanswerables" page, lists these two items one after the other: I just read a blurb that pre-packaged foods can cause people to turn gay because of too much estrogen. If I was only allowed one question for snopes, I would ask if this is true. Is it? Does the color [...]
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"Struggle" vs. "War"
WASHINGTON, July 25 – The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday. In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. [...]
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Such a Safer World Today
Jean Charles de Menezes: an unarmed, brown-skinned man from Brazil, shot five times in the head by British policemen who thought his coat was too bulky and might, therefore, be hiding something. Which truly makes us less safe: terrorists, or the "war on terror" itself? For a chilling examination of what unthinking, bigoted hysteria can [...]
Share on FacebookAn "Uncle Bruce"
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum, perhaps the most intolerant member of the Senate, turns out to have a gay chief of staff/communications director. When asked how a gay man could speak for someone with Santorum's record of homophobia, Robert Traynham said "Senator Santorum is a man of principle, he is a man who sticks up for what [...]
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Understanding vs. Control
I was struck today by another distinction between liberals and authoritarians that seems to summarize quite a few observations for me. Liberals want to understand other people's behavior; Authoritarians want to control other people's behavior. The goal for the liberals then, seems to be to figure out things to do that will accommodate and acknowledge [...]
Share on FacebookNo Telling How Much
It used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that's not true anymore. In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling [...]
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Massive Election Conspiracy Not Required
Sometime ago, I read this article in The Washington Post on the topic of election fraud: had the presidential election suffered from it. This is the bit that has continued to niggle: Similarly, it strains credulity to think that there was some sort of massive, coordinated effort to steal an election. Such a conspiracy would [...]
Share on FacebookWhat's That In Your Briefs?
Okay, maybe it's just me, but here was this advertisement that I noticed in an article at TalkLeft ("New Damaging Information About Karl Rove", although there's no guarantee the ad will be there when you look). Over a picture of a youngish guy in a power-blue shirt and power-red tie sitting comfortably at a desk [...]
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Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 [...]
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Not All Things Freeze
Some time ago I started reading1 Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook 2. It is a collection of very short pieces about food and cooking from a chemist's point of view, assembled from his Washington Post columns. Rather early on though, he made a small error of fact. I point this out not to [...]
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Mathematical Puzzles
No thanks to Elayne Riggs, where I saw the game mentioned, I have now wasted something near to 20% of the last two days playing a game called Planarity. She's usually such a sensible person, too, so I don't know what happened here. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this is just the type of game that can [...]
Share on FacebookSingular Experiences
Tonight Isaac and I had dinner with our favorite engineer and said engineer's son; both are men with enquiring minds willing to play tag with silly and frivolous topics, in which we nevertheless try to find meaning or at least amusement. It's a game we enjoy. RT (the engineer) offered crocodile-tear regrets that he had [...]
Share on FacebookLiberal vs. Authoritarian
Phillip Honenberger, in an essay called "John Locke and Religious Fundamentalism" (What is Liberalism? 11 July 2005), wrote about the worldwide tensions between Liberalism and what we tend these days to label as Fundamentalism, and then (correctly, I'd say) he identifies Fundamentalism as just another packaging of Authoritarianism (which also travels under the guises of [...]
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Republican Fortunes
Last night we ate at our semi-local Pho restaurant. After our big bowl of tasty noodle soup, we were given fortune cookies, standard chinese-restaurant fare, although this was nominally a Vietnamese restaurant. The one Isaac opened said: Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it. It sounded to us like an explanation for the [alleged] [...]
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Making the Bomb — Excerpts
A big chunk of my month of June was spent reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986) an historically precise and yet dramatic telling of the story of the people and events that came together to unlease the power of nuclear fission at the end of [...]
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Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement
For those who are emotionally concerned with whether Karl Rove has actually violated the letter (perhaps even the punctuation) of the law, this note just came in from Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) office, via the Government Reform Minority Office mailing list: Friday, July 15, 2005 — A fact sheet released today by Rep. Waxman explains [...]
Share on FacebookFascinating Footnotes
Just yesterday I finished reading Sharan Newman's The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code (Berkley Books, New York, 2005). We know and enjoy Newman's writing from her outstanding series of historical mystery novels, set in medieval France, staring the fascinating Catherine LeVendeur; Newman happens to be mentioned in my own "Top Twenty Mystery Authors: [...]
Share on FacebookLiberal v. Conservative
Liberal versus Conservative It's allowed if it's not prohibited. It's prohibited if it's not allowed. Hey, that's ours! Hey, that's mine! Do as I do. Do as I say. We're all in this together. Watch out for number one. I've earned this. I deserve this. See for yourself. Trust [...]
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