Please don’t interpret the fact that I’m not writing about such developments as the latest news on ISIS, or Iran, or the like, as meaning that I don’t care about them. It just means that I presume that my readers follow national and international news as much as I do, and I don’t feel at all equipped to provide a perspective that’s any different than other writers or any more useful than “oh, c@*!” or maybe “oh, f*&!” when the... Read more
No, not nonsense about per-child or other kids of tax credits. But instead, a change in IRS regulations that’s causing a lot of headaches for non-profits, specifically youth organizations. In my sons’ Scout troop, the annual wreath sale splits its profits two ways: half to the troop, half to individual Scouts’ accounts which fund their expenses during the year, for outings or summer camp. Lots of other youth organizations do the same — my oldest son’s marching band has similar... Read more
It was a Valentine’s Day outing with my husband. Yeah, not a standard Date Night movie, but it had been on the agenda in a “gotta see what all the fuss is about” sort of way. (Though we will not be seeing “50 Shades” based on that approach.) What did I think? I didn’t think that the move romanticized Chris Kyle; although he repeated that his goal was solely to protect his country, the movie made it clear that his... Read more
This is actually an old book, dating from 2006. I strayed from the new book section at the library and stumbled upon it. And reading it, I wondered whether I was essentially reading history, or whether conditions in Japan are still much the same now as nine years ago. I also had a major dose of schadenfreude, having grown up in the Detroit area in the ’80s. The book starts out talking about a phenomenon in Japan of the hikikomori,... Read more
(For context, see my post from Wednesday.) I just wrote the text below as a comment elsewhere and wanted to add this here as a means of holding onto the thought to think about some more: This is a difficult topic. This case doesn’t fit into our neat categories. Hate crime? Not in the same way as the man who shot people at the Sikh temple, then killed himself. Though I haven’t seen much on the timeline, the news articles... Read more
First of all, the reporting: Per the Chicago Tribune: Little League International stripped Jackie Robinson West of its championship Wednesday, saying its officials knowingly fielded players who lived outside the team’s residential boundaries and then tried to cover up their deception. . . . Chris Janes, vice president of the Evergreen Park Athletic Association, had seen one of his teams demolished by Jackie Robinson West 43-2 last year. As the squad made its World Series run, he noticed that some... Read more
(Update: see more reflections here.) For those in a cave, three people were shot in their apartment by a neighbor, in what’s being described as a “parking dispute.” The story is making national headlines because the victims, a married couple and a sibling, are Muslim, and visibly so, with headscarfs. (Here’s a Reuters article but essentially similar reporting is everywhere.) Look at twitter: people are outraged as much by their perception of the media treatment and public reaction as by... Read more
(What’s good, and bad, about blogging on your own is that it requires no self-discipline. If I keep thinking about a topic, I can keep writing about it, regardless of whether my readers may have lost interest. But I do intend to get to a planned project of reading more in-depth and writing about the latest GOP proposals re: Obamacare, soon, I promise!) In Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, he labelled ISIS exactly that: “a brutal, vicious death... Read more
So right now lots of conservatives are flipping out that Obama compared ISIS to the Crusaders. (Per my earlier post, he’s being interpreted as if he said that there’s a moral equivalence between the two, so the West had better shut up, but the way I read it is just that Crusaders and ISIS fighters alike perverted their religion.) The internet is brimming with defenses of the Crusaders, as pure of heart, sacrificing their lives to rescue the Holy Land... Read more
What does Obama really think about ISIS and radical Islam? And about the Crusades, for that matter? Here’s a link to the transcript of the president’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. And here’s the key quote: And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In