This was in the Tribune a bit ago as a syndicated piece, but here it is from the original Washington Post source, “Five Myths About the Berlin Wall.” (The link seems to be directly accessible rather than requiring a google search, such as my own myth + Berlin Wall, to get there.) Now, this article doesn’t have any real myths, so I present it to you mostly as a “mock the author” opportunity: most of the so-called “myths” are based... Read more
Will he or won’t he? That’s what I was thinking this morning (I do my thinking in the shower, of course) — “will Obama choose the nuclear option of a December executive-order amnesty?” And the discussion around this centers around a couple angles: Does Obama care that he’d be poisoning the well, or does he figure that he’s not going to do any constructive bipartisan work over the next two years anyway, so the most he can do is position... Read more
This Friday’s “CFM” meeting (a church group) is at our house, and my husband is out of town, so I’ve been trying to tackle the project of getting the house Company Clean. Which meant that last night, rather than blogging, I had the TV tuned to CNN while I scrubbed the floor. (Incidentally, the Magic Eraser was remarkably effective at removing the dirt that mopping couldn’t, though it meant hands-and-knees cleaning.) So this morning I thought I’d offer a few... Read more
Seriously. Over the past couple days, I’ve seen ads for Union Pacific. For CN. And now, on CNN, for Norfolk Southern. Is there some big rent-seeking legislation in the works that I’m not aware of? Read more
In the context of the “death with dignity” discussion, commenter cthulhu suggested a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frenkl, which is prominent enough to have its own wikipedia entry. So I popped into the library to check it out. And, of the three copies, one was missing, the other two were already checked out, and, besides that, there were two holds already. So either this humble blog’s small readership is so local that everyone ran off to... Read more
A: Only that in the latter case, society or the government or your favorite advocacy group agrees with you that your life isn’t worth living. I’m typing quickly, because I have to start my workday ASAP, but I wanted to comment further on a couple new articles on the Brittany Maynard case. First, an article in The Atlantic, “Brittany Maynard and the Challenge of Dying with Dignity,” which observes that “most terminally ill people who seek assisted suicide are depressed.... Read more
A couple weeks ago, I skeptically said that if young men and their advocates were truly afraid of being deprived of due process in sexual assault allegations, they’d avoid/advise avoiding hookups like the plague, especially hookups occurring during or after drinking. But right now, it’s all griping, no behavior change. Today, via instapundit.com, there’s a piece out of the Boston Globe, in which a young man of considerable promise describes his encounter with the Yale University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. On... Read more
I haven’t posted a recipe in a while, but here’s dinner tonight. I call this “Cheater’s Fried Rice” because it takes so many shortcuts that it only vaguely resembles the original, but it’s another in my collection of kid-friendly meals. This is also a rare instance of a no-recipe meal in my rotation. But here goes: 1. Prepare 3 rice-cooker-cups of rice. If you don’t have a rice cooker, then I suppose step one is actually “buy a rice cooker,... Read more
Yes, Obama said that with reference to stay-at-home mothers. Yes, he will weasel out of it by saying he was misconstrued, as with the “you didn’t build that line.” And he’ll say that his point was actually that he wanted women not to be limited in their choices by unavailability of daycare. The Federalist pushes back against this rather well, and I hadn’t originally planned to write on this because so many others have pushed back already. (By the way,... Read more
A follow-up to my post on Friday rejecting the label “death with dignity”: Sure, the answer to the question, “why has the ‘death with dignity’ movement gotten such traction now” is in part as simple as “because society has become secularized, and people aren’t as bound to religiously-based anti-suicide beliefs any longer.” But that’s begging the question, isn’t it? After all, that implies that the only reason to live in the face of pain and incapacity is a religious belief that... Read more
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