Unqualified Offerings

I pretty much endorse what Jane Galt has to say about overreactions one way or the other to news from the Middle East. The depressing side of this view is that, at least in theory, no one need ever change their mind because they can hope that events will eventually bear out their existing opinions. […]

Following up on last week’s Mommy Trap blogging, Leonard Dickens suggests that Jennifer Warner and her class are prisoners of ideology.
Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to “get ahead”, I think one part of their problem is they don’t know why they want this. They […]

Oh, fuck it.

The one, the only, the awesome, eminence . . . uh, purple, dean of the comics blogosphere, Neilalien himself, turned Five yesterday (in blog years). My hat’s off to you, sir!

Tacitus is at least theoretically restarting today after an intermission, with a minor site redesign. There may well be a lot of changes under the hood too. Apparently the diary system, which I’m old enough to not quite grasp, survives, though the main page will theoretically be All Tacitus, All the Time.

Comment preview appears to work. And it doesn’t seem to break anything either. I think the remaining tasks are to change the header and do the import. As of tonight, I’ve decided to bag inline titles. Sorry Gary! Sorry Patrick! Sorry Kevin! I’m leaving the brotherhood. Heck, I’m (Bye Ginger! Bye Avedon!) quitting the […]

Loose ends from yesterday. Anent the torture “reality show” Eve writes, “I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape.” Also, did I ever get around to saying explicitly that Battlestar Galactica, and the Lear revisit it inspired, helped me understand how much of America’s embrace […]

Matt’s absolutely right about the distinction between anti-Left and anti-State. And it explains most everything. I meant to get around to writing something about it for awhile, but quick brown foxes jump over lazy dogs, you know? There’s a similar schism on the left, BTW, but I’ve never quite formulated it to my satisfaction. It’s […]

Drama, fiction are tricky. The file cabinets of Burbank, California bulge with letters from people complaining that some studio has, by portraying some outrage, endorsed it. But context is all. And context can be . . . tricky. When Cornwall bursts the jellid eyes of Gloucester we should not conclude that Shakespeare is pro-blinding. We […]

Obernews returns.

for Radley Balko.
I am of course against gun control. But it’s never been much of a hot-button issue for me. Until now. I want a gun. Tonight. I should be able to go to Wal-Mart and by a goddamned handgun to defend myself. I doubt the two buffoons who threatened us tonight were serious. But […]

Interesting. Set your (British) TV to Channel 4:
LONDON - A British TV channel is preparing “Guantanamo Guidebook,” a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.
Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit “Big Brother,” […]

I’ve half settled on Bricks as my theme. I’d sort of like to do my own banner graphic, though that means settling on an image to replace the skewed building view. The skewed building is cool but it doesn’t say “Unqualified Offerings” somehow. Well, what would except maybe a votive bowl filled with candy, and […]

I want to see what links look like. Here’s one.

I confess it. I’m sitting there tonight watching Battlestar Galactica, and it did occur to me that there were a couple of dozen folks around the world thinking, Man, Henley must be flipping right now.
More after I stop flipping.

So. Anyone interested in who actually killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri? Didn’t think so. Discussion seems to moved directly to the politics of the Syrian occupation with barely a pause to consider what may have actually happened. The Lebanese, with the help of the Swiss, are planning an investigation, bless their hearts, but […]

The idea is to test blockquote functionality. So
That was fun, but there’s a less snarky point to make about Warner’s article. Quindlen may actually be “wrong.” Warner et al’s careerist approach to mothering may be “necessary,” to the extent that Warner is showing us how 21st Century American meritocracy reproduces. Warner and her cohort represent […]

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for combatting the “broken window fallacy.”

That was fun, but there’s a less snarky point to make about Warner’s article. Quindlen may actually be “wrong.” Warner et al’s careerist approach to mothering may be “necessary,” to the extent that Warner is showing us how 21st Century American meritocracy reproduces. Warner and her cohort represent the elite of Robert Reich’s class of […]

given that she’s been one of my bete noires for years, but thank God for Anna Quindlen. Her Newsweek essay, “The Good Enough Mother,” is the perfect antidote to the twaddle peddled in its more-discussed companion piece, the excerpt from Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness. The obvious point to make about at least the excerpted portion […]