Sunday, 30 August 2009

Linkage

Sunday morning reading - August 30, 2009

A few good ones you might have missed...

“Grass? There was no grass. We would have eaten it.”

Rachel Goes to Auschwitz, and experiences
...intensely upsetting moments of terrifying and physically sickening clarity, interspersed with tears, laced with disbelief and all surrounded by a general feeling of impotent but genuine strong rage.
This is one of the best posts I’ve read this year.  (As somebody else says, “she’s one hell of a writer.”)  If you saw it linked elsewhere and skipped it, well, go read it start-to-finish. • 4000 words, 16 photos


“Average people should not require advanced degrees in medicine and economics to make informed decisions in the voting booth.”

“Doctor Zero” begins with the Beck boycott, considers whether the President is racist, and touches on our political discourse, and why politics has become so important:
Calling any liberal a “racist” is the Avada Kedavra of political discourse, the Unforgivable Curse.  Admittedly, it seems like an unprovoked act of rhetorical aggression.  It’s not like Obama and his party have been running around calling everyone who disagrees with them racists, mindless drones, un-American traitors, Nazis, assassins, or Astroturf lawn gnomes who get their opinions from their corporate paymasters.  Oh, wait, it’s exactly like that.
• 1200 words, RTWT.


“...if you’re famililar with anthropology- rather than with Rousseauian noble-savage fantasies...”

“LabRat” takes on a climate activist and some people’s ideas of “natural balance”... in one post:
There is something elementally appealing about end-of-the-world scenarios for idealists, because you don’t have to take any responsibility for the consequences of your ideas, no matter how horrific.
...
No plant or animal has any kind of mystical sense of balance or sustainability; to the degree that there ever exist balances in ecologies, they were not arrived at by cooperation, but by the point at which competing forces have reached a temporary detente.
It’s a two-fer! • 7800 words


“One dead in domestic dispute; fiance in custody.”

Some times all you can do is stand by and watch, helplessly. Senseless.
I had already filled out the recommendation for the Honors program, and submitted her name to the editor of the uni’s literary rag as a potential writer/editor. The last day of classes, she handed in her final, and I handed her the stack of paperwork for the Honors program. “Oh, I’m so flattered!” she gushed. “But I am transferring to Guido Barely Accredited Community College, back home. Brick misses me, and I don’t want to be too far away from him for another year.”
• 2400 words


Not just a kitten.
Tonight I remember when Valerie asked me for this purebred Persian kitten.  She wanted a long-haired kitten and so our journey began.
On animals, people, memories, and unconditional love. • 1800 words, 1 photo


Future Headline: “Pizza Program Produces Indigestion”

Page Nine has a report from three-years-after:
When announcing the pizza program in 2010, President Obama had promised that pizza prices would fall, pizza quality would rise, and there would be universal access to pizza.  “After all,” he had said in his typical all-knowing manner that Americans have come to hate, “the pizza industry is much simpler than the medical industry, which we completely nationalized last year.”
Amusing or frightening? • 3700 words


Being “imaginary” and “imaginary being”

And finally, from “Mycroft,” the square root of minus one.

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