Posted in Wired Sisters on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
(Which is Latin for:
Holy Cr*p)
Or maybe for “who’d a thunk it?” I’ve been wondering for weeks where these utterly loony protestors at the health care reform town hall meetings are coming from, since they seem too loony to be mere garden-variety Republicans, and too organized to be mere “I’m mad as hell and not [...]
Posted in Wired Sisters on August 18, 2009 | 1 Comment »
or Benefit of Clout
Michael Vick’s rehabilitation pops up in the moral/religious blogs a lot these days. It raises a lot of issues. Like, who deserves a second chance? A second chance at what? Is a professional athlete a role model, and if so, what are his obligations? What about “morals clauses” in actors’ contracts? [...]
Posted in Wired Sisters on August 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First of all, some senator, whose name now escapes me, says the “death panels” are a bad thing because doctors shouldn’t be doing end-of-life counseling anyway, that’s the job of Jesus Christ and your minister. Well, aside from the fact that there ARE no “death panels,” and that many Americans are not Christian and therefore [...]
Posted in Politics, Wired Sisters, tagged Freedom on October 29, 2008 | 2 Comments »
“Clever terrorists can use innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities. But don’t forget that most bombers are not, in fact, clever. Living bomb-makers are usually clever, but the person agreeing to carry it may not be super smart. Even if “all” we do is stop dumb terrorists, we are reducing risk.”
Well, yes. Most criminals are pretty [...]
Posted in Commerce, Nation, Politics, Wired Sisters, tagged fat cats, wait a minute on September 25, 2008 | 3 Comments »
It’s 6:47 PM Central Time as we write, and all three of us and Mr. Wired are totally confused. Is there an agreement on bailing out Wall Street, or not? Is the debate between Obama and McCain on or off for tomorrow night? Was McCain trying to act presidential by suspending his campaign, or just [...]
Posted in Arts, Culture, Wired Sisters, tagged Haiku on September 20, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Forty paces out
Write your haikus on the count
Winner gets champagne
Posted in Community, Ethics, Lifestyle, Politics, Sport, Wired Sisters, tagged can't we all just get along? on September 17, 2008 | 6 Comments »
1. As the Points Spread
Just heard NPR’s sports commentator, the only person I will listen to on that subject, inveighing on corruption in professional tennis, which is apparently rife but totally closeted. For some reason, this short-circuited my brain into what my dear friend Tim Preston, may he rest in peace, would have called an [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Ethics, Politics, Wired Sisters, tagged banality of evil, can't we all just get along? on September 13, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In his response to The Man Who, DSL very kindly pointed us in the direction of Jonathan Haidt’s article on Why People Vote Republican. * Haidt parses the issue in terms of five factors: kindness (not harming others), fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. Liberals, he says, put the first two above the others, and may [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Ethics, Politics, Private, Public, Wired Sisters, tagged sincerity on September 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
My mother used to label all of the political speechifying of her era as “Man Who” speeches. You know, the stuff that starts out, “My fellow Americans, I have the honor to present to you the man who brought us to victory in Europe in WWII, the man who successfully led a major university, the [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Ethics, Family, Lifestyle, Wired Sisters, tagged overpopulation on September 8, 2008 | 10 Comments »
In “Replacement I,” we pointed out that overpopulation leads to crowding, regimentation, and spoliation of the environment, while the most obvious countermeasure (China’s one-child family mandate) leads to a generation of badly spoiled “only” children. Those of us who value communities of ponderable size (big enough for variety, but small enough for individuality) need to [...]
Posted in Law, Media, Nation, Politics, War, Wired Sisters, tagged Government without newspapers, or newspapers without government? on September 3, 2008 | 3 Comments »
September 3, 2008 by wiredsisters
I just got a call from a friend of mine who just got back from the Vets for Peace convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and told me about the numerous police raids on the homes of members of groups planning demonstrations against the Republican National Convention. This was the first I’d heard, [...]
Posted in Arts, Culture, Technology, Wired Sisters, tagged Music, things that go boom on September 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Every Labor Day, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra does its annual all-Tchaikovsky program at Ravinia, and I go with a bunch of friends to picnic on the lawn and hear the concert. We did it again this year, and as usual it was delightful, and as usual it ended with the 1812 Overture, complete with 11 [...]
Posted in Community, Nature, Politics, Wired Sisters on September 1, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It’s interesting watching the Republicans respond to Hurricane Gustave. Bush flies south to look around and look presidential (which is of course a lot easier when there really isn’t any crisis yet); McCain and the RNC downshift the convention fun-and-games; Obama tells us to send money. There is, of course, no real reason for the [...]
Posted in Culture, Ethics, Family, Gods, Lifestyle, Nation, Politics, Sex, Wired Sisters, tagged bible on September 1, 2008 | 1 Comment »
This was originally written shortly after the 1992 Republican convention, but previous posts here seem to call for this slightly different slant on political/cultural debate.
The 1992 Republican Convention was a virtual orgy for the Religious Right. George Bush spent so much time talking about morality and values that it was difficult to remember that he [...]
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Law, Media, Nation, Politics, Science, Technology, Wired Sisters, tagged Communications on August 30, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I get most of my information on this sort of subject matter from Mr. Wired, who has just informed me that the Great Bandwidth Robbery will not only wipe out our current broadcast TV frequencies, but may very well seriously impair FM radio reception.
A bit of history here: Does anybody recall when cell phones first [...]
Posted in Commerce, Lifestyle, Technology, Wired Sisters, tagged Communications, watering the desert on August 22, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I remember almost exactly when broadcast television went 24-hour. It was in the mid-‘60s, when every large US city lived in dread of riots. Nobody actually said it (not that I knew of, anyway) but it suddenly seemed like a very good idea to give people—especially poor people—something to do at home all night.
I mention [...]
Posted in Culture, Law, Politics, Wired Sisters on August 5, 2008 | 7 Comments »
The conservative media spend a lot of time complaining about “activist judges,” who override the will of “the people.” Most of us don’t pay much attention. Arguably, we aren’t paying enough attention, because we don’t unpack these complaints.
By “the will of the people,” conservatives usually mean one of 3 things:
a) what the state’s lawmakers have [...]
Posted in Culture, Language, Politics, Wired Sisters on August 1, 2008 | 9 Comments »
It took me a while to figure out what McCain’s people were talking about when they accused Obama of “playing the race card.” “I don’t look like those guys on the dollar bills”? Well, no, he doesn’t. He’s a lot younger and skinnier, and his ears stick out. The only person on our currency who [...]
Posted in Culture, Ethics, Family, SUBJECTS, Wired Sisters, Woman, tagged sex roles, snark alert on July 23, 2008 | 8 Comments »
If you haven’t read Margaret Mead’s Male and Female, it’s worth reading. Yes, I know her anthropological research has been discredited, but her sociological theorizing is still pretty good. What M&F tell us is:
In every culture, men and women do different, and non-overlapping, tasks.
Tasks that are assigned to women in some cultures may be assigned [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Lifestyle, Nature, Technology, Wired Sisters, tagged can't we all just get along?, great cosmic battles, nowadays, sumptuary regulations on July 12, 2008 | 4 Comments »
When I was a kid, growing up in South Florida, we always dried our laundry on the clothesline. It dried within a day, and always smelled wonderful. Hanging it out was a chore, but taking it down was delicious.
Then I moved north, to where, three or four months a year, there was no sunshine [...]
Posted in Culture, Nation, Politics, Wired Sisters, tagged archetypes, electoral politics on July 11, 2008 | 17 Comments »
Why were the comments closed on “Lie Pie,” anyway? Well, shoot, if this is the only way to respond, here goes. Americans have been “voting for the man [sic] and not the party” for at least my entire conscious lifetime. In fact, we do it somewhat less often now than we used to in the [...]
Posted in Culture, Law, Wired Sisters, tagged Law, urban legends, vast right-wing conspiracy on July 10, 2008 | 1 Comment »
According to a couple of sources cited in Wikipedia, Hitler may really have been monorchidic, just like the song says. The Russians allegedly did an autopsy and that was one of the things they claim to have found, or rather, not found. No word on the glandular endowment of the other Third Reich functionaries, however, [...]
Posted in Culture, Language, Law, War, Wired Sisters on June 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
When I was doing graduate work in sociology, I took a course on “deviance.” I did a paper for the course, on conscientious objection. It’s a fascinating subject, about which I could go on for a long time, but won’t. I chose the subject in the first place because the notion that having a conscience [...]
Posted in Arts, Commerce, Culture, Wired Sisters on June 30, 2008 | 5 Comments »
We hear a lot these days about the growing concentration of the media, on one hand, and the wild expansion of the blogosphere on the other. It calls to mind A.J. Liebling’s famous dictum that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” These days, almost anybody can own the equivalent of [...]
