It took me to about age 35 before I realized I would never get to read everything I wanted to, which didn't stop me from being an addict of the written word. And that was before the arrival of the Internetz.
Now, just keeping up with half a dozen areas that I have an especially keen interest in is impossible. This comes home to me every time I post something here or elsewhere and 5 to 50 readers - some gently, some ferociously - point out that I missed this and that and the other thing that might have reshaped my analysis. Instant feedback is a joy and a pain.
And, although I don't get
4 million e-mails the way Bill Gates does, my e-mail traffic indicates I am far from the only person who just can't keep up no matter how many times we take a speed-reading refresher nor how rapid our judgment at sorting grain from chaff.
If you think this is my pitch for selling you a method of lightening your reading load, guess again. My purpose is to burden you further.
Blogworld is brimful of tremendous stuff - thought-provoking, funny, inspiring, infuriating and disturbing stuff – much of which unfortunately gets seen by a mere handful (or fewer) people each day and deserves a wider audience, whether the source is left, right, center or fits into the category of none of the above.
Here are three pieces, I found compelling today. You may want to wring the neck of one or more authors of some of what you read here, or you may want to wring my neck for pointing you toward them. So be it. Having come to know Kosopotomians as I do, I have no doubt the dissidents will have some URLs to substitute for mine.
Barbara Sehr at The American Street writes:
Retroactive Abortion Offers Hope
Now that prospective Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has been properly humbled, Democrats may require a new strategy in blocking future anti-choice Bush Supreme Court nominations. “We can’t necessarily wait 18 years until a whole generation of pissed-off unwanted children is old enough to vote Republicans out of office,” a Senate source said.
As when Republicans discovered a rarely used procedure they liked to call “partial-birth abortion,” Democrats may choose to concentrate on slightly more common procedures that some call “retroactive abortion.” GOP ranks are replete with well-known names who have participated in the procedure. “The names start with George Walker Bush himself,” a Democratic senator noted.
The Senator noted that Bush’s record of support for retroactive abortions began with his 1976 drunken driving conviction, in which he had the potential to complete a retroactive abortion without even thinking. Even as he allegedly “matured,” his thirst for retroactive abortions continued as Governor of Texas, where he signed permission slips for hundreds of retroactive abortions at the Huntsville State Prison each year. “Even as we speak, he is authorizing the retroactive abortion of hundreds and thousands of US and Iraqi conceptions on the battlefields of Baghdad and Fallujah,” the senator said.
While there are some who believe a retroactive abortion should be an issue only between a governor and a convicted murderer, or a commander-in-chief and an enlisted man, a growing protest movement believes that the procedure is cruel and unusual, and therefore unconstitutional. The issue did not even register a blip on recent election exit polls and when the question was asked in isolated areas of deeply red states, there were actually elements of deep support for the procedure.
In deeply wooded areas of Idaho and Montana, volunteers told of plans to establish clinics for retroactive abortions much like those created before the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision. The clinics would reach out to what the volunteers called “particularly needy” populations that would benefit from retroactive abortions. Among those populations listed were “gays” and “liberals.”
Steve Clemons at The Washington Note writes:
WNET SAYS NO TO KINSEY AD: COLD SHIVER OF CENSORSHIP IS HERE
A while back, I wrote about Academy Award-winning writer and director Bill Condon who has produced a brilliant film on the life and work of sex-researcher Alfred Kinsey. Here are the first and second links to my posts about this important film and director.
I saw this film as one that depicted the ongoing battle in our society between rationality and science on one hand versus dogma and a strain of empirically-hostile religious extremism on the other.
Well, a cold current of censorship has now just hit even New York's flagship PBS station, WNET Channel 13.
You may recall that a league of ABC affiliations refused to air Saving Private Ryan last week. Now, WNET will not air ads about Kinsey not because of the content of the ads -- but because of the subject matter of the movie.
Seriously WNET -- do we need to live through the same anti-intellectualism and sexually repressed hyperventilation that Alfred Kinsey fought in the 1940s?! I can't believe that this important station is forfeiting its leadership role as an educational oasis for the public. Does WNET fear Michael Powell and the FCC also? …
I prefer to live in a nation committed to the Enlightenment, to ideas, to progress, to the notion that science and technology can improve our world. I like culture and holidays, and churches, and mosques...but not at the expense of rational discourse.
Wretchard at Belmont Club writes:
Three Conjectures
A
Pew poll finds 40% of Americans worry that an US city will be destroyed by a terrorist nuclear attack . James Lileks thinks the annihilation of a city is a dead certainty and will only mark the start of a long, wearying struggle against Islamists armed with nuclear car bombs.
The imminence of the threat is open to debate. Despite the perception that technological diffusion has put weapons of mass destruction within easy reach of Islamic terrorists -- the cliché of a mullah brewing anthrax in a cave -- terrorist weapons remain at the 1970s level. The Al-Qaeda attack on the September 11 was the most sophisticated terrorist assault in history. Yet it did not employ any new technological elements, just the creative use of old techniques like the airline hijacking. High explosives, small arms, and poison gas still comprise the terrorist arsenal.
The limiting factor is the lack of terrorist engineering resources to make sophisticated weaponry. The principles of ballistics, explosive chemistry and aeronautics needed to make combat aircraft are well known; but groups like Al Qaeda don't have the personnel, facilities and secure environment to turn the concepts into a working object and so have no combat aircraft. Making a uranium A-bomb of the simplest kind is comparable in complexity to manufacturing a Douglas DC-3, even given the fissile materials. But the SAFF (Safing, Arming, Fuzing, and Firing) issues alone pretty much ensure that it cannot be developed from a mullah's cave. US weapons are one point safe -- with less than a one in a million chance of detonating accidentally if their explosive primers were improperly activated. Unless the Islamists engineer similar precautions, their weapons would be unusable. The safety record of terrorist bomb factories and the history of prematurely detonating car bombs would see Islamabad vaporized before Manhattan. Analogous problems exist for biological weaponry. There are no Biosafety Level 4 facilities in tribal areas or tents in North Africa and an accidental plague that wiped out the population of the Middle East would hardly help the Islamist cause. Only a state in the near term -- Pakistan, Iran or North Korea -- will have the manufacturing resources and secure territory to make the weapon that Lileks and the Pew respondents fear.