Month: August 2009

(Hat tip: URLesque)

One of Aesop's fables just became reality:

Scientists have found that rooks – a member of the crow family – were able to figure out how to raise the water level in a laboratory container by dropping stones inside to retrieve a tasty worm floating on the surface […] just like the mythical crow in the fable, which illustrates the virtue of ingenuity and how necessity is the mother of invention.

Susan Anderson's High Glitz photo project focuses on the world of child beauty pageants:

… bordering on abuse of children, in my book. What value system does this instill in children? I guess the kind of value system that makes Paris Hilton and Perez Hilton our current pop-cultural avatars.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

"I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth," – Up From Liberalism, William F. Buckley Jr.

And a young, worldly Manhattanite became a Catholic:

A few summers before, my sister and I had taken ourselves to Europe, and when in Florence, we visited the baptistry. We stood under the dome, under a bearded, dark-eyed Christ looking down on us from the ceiling, seated in judgment, surrounded by angels, saints, evangelists, and prophets. His face gave me a start. I recognized this face, although it had never been made visible to me by the churches I'd grown up in. This was the Jesus of the lover's sigh. Of the mother's sigh. The Jesus I had been praying to all my life, whose open hands offered infinite mercy. There he was suspended above us, arms outstretched, suffering everyone to come unto him, whether indifferent, curious, hostile, or humble. He had been sitting there for centuries, wanting really only a few things from us while people came and went below him. Come unto me, if you want to, everyone down there flipping through guidebooks, taking pictures, arguing about where to have lunch, tugging your children on to the next sight.

That day I saw that I could not be anything other than a Christian.

West Jefferson, North Carolina, 6 pm

A reader writes:

Our twins are preemies – born at 34 weeks. While there were no complications, it was cold-and-flu season when we brought them home. Their health was a very precarious affair. We were under strict orders to keep them in the house, to limit visitors, to always wash hands after coming back into the house, etc. When we went to the pediatrician, she scheduled us on on a Saturday afternoon when the office was empty in order to minimize potential contact with other sick children.

At our first visit, she recommended a vaccination for a common virus. This is a virus that everybody gets, and is generally mild. With preemies, however, it can be quite severe and commonly results in hospitalization and even death. It should have been done in the NICU, but it had been missed. She scheduled us for the following week. She had to order the vax since it was quite expensive (a total of about $16K.) Two days beforehand, she notified us that our insurance company had denied the coverage as too expensive.

We then proceeded to try to get the insurance company to cover the vax. Our doctor called. The NICU doctor called. We had conference calls with them and the insurance company. We worked up the chain of command at the insurance company. We had it done and paid out of pocket. What choice did we have? Finally, we pulled in a specialist and managed to get high enough up the chain to get it approved. By this point, it had become something of a crusade for the various doctors involved. Two weeks later, my company's health insurance premiums went up 30%.

Coincidence? Who knows. But when people talk about rationing under socialized medicine, I always think, "You know, we have rationing now, it just hasn't effected you. Yet." And mine was one of those highly-vaunted "gold-plated" private health insurance policies.

Harold Pollack explains.

TNC visits the Met:

This is Massacre of the Innocents, by Navez. I saw it last week, and it stayed with me, and then, a few days later, my Bible reading took me to Herod, who killed all the male children in his kingdom, in hopes of staving off the coming of the Messiah. I hope I have that right. Anyway, with the lore in hand, I wanted to see the painting again. I hoped the colors would

mean more, that they would be deeper to me.

This was easier said the done. The Met is a universe, and each wing is a galaxy, and in each galaxy there and stars and planets tugging at the imagination. You come in with your heart set on seeing Hercules shooting his bow, but instead you end up staring at a nomad queen's golden crown.

Toward the end I finally made it there, but I had to push myself, and it is true, I did see more, but I'm not sure I saw better. I guess it was nice to know what the painter had in mind, and I did hone in on details that I'd missed before, but the story really didn't feel essential to me.

Whatever. The painting is gorgeous. The woman in the back futilely trying to shush her young son, is just arresting. I love this piece.

A classic from Heny Fairlie’s blistering account of the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit:

“Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend.”

His peroration is a show-stopper of rhetoric:

“The America which Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of ‘‘better dead than red’’; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy.

The America of fear. For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live. And there was this America in control at Detroit. It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes. It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right.

No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within. The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy. If the neo-conservatives cannot sniff danger, surely the rest of us can be alert.”

The phrase that resonates so powerfully to me after the last few years is his reference to foreign policy: “a now ignorant interventionism.” I argued with Henry about this back in the day. But the longer I live in America and keep my eyes open, the closer to his view I find myself traveling.