The Times of London has the good sense to follow the Dish and name Neda Soltan the person of the year. Money quote:
“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”
In the rush to become the first Latin-American country to have a same-sex civil marriage, Argentina just beat out Mexico City.
A reader writes:
Opened the gift my sister gave to me for Christmas – your book, "The View Through Your Window." I didn't know what to expect being familiar with you through Huff Post only … I spent the morning mesmerized by the pictures (occasionally looking through my window at the fluffy flakes coming down in a Chicago suburb.)
Profound, simple and the best gift I received this Christmas!
Sometimes all it takes is a little idea…
It really is much more than the sum of its parts. The book goes across the world from dawn to dusk chronologically. The series comes alive this way, each page charting the path of the sun, including every season and every state and several continents.
Truly, it blew me away when I first saw it, and it's a perfect book for your coffee table or toilet or waiting room, or anywhere anyone needs a truly uplifting and yet calming distraction. You can preview it here and buy it here.
This Australian version of Lassie is aptly described by a YouTube commenter: "best fun show to watch when ur high lmao." In Britain, I grew up on this stuff and was never high and loved every minute of it.
Apart from the usual bile directed at president Obama, who is largely irrelevant to events in Iran, it's a useful summary.
For some reason, I've been much less suicidal this holiday season than usual. But I know that it's a painful time for many. A season when one is supposed to be happy can make sadness all the more acute. And, of course, there are some brutal memories that sometimes come to the fore at this time of year. PZ Myers writes a rather beautiful post here, illustrated by the brilliant cartoonist Mark Tatulli (above), of how the sudden death of his father on December 26, 1993 still haunts him at this time:
One of the lies we always tell ourselves is that the pain will go away with time, that we'll get over it, that time heals all wounds, and it's not true.
Every loss is forever raw, and we can feel it all again with just a thought or a reminder, like a Christmas phone call to the family. The older you get, the more of these moments of grief you accumulate, and they never leave you.
My father was cremated, and there is no location I can batten upon as a focus, no place for flowers. And strangely enough, florist shops always remind me of my father, too; he took me to a little shop when I was a teenager, and helped me pick out flowers for my first date with the lovely young lady who would several years later be my wife…and it was this same florist shop I went to almost 20 years later to pick out flowers for his funeral. So I'm reduced to this, honoring a memory with an evanescent scattering of electrons on a medium my father never knew anything about. But hey, it's no more transient than petals on a grave, now is it?
Hang in, PZ. And everyone else who's hurting right now.
These two heroes – one dressed as a bride – got married knowing the legal consequences:
Two Malawian men were arrested and charged with public indecency, police said on Tuesday, after becoming the first gay couple to marry in the conservative southern African state where homosexuality is illegal. Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza publicly wed in a symbolic, traditional ceremony on Saturday.
"We arrested them last night at their home and charged them with gross public indecency because the practice is against the law," police spokesman, Dave Chingwalu, told Reuters.
Homosexuality is banned in Malawi and carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
Chingwalu said the two men were likely to face further charges and would be held until further investigations have taken place.
It's almost certainly a response to the global marriage movement for gays that has begun to alter consciousness even in places like Malawi. But same-sex marriage has been an underground fact for centuries, because it is so natural for gay men and women to seek to solidify and bless their love and unions. Here's a passage from Montaigne's notebooks, included in my anthology, that provides some fascinating context for exactly the same thing centuries ago:
On my return from Saint Peter's I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanna Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood.
They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, read the same marriage Gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church.
Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned.
As ever, Montaigne's dry wit about the naivete of these people is leavened by his obvious support for the activities of this "fine sect." Gay marriage is not new; it is as old as homosexuality, and the human need for love, commitment and companionship. For more examples – from medieval China to nineteenth century Boston, my anthology is comprehensive. Book here; kindle version here.
I keep seeing Rasmussen polls cited in the usual Republican outlets. Maybe their selection bias really does represent the people likely to show up in next November’s mid-terms better than other polls. But the discrepancy between their findings and everyone else’s seems to be widening, as the GOP keeps up its campaign to bring down this presidency. Here’s Rasmussen’s Obama approval chart in the last half of 2009:
Now, here’s the same graph, as reported by all the other polling outfits included in Pollster’s poll of polls:
See what I mean?
A reader writes:
I am a family law attorney in NH. I find Bristol's statement about Palin's involvement in the case implausible. For starters, in about 100% of the cases involving custody of a child born to teen parents, the maternal grandparents are heavily involved. The teen mom about always lives at home, is very dependent on her parents for child care, and overall assistance with everything to do with the baby. And not the least, but reviewing the pleadings filed to date, serious money has already been shelled out-in the thousands I am certain. You can be sure that Sarah and Todd wrote those hefty retainer checks, not Bristol..
She seems to be using every weapon to hand to intimidate Levi. But why?
One failed bomb attempt on a plane and one of Cheney's flunkies is already banging the drums to bring back torture. He uses Orwellian language, of course, the kind we became used to under Cheney's criminal regime:
Instead of looking for ways to release these dangerous men, we should be capturing and interrogating more of them for information on planned attacks. But that is something the U.S. no longer does. President Obama has shut down the CIA interrogation program that helped stop a series of planned attacks — and in the year since he took office, not one high-value terrorist has been interrogated by the CIA.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has escalated the targeted killing of high-value terrorists. There may be times when killing a terrorist leader is the best option (for example, his location might be too remote to reach with anything but an unmanned drone). But President Obama has decided capturing senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogating them — with enhanced techniques if necessary —is not worth the trouble.
My italics.
What Thiessen is really saying is not that the US isn't interrogating captured terror suspects – we're told, for example, that our trust-fund fundamentalist from Nigeria is chatting away merrily to interrogators. What he is really saying is that we are not hooding them, freezing them to near death, waterboarding them, hanging them from shackles to create excruciating pain, exploiting phobias, stripping them of clothes, beating them and hounding them with dogs. This is what Thiessen and his comrades yearn to get back to: the tools of torturers. One overwhelming reason to hope that Obama manages to keep terror attacks at bay – by luck or design – is that the neo-fascist wing of the GOP is chomping at the bit to get their hands on the machinery of cruelty once again.
The Dish 