Meeting Younger Voters

Gordon Brown meets reality:

The presenter says they took a call from a soldier who lost a leg in Afghanistan and said he was working with local troops who were "smacked up off their face".

Gordon: "Yes. I just had a meeting about this."

And to believe we can win in Afghanistan really does require one to be smacked up off one's face.

“These Rooms Blandly Filled With Excrement And Meat.”

A thought for Tuesday:

"It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately–the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it.

A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?

These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? 

This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way.

Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one's life, plunge in. I had researched this.

Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning."

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

“It’s Not A Struggle”

A reader writes:

Speaking of Jennifer Knapp's revelations in Christianity Today, one of the biggest black gospel artists, Tonéx, came out on a Christian cable show last fall. It’s captivating TV. I was on a tour bus with some of his musician friends when this hit YouTube. I had said for years that he was gay and they denied it. They pretty much cut him off after he came out the closet.

The interview is in three parts – first here, second here, and third here. Discussion of his sexuality and faith begins around the 3:00 mark of the second clip.

“I Don’t Know Why You’re Hollering”

Because, Mr President, it is not enough to be “supportive” of ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” When you have the presidency and your party controls both Houses of Congress, it’s a matter of having the political will to end it. Not all gay people are HRC-fundraisers. Some are even risking their lives every day for this country, in uniform, only to be treated like second class human beings and citizens by their own government.

Their own government? That means you, Mr President and Senator Boxer.

Ash And Airplanes, Ctd

Planesvolcanosupdate

InformationIsBeautiful corrects their chart. Plumer analyzes the chart:

As this story notes, "air freight is responsible for a quarter of the value of all goods moved into and out of the UK." And a variety of poorer countries are getting hit even harder: Businessweek reports that flower and vegetable farms in Ethiopia have already lost $2.36 million due to all the canceled flights. I wrote a longer piece about this topic a few years ago, but greenhouse-gas emissions from airplanes will almost certainly be some of the hardest to cut, since we've become so dependent on flight, there's no easy substitute, and there don't appear to be any technological fixes around the corner.

Drowning In News

David Corn describes his reading habits:

Never before in the history of the known universe has there been so much information available to us humans. And never before has it been so difficult to process all the information we receive. Some consultant recently told me that the average American is bombarded with 4000 messages a day (fact-checkers, back me up on this.) Those of us who are informationalists–people who work with information professionally–must be assaulted more often. The toughest challenge, I find, is wading out of the cresting information river to experience media for frivolity's sake or simply escaping the churning waters altogether for a few moments. If I manage to do either, it's usually after tending to the dishes in the kitchen late at night. Then I head to bed, look at that stack of books, feel a pang of guilt, and shut out the light. I do miss reading. Nowadays, we absorb.