I doubt it.

Guy "Guido" Fawkes, an Englishman who converted to Catholicism as a teenager in the time when Catholicism was no longer the state religion but a proscribed and persecuted one, and then went to fight on the side of the empire that had tried quite hard to invade and conquer England when he was eighteen, came back with explosives training ( Read more... )

T. E. Lawrence to the Editor of The Times (emphases mine)

All Souls College

July 22 [1920]

Sir,

In this week's debate in the Commons on the Middle East a veteran of the House expressed surprise that the Arabs of Mesopotamia were in arms against us despite our well-meant mandate. His surprise has been echoed here and there in the Press, and it ( Read more... )

Sweet dreams are made of this,
who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas,
everybody's looking for something:
some of them want to use you;
some of them want to get used by you;
some of them want to abuse you;
some of them want to be abused...
--The Eurythmics, 1983/1991

A dispiriting way to bring girls up, Sarah thought; to make ( Read more... )

I have to run down and post the rent check before I forget again and it gets too late, and then I have to do housework that I have been putting off for far too long, and then I will try to answer comments before buckling down to slog through the rest of my writing duties.

Meanwhile, a smattering of more whimsical observations, for leaven:

1. ( Read more... )

Averting the Sin Cooties is All That Matters

Sorry, conventionalists, I'm going back to my old Victorian letter-writer/typist's style of using underlining for primary emphasis because it's just too distracting for me to use bold for primary emphasis all the time and italics don't always show up well. Links are burnt-orange and usually bolded in my ( Read more... )

How Prolifism Substitutes For Genuine Ethical Engagement With A Fantasy Life of Moral HeroismI've been trying to write this post for years. I keep failing at doing it, for various reasons. It keeps on needing to be written. So, this time, I'm just going to write it, and fail, and post it anyway, however far or not I get, and however muddled it is ( Read more... )

A short while back, I was in a situation where the only book on hand to read was a novel by somebody I'd never read nor heard of, of that genre that is hard to nail down, the quasi-mystery novel which is often called "suspense" or "thriller" but which would be most accurately called "serial-killer fear porn" in most cases - they were very big ( Read more... )

"She lied! She lied to us!"
--Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars, (1977)This is something that I've been kicking around for a very long time, and which I suppose doesn't really need a good "hook" to tie it to, as the problem never seems to go away. We talk a lot about "empathy," defined in Webster's as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being ( Read more... )

If you follow dKos as your first newsfeed aggregator of choice, you've already been aware of these cases, and the syncretic whole they are parts of. If not, you might have missed the story that Chico Dave RN and Robin NWLC posted about yesterday, in which it is revealed that having been raped and sought medical care afterwards is grounds for denial ( Read more... )

Bob Herbert gives the worship of the Invisible Hand a rare and righteous smackdown in the NYT, being one of the rare members of the SCLM with a memory longer than a guppy's; people all over the blogosphere are getting fed up with the SCLM's endless torrent of "Pity the poor rich, they are being made to feel BAAAAD about their new Jags and it's ( Read more... )