Entries from July 2004 ↓
July 22nd, 2004 — brain-candy
Choices made in silence can be taken away in silence.
Barbara Ehrenreich in her latest column for the New York Times continues to demonstrate why Thomas Friedman, whom she is substituting for, should stay away permanently.
In a strong and lucid essay, she slashes away at the hypocrisy which allows women who have had voluntary abortions for fetal defects to feel morally superior to women who have had abortions purely out of “choice”.
…what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular “defective” fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed “terminations” are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I’ll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn’t the choice I’d make for myself…
Whatever the reason for the abortion, she tells the 30 million women who have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, “Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.”
July 19th, 2004 — the web-wide world
35 years ago tomorrow, I was awake long after my bedtime, sitting in front of our 13″ black-and-white television, when, at 10:56pm, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on a planet that wasn’t his own. The picture I saw, (6.6Mb MPEG) was the same image watched by half-a-billion people around the world — probably a majority of all people who had access to a television. I remember thinking how great it was to be alive at that moment. To be alive and human and American.
NASA has a site dedicated to the anniversary, and it’s chockful of audio and video and animations covering nearly every aspect of the mission.
And over at panoramas.dk, Hans Nyberg has taken the incredibly crisp and detailed images taken by Neil Armstrong and turned them into a QuickTime panorama.
It’s strange, but, as cynical and disillusioned as I am about this country and where it has gone in those 35 years, I just can’t seem to find anything but awe, pride and that same sense of connectedness when I think about what we achieved when we let our dreams soar instead of wallow in the mud.
July 15th, 2004 — brain-candy
The Guardian reports on an interview with Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, to be published in Rolling Stone tomorrow.
The notoriously private cartoonist reveals that he was 2 years behind Bush at Yale, but served on a social committee with the future president. And — here comes the “inspiration” mentioned in the title of this post :
Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.
The article in the Yale Daily News prompted an interview with Bush in the New York Times, in which Trudeau says the frat boy opined, “it was just a coat hanger, and … it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn.”
So, at last , Rush Limbaugh is vindicated in his claim that the torture at Abu Ghraib prison was nothing more than a college fraternity prank! At least now its obvious that the inspiration for the torture — if not the instructions — came from the top…
