(Scott Meyer’s website)
.
Heh, indeed.
Apart from explaining why Obamacare is indeed a Good Thing, what’s on the agenda today?
Friday Morning Open Thread: Good Enough, BroPost + Comments (70)
This post is in: Open Threads, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)
(Scott Meyer’s website)
.
Heh, indeed.
Apart from explaining why Obamacare is indeed a Good Thing, what’s on the agenda today?
Friday Morning Open Thread: Good Enough, BroPost + Comments (70)
This post is in: Open Threads, Rare Sincerity
I know Anne Laurie handled the start-of-holiday greetings, so I’m tagging on behind, with a few hours (and roughly 100 shofar blasts) to go in Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year.
Really, I’m doing so just to give me an excuse to post this image:
I know of vanishingly few fine-art images of Jewish ritual life — even fewer of views of religious practice out in the world. So when my art-historically sophisticated wife sent this on, it was a surprise.
Anyway, I find this holiday one of those that works on me, atheist-Jew that I am. The two stories read on the two days of services come from the Abraham cycle. Day one, we read of the expulsion of Ishmael and Hagar from the camp. Day two, the binding of Isaac.* Terrifying stuff, terribly sad, much grist for thought.
And then, after the chanting is done, apples and honey all round! As we say in my family, so to you: may the coming year be as sweet as this apple and this honey.
Open thread, y’all.
*If you want to read a brilliant, horrific account of the path the Akedah — the Isaac sacrifice story — took in Jewish history, look no further than Shalom Spiegel’s classic, The Last Trial. For an equally brilliant dissection of the literary technique in the story, the first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. is so good I believe every writer should read it. Here’s the essay on its own. (In it, Auerbach compares the story of the sacrifice of Isaac to the scene in the Oddyssey, book 19, when Odysseus’ housekeeper recognizes the long-lost hero by the old scar on his leg. Just a brilliant bit of literary analysis, and a great introduction to thinking about one’s own writing from the point of view of technique and desired ends.)
Image: Alexander Gierymski, The Feast of Trumpets, 1884.
Belated (But Not Completely Outdated) Happy New YearPost + Comments (15)
by John Cole| 79 Comments
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
Enough of this serious informative shit, let’s talk about the Ravens shitting the bed.
Here is today’s earworm, which has been with me all day:
I love his solo efforts, and always did love Wall of Voodoo, so this is a nice earworm to have.
This post is in: Open Threads
This post is in: Books, Open Threads, Popular Culture
Paul Constant, book critic at Seattle’s Stranger, posted this:
John Scalzi’s sci-fi novel Redshirts won a Hugo Award over the weekend. On his Facebook page, military sci-fi author John Ringo posted this (links added to the post are mine, not Ringo’s) in response:
If anyone has been wondering why Scalzi has been picking the rather stupid fights he’s been picking lately:
That’s why. There’s nothing wrong with Scalzi’s writing. This is a reasonably good novel (from what I’ve heard) with no real SF or literary merit beyond being a reasonably good novel. But he’s been speaking truth to power about the degradation of women in SF along with other idiocracy and so he’s beloved by all the hasbeen liberal neurotics who control the Hugo voting and balloting. Look to many more in the future as long as he toes the Party line…
There are at least a dozen things wrong with John ‘Bitter Much’ Ringo’s statement, so I’ll go with one of the minor ones: “no real SF or literary merit beyond being a reasonably good novel”? Because, what, it’s not skiffy enough?
Thanks for giving the mundanes a(nother) reason to believe that within the sf/fantasy community, it’s not about the quality of the work, it’s about handing out awards to properly salve all our junior high social disappointments, Ringo.
(Side note, for those of you who could not care less about speculative fiction, yes John Scalzi is the guy who wrote Being Poor.)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Harold Meyerson enjoys a little hard-earned schadenfreude:
… As the August recess unfolded, Republicans — including a number of prospective presidential candidates — contemplated whether to shut down the government as a protest of Obamacare and whether to refuse to honor the nation’s debt as a cri de coeur against Obamacare or the deficit or Obama himself or perhaps modernity in general. These issues were debated at length, if never quite in depth, on right-wing talk radio and Web sites. That nobody but the hard-core Republican right seemed stirred by shuttering the government and defaulting on the debt mattered not at all.
If the American right increasingly seems to occupy an alternative planet, that’s largely because its media outlets — we can throw Fox News into the mix — dwell on stories so exquisitely calibrated to excite the right that they may not be stories at all. The New Black Panther Party? The Epidemic of Voter Fraud? The calculated perfidy of Benghazi? The impeachable crime of Obamacare (a socialist scam actually modeled on a proposal from a conservative think tank 20 years ago)? It’s not the editorials and opinionating of right-wing broadcasters and journalists that are driving the right into fantasyland. It’s the tales they spin into stories and the time and space they devote to events that never actually happened or that they surreally misconstrue.
By throwing the Syrian conundrum to Congress, Obama has at least confronted Republicans with a real-world choice. Since Saturday, the drumbeat for closing down the government has been muted in its usual haunts.
That’s why the coming collision of libertarian fantasies with reality will be instructive. Can a congressman vote to defund the government and approve a military action in the same month? Or vote to authorize cruise missile attacks while insisting the government default on its debts? All these issues will soon come before Congress in rapid succession…
by Betty Cracker| 178 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Good News For Conservatives, hoocoodanode, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
Via ThinkProgress:
The most comprehensive study on Obamacare to date finds that Americans’ insurance premiums under the health law will be “lower than expected.” Many Americans will pay even less than the top-line rates after factoring in government subsidies for their health coverage, with some paying nothing at all for crucial medical coverage.
Must be all the death panels. I thought I detected the odor of incinerated codgers in my drapes the other day.
ETA: I can’t bring myself to delete TBogg from my bookmarked blogs yet — still not at the acceptance phase, I guess. I sadly scroll past that entry in much the same way I sigh when I see a deceased cousin’s number in my contacts list, which I also can’t bring myself to delete.
But life goes on, even if TBogg is in Basset Heaven, so it’s time to find a new blog or dozen to bookmark and fill that TBogg-sized hole. To that end, please feel free to pimp your blog in comments or recommend other sites you enjoy.
Please note this is for my personal blog bookmarking pleasure only — to get your blog added to the Balloon Juice blogroll, I think you have to email Cole IN ALL CAPS. Over and over.