Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- The Tea Party – I concur. This is not about the worthiness of various elements of the TP ideology (to the extent that it can be pinned down and to the extent that it can be debated) but that it’s a movement seized upon, promoted, and exploited by powers “vast and cool and unsympathetic” toward their own ends — ends very different from the quasi-libertarian nationalism of the Tea Party.
- BBC News – Analysis: Impact of Wikileaks’ US cable publications
- Could You Be a Failure? – I have no idea of the source data, but at a glance it rings true …
- Google to take on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble with new e-book store – An interesting development. Though Google is making money here, their MO has been to be as open and platform-generic as possible. Damn — I really want to fast-forward through the next five years and see where the ebook market is.
- The End of NaNoWriMo 2010 – Harsh words as times, but, amen, Sister De.
- You Are No Longer Free To Move About the Country – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine
- Somerville Voices » Blog Archive » The Diary of a Wheelchair Experiment – A casual suggestion would be that anyone “in charge” of accessibility efforts either be wheelchair-bound themselves, or required to test them out as such.
- Are All Murderers Mentally Ill? – Lane Wallace – National – The Atlantic – Ultimately, it makes little difference. The definition of “mentally ill” starts to blur to indistinction the more it’s applied to “reacting outside the norm.” We may incarcerate heinous murderers for life (out of respect for even their lives), or execute them (out of the chance they may harm others, even in prison), but my own objection to capital punish remains, as with Justice Stevens, that the SYSTEM by which it is administered is so flawed that we cannot be confident that the innocent are not being killed by us as well.
- Why We Fight – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic – It is understandable, from a tribalist standpoint, that some folks in the South would tend to see the Civil War as simply an Us (sympathetic, however we figure out a way to make it so) vs Them (who, by definition, are evil and out to get Us). That is why it’s up to everyone to be up front about the truth of the Confederacy, that even in a context of “states rights,” what it sought the right to do was evil, and that those who were profiting from evil were taking an ostensibly good cause (individual liberty) and corrupting it. (And, yes, the North fought, especially at the beginning, for far more, or other than, slavery. That doesn’t take away from what drove the South to the fight, or what the war eventually morphed into, cynically or otherwise.)
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7. As your lovely wife discovered last year, there are many small issues to navigating the world with wheels. I appreciate her efforts although her emotional issues struck me as odd. If the wheelchair itself instills fear in someone, they’ve clearly always seen the chair before the person in it. And the great fear of saying the wrong thing – it’s easier to get that out of the way early and just move on.
I always think about how disabled I would be without my glasses.
Yeah, the author seemed a bit … uneasy about the whole thing for reasons beyond the actual barriers present. But I thought it was still interesting.
And, yes, I’d forgotten how Margie (in her own knee-scootering capacity) had discovered how non-trivial even handicapped accessible could be.