Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise has some good posts up about John McCain.
McCain is very good at manipulating the press.
He doesn’t think there’s a constitutional right to privacy.
He finally distances himself from some crazy religious figures.
War isn’t good for people
Since the military isn’t doing enough to care for the mental health of our soldiers, private counselors are offering free help to veterans. Suicide rates are way up in the military right now, which is probably indicative of how much help our veterans are going to need when they get back. It’s not really surprising considering war is generally horrifying and things like Standard Operating Procedure at Abu Ghraib and other prisons (via 3QD)
what happened at Abu Ghraib was not only tolerated but condoned and encouraged. Harsh treatment wasn’t punished; it was rewarded. When First Lt. Carolyn Wood of the Army was in charge of the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2003, she established a policy that allowed prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for a month, to be stripped, shackled in painful positions, kept without sleep, bombarded with sound and light. Three prisoners were beaten to death on her watch. She was awarded a Bronze Star, one of the armed forces’ highest combat medals, promoted to captain and sent to Iraq.
New theme!
I know it’s been less than three months since I changed my blog theme, but I don’t like things the same all the time and my furniture is too heavy to move by myself. So if you use a feed reader, drop by and check out my pretty new page.
Festival of the Trees
There’s a new edition of Festival of the Trees up at Wrenaissance Reflections. Go read it!
The best bits:
70 degrees in Flagstaff
Good weather is finally here.
Weekly Top 5
Chumbawamba – Tubthumper
Chumbawamba – Un
Max Richter – The Blue Notebooks
Thievery Corporation – The Cosmic Game
Infected Mushroom – Converting Vegetarians
Dying
Everyone knows that they’re going to die eventually, but most of the time we try really hard not to think about it. When we do think about it, we do things like eat more cookies and go shopping. But disease often forces us to confront our mortality. In portraits of the dying, the artist spoke with hospice patients, people who knew they were going to die and photographed them before and shortly after their deaths (via 3QD). In the Guardian, Susan Sontag’s son describes her attitude towards death (also via 3QD)
But no amount of familiarity could lessen the degree to which the idea of death was unbearable to her. In her eyes, mortality seemed as unjust as murder. Subjectively, there was simply no way she could ever accept it. I do not think this was denial in the ‘psychobabble’, Kübler-Ross sense. My mother was not insane; she knew perfectly well that she was going to die. It was just that she could never reconcile herself to the thought.
This guy hopping rocks in the Grand Canyon seems pretty comfortable with his mortality, though (3QD again).