Some interesting quotes I’ve stumble upon in my readings:
“How fabulous was Phelps’s feat? At Sunday’s start, the Person’s Republic of Phelps would have ranked fourth in gold medals and been ahead of all but 14 countries in the medal count.”
- New York Times
“As the meet went on, the otherworldliness of Phelps’s performance found expression in [...]

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So you may be wondering, “Did Timmy die? He hasn’t blogged in a very long time.”
Well, I haven’t died, but I am very sick. I’ve caught a dangerous case of Olympic Fever, of the Phelpsian variety at the moment. You may or may not know that I do not have a TV [...]

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A group of college students raises $250,000 for Darfur and looks for an appropriate and impactful way to spend it.
Bell and Hanis’s aborted foray into the world of discount drone shopping was done on behalf of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Founded at Swarthmore in October 2004 by Hanis and another student, Andrew Sniderman, GI-Net [...]

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“I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don’t believe politics is the most effective way to change the world,” he says now. “Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don’t have much faith in government solutions, given the [...]

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When does dissent become Untruth and lose the rights and respect due to “legitimate dissent”? Who decides—and how—what dissent deserves to be heard and what doesn’t? When do journalists have to “protect” readers from Untruth masking itself as dissent or skepticism?
I found myself thinking about this when I came across an unexpected disjunction in the [...]

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So I’ve had a couple tabs in Firefox related to this situation open for a while, and I figured I might as well blog about it now, before it becomes too irrelevant.
Here’s the super duper short story. A student at the Univ. of Central Florida received a communion host at mass, but did not [...]

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“We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment,” Mylenek said. “What better way to take advantage of this incredible [...]

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⇒ Holy Ghost (xkcd)

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In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment [...]

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Some great stuff. It’s not too original of an idea, but the execution is what sets it apart from everything else.
⇒ Lightmark | Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke (via Design You Trust.)

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So I’m considering an alternative to the we-are-so-into-our-kids-that-we-do-anything-for-them theory. I call it the Parental Guilt Hypothesis. Why does little Jimmy have baseball camp and rock-climbing lessons and his own personal tutor? Because Jimmy’s mom and dad feel, deep down, guilty for not giving him enough of themselves. Overparenting, in my theory, is frequently an outward [...]

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Whether you have succumbed to Obamania yet or not, these pictures are quite good. This photographer has been with Obama since before Iowa, and does a fantastic job of capturing those little moments that can be so easily passed over in the hub-bub of it all.
⇒ scout tufankjian (via Shoot the Blog.)

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Some high quality photoshop work at this site.
⇒ Beefactory Retouching Workshop (via Changethought.)

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Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, [...]

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Before the 200 butterfly final at the 1976 Olympics, the Americans Steve Gregg and Mike Bruner were in the ready room opposite Roger Pyttel of East Germany, who had broken Mark Spitz’s four-year-old world record in the event that summer.
“We had a lot of fun with Roger,” Bruner said, recalling the act that he and [...]

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