Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here’s a nifty page that shows a new set of my current Flickr photos each time you refresh. I ported a few sets of pictures over from the old site: The Sasquatch Music Festival from May 2003. A trip to … Continue reading →

It is very much a vital and open question at the moment: what will a John Kerry foreign policy look like? More broadly: what should it look like? I waver on these questions, and don’t find much to agree with … Continue reading →

Admittedly I’m not exactly tapped into mainline right wing thinking, but just from reading around it sounds to me like lots of folks on the right are jumping off the Bush bandwagon. I’m thinking of libertarians, who are disappointed with … Continue reading →

The final word, from the New York Press: Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he wouldn’t be necessary … Continue reading →

The right is heavily invested in the myth that the American press is “liberal,” but the problem with the press is not political bias, but laziness, sloppiness, and fecklessness. They go for the easy, cheap, sensational story every time. This … Continue reading →

I wasn’t sure whether to post this here or over on the grip diaries—it’s one of the few subjects that bridges the gap.

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist that’s done a lot of work on metaphor and how our thoughts—and even our brains—are structured around them. (It’s pretty wonky.) When he turned his attention to politics, the result was a new book. His thesis (which you can read about in great detail here) is that what divides liberals and conservatives at root is not so much a set of policy positions as a deep-seated, fundamental metaphor for parenthood.

You might wonder what parenting has to do with politics. Quite a lot, Lakoff thinks. Continue reading →

It’s fairly easy to tell, from close observation of our president, that he’s got… issues. This Salon article is well worth reading (even if you have to watch the ad to get to it)—it’s a summary account of three new … Continue reading →

Incidentally, I found the previous story through this site, which is a blog about babies. It differs from this blog in that a) it’s about babies in general, not just one baby, and b) it’s updated several times a day, … Continue reading →

Particularly at this stage of things—with the kid clinging to his mom like she’s a buoy in a large and hostile ocean—it’s nice for us dads to get some affirmation. Turns out a new study at Yale shows that fathers bring a different style of parenting and problem-solving that is crucial to healthy childhood development. We all knew that, right? But it’s nice to see science say it. This comes from an article in USA Today that is short enough to reproduce in its entirety, below the fold: Continue reading →

This should surprise exactly no one. Bush has nothing positive to run on, no accomplishments, so he’s going negative on an unprecedented scale. This is what the modern Republican party does, though. It’s what they’re good at. Expect a long … Continue reading →