Posts by richard
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I did a couple of lags at private, Anglican affiliated schools located in a city on a large river a little south of Auckland, and the casual brutality of those places is eye-popping in retrospect, but simply seemed to be an unavoidable part of the landscape when I was there.
Just as a for instance, there was the teacher who used to get boys out to the front of the class, have them grasp the chalk ledge, swish a cane through the air, and then ask them why they were standing there, and send them trembling back to their desks. Mock executions are of course a violation of the Geneva convention.Our parents knew that most of this went on, and while they didn't like it, I think that most people simply could not imagine a school without this sort of calculated sadism.
By most measures I did fairly well at school, and actually enjoyed it most of the time. [Although you wouldn't know this from the cache of school reports I found the other day -- I was lazy, messy, obnoxious, opinionated, cheeky, had no interest in sport, disruptive in class, and idle -- which was probably all true, of course.]
However, what grieves me now is the huge lost opportunity of my school years, in that I can wonder what it would have been like growing up in place without such an unpleasant ethos. [Actually, I was lucky -- my last four years of school were spent at a public boys high school, and whatever other shortcomings it had (rampant homophobia and rugby-worship among them), bullying was not widely tolerated, and from memory all the caning there was done by the Deputy Principal, who had a reputation -- deserved I think -- as being a hard man, but fundamentally decent, and by no means a sadist.]
At least for those students who went on to university, many of the most unpleasant remnants of their high school education seem to be shed over the summer at the end of 7th form.
However, in my present job (faculty at a well known private university in New England which turns away more than 90% of the potential undergraduates who apply to it -- not that one, but the other one) I get to meet any number of students who attended high schools where they were clearly encouraged to excel and which possessed a relatively sane and tolerant environment (and certainly these schools are far from average in the US), and made a pretty much seamless transition to undergraduate study. And I must say I envy them.
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Here is a cleaner video of the Falcon / feather experiment performed by the Apollo 15 crew, if anyone is interested.
Still looking for pedantry points, the War of 1812 between Britain and the US would seem to be a fairly clear-cut example of two democracies at war with one another.
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In the second instance, if there was some way traceless way to amend the documents - say, as Jolisa coined a word for it somewhere int he archives here, insert the word "fuck" into the middle of it (or some embarrassing clause) and hand it back... well I'd consider that.
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You're far from a handy target, I admire you're writing a great deal. But true, I'm angry at this whole thing obiovusly, and especially angry at the fact that it didn't come out on the National Enquirer, but on Daily Kos, which love it or hate is a major organiser of progressive causes and campaigns. The longer all these liberal voices (Sullivan is another) stew in this particular pot, the more... tattery? their reputation will be at the end of it all,
I have no particular love for the Daily Kos -- it is shrill and partisan and always has been. I find their aims much more agreeable than those of right wing bloggers and bloviators, but they enjoy nothing better than a wiff of Republican scandal (I am pretty sure they were all over Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, back in the day, too.) And my reading is that Obama is actually far more centrist than the Daily Kos and co would like, when it comes right down to it, as well.
But to say it again, to the extent the story is "Palin hushes up daughter's pregnancy" the Daily Kos had it right. They were wrong about the details, but if your daughter is engaged to be married, and will have a baby before the inauguration, you might have mentioned it in the circumstances. Especially when "Perky Mom of 5" seems to be one of principal qualifications for high office.
So simply asking whether the second half of the original story is potentially true is harmless. Especially when we are posting comments to a small (sorry PA!) blog in a distant country when the New York Times has already covered the existence of the rumor.
And to the extent it already seems that she was not properly vetted by McCain's team, it raises questions about his judgement as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/us/politics/02vetting.html?hp
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Poor Giovanni. I will give him a hug if he wants, but I do wish he would settle down. Chelsea Clinton was roughly the same age as Bristol when John McCain made this joke about her. Offensive, homophobic, a nasty crack about a young woman's appearance, and COMPLETELY gratuitous, but the world kept spinning on its axis.
Or witness the recent flurry of rumors that one of the Bush daughters (albeit in their early 20s) was up the duff which given the passage of time, are now comprehensively debunked.
But in the meantime why not let the liberals dig themselves a Washington monument-sized grave?
Let's try not to completely lose our perspective here.
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Your suggestion that Palin should come to you with her medical records takes the cake.
Because that is what many US presidential candidates actually do. I have not seen anyone on this thread ask for these records, but if you want to be president, the price you pay for that is that your medical records, tax records, military records, and a list of your assets all wind up in the public domain. In some cases (assets and tax returns) there are disclosure requirements, but this is mostly a matter of candidates voluntarily providing the information. However, it is the done thing for presidential candidates to the point where a failure to provide this information would invite suspicion (although not, so far as I know, people seeking other public office), and Palin has voluntarily put herself in this position. No-one is arguing that this is a good thing (although given the gravity of the office, I am not sure it is a bad thing), but these are the rules of the game Palin has agreed to play.
Why in the world would she do that? Why lend credibility to such a repulsive and completely unsubstantiated rumour?
It is not unsubstantiated. My first reaction on reading this was it was both scurrilous and as bogus as claims that Obama is a closet Muslim. However, to my astonishment it turned out to be fairly close to the mark -- Palin's daughter is pregnant, and it has been kept quiet.
You might well point out that this is no-one's business but the young couple's, and in most circumstances I would agree with you -- but given this omission when Palin was "introduced" to the country, one cannot be blamed for wondering if there are other shoes left to drop.
To me, the point at issue here is simply whether it is mathematically possible for the first rumor to be true, rather than to speculate inappropriately about the private life of 17 year old girl. And it is relevant that dating pregnancies is a somewhat imprecise business. Nothing more.
And besides, what good would it do? Good ol' Jolisa would quickly come to the conclusion that these records are not worth the paper they are written on, just like the opinion of her doctor on the risks she took flying home to have her baby are not worth the breath they were spoken with.
To be honest, doctor or not, I am pretty astonished that anyone would get on a plane in these circumstances. Especially with a somewhat premature baby.
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And I don't want to join in any nasty cracks about McCain having one foot -- and three toes of the other -- in the grave. That's cheap, ageist shit that's frankly unworthy of the people who make them. But here's some cold hard stats: Out of forty three Presidents, nine of them (twenty percent, folks) were succeeded by their Vice Presidents. Four died in office. Another four were assassinated. One resigned.
And, demographically speaking, a 72 year old man stands a much higher chance of croaking sometime in the next four years than a 50 year old.
When a presidential candidate chooses their running mate they SHOULD be telling us, "Look, I think I am the best person for the job. But if I can't do it, [INSERT NAME HERE] is the second best." No-one can say that about Palin with a straight face -- even if you wanted a token woman who was also a rock-ribbed Republican you could have done better than her.
And it reflects no credit on Palin that she accepted McCain's offer. If she was smart she would know she was unqualified, and might have said "Well, I'm honored to be asked, and in ten years, I might be ready to do the job, so let's wait until then." But she didn't.
This is the crassest sort of tokenism, and one that reflects poorly on everyone concerned -- and makes it abundantly clear that McCain (while he is certainly the least-worst of the republican candidates) is not fit for the office he seeks. -
SCORE! Now I shall run round the field with my shirt over my head.
Well, it all depends on whether you are playing for Arsenal, or Bristol City.
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I think she totally wimped out not going with a theme for them all. Herbs are an obvious one, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary etc.
Pennyroyal anyone? (Ok, this probably is in questionable taste, but extra points if you don't need to look it up).
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Fuck. Could we lay off this crap, pretty please? Questioning Palin's choice of flying during labour is one thing, latching on to this revolting 'story' quite another.
However outlandish it might seem, the "Bristol is the real mother" story had legs for two reasons -- firstly, Palin had a daughter whose pregnancy (at least for the first couple of days -- gotta love that blogoshere news cycle) while not technically "hushed up", was certainly not mentioned. A whiff of that helped animate the story, since it sounds as if it was an open secret in their home town that Bristol was in the family way. Secondly, the "oh my waters broke so I began the long plane ride home" story just smells fishy -- even our extra-crunchy homebirth midwife would have been alarmed at that one.
So while the "Bristol is Trig's mother story" is most likely untrue in detail, it was not entirely wrong -- so we can hardly be blamed for wondering if we have heard the full story, given that we have already seen one major lie of omission. And yes, dammit, we have a right to know -- Palin has a laughably thin cv for someone who wants to be one 72 year old heart beat away from the presidency, and many of her public statements make her sound like an idiot, so anything we learn about her is relevant.
The confusion among the two I believe is what might have led to Russell being called a scumbag in the other thread.
Nobody is going to care about us here, of course. But already McCain has tried to tie Obama to the Kos story, and I wonder to what extent it is actually unfair, seeing how ready we are to ascribe anti-Obama slurs to "the Republicans".It is one thing to perpetuate a smear (John McCain was brainwashed by the Vietnamese, Bill Clinton had people whacked when they got in the way of his cocaine smuggling enterprise, Obama took the oath of office on a Koran) that you know is false, it is a different thing again to speculate whether or not there is more to a story involving a politician who has already been proved to have been economical with the truth.