Advice to President Obama

So far, you have been brilliant at splitting potential opponents, sir, and I do not understand why you seem to have surrendered this tactic and gone for its opposite when it comes to by far the most important item of your legislative program. Your health reform proposals have fearsome and committed enemies. Why multiply them by insisting on placing abortion among the basic provisions, and allowing your party to shoot down any amendment that would prevent or even limit this? The opposition to abortion in America is formidable, but it only partly overlaps the ideological (and provincial) opposition to socialized medicine. You are shooting yourself in the foot, running the risk of a humiliating and crippling defeat, and strengthening and enlarging the front of your opponents, by this ill-advised behaviour.

A magnificent post by starshipcat, which everyone ought to read

http://starshipcat.livejournal.com/69174.html

A great new fic

An enchanting if occasionally troubling masterpiece by Hijja, which not everyone might come across, as it is in a small community: http://community.livejournal.com/welovekiks/1043.html Little Teddy Lupin gets lost in Diagon Alley. Hijja has on occasion praised my way of setting stories, so may I return the compliment and say that the opening sentence is almost miraculous in its recreation of a child's experience of the world outside?

(no subject)

I have just visited a Tory blog. Apparently support for the detestable and mendacious Dave Hannan MEP is 75%. These people simply do not realize what planet they live on. Ron Paul - who has been rejected by his own conservative colleagues because of his proven racism and links with neo-nazis - was repeatedly quoted as an example. The world is going mad - left, right and centre.

You couldn't make it up dept no.93: hadda happen.

A rather battered-looking, elderly man was spotted walking about in the rain by a suspicious citizen in Long Branch, New Jersey. The police were called and, after some palaver, finally took the supposed bum to a hotel where he was staying and where he was able to prove that, yes, he was indeed Bob Dylan.

Why is nobody paying attention to this?

I had never even heard it, had any of you? And yet it is since 2007 that Germany had announced the establishment of a purely German space program, separate from the European space agency, and intended to go to the Moon. Now Peter Hintze, the German federal director of aerospace, has announced that Germany plans a mission to the Moon within ten years. One of the many ways in which the world media are corrupt is that they never pay any attention to news like this. There is a meme that Europe is lazy and declining, and that the future is in the Far East. Any news that contradict the meme simply are not publicized. And when German spacemen will in fact be walking on the Moon, everyone will be surprised, not knowing that the program had been widely announced.

(the news was reported by today's Italian Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire)