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December 19, 2015
Irish Times: 50 Things Ireland Needs in 2016.
This appeared in Saturday's The Irish Times by Ireland historian and author Diarmaid Ferriter: "50 things we need in Ireland in 2016". Excerpts:
5. A new government committed to the idea of a republic.
8. A narrative of 1916 that is honest, evidence-based and complicated.
12. A solution to the homelessness crisis.
13. Cyclists to be treated with more respect and subjected to less abuse by bullying motorists.
15. Those who do not clean up after their dogs to be interned in Frongoch, joining the commemoration hijackers.
21. Women’s sporting achievements to achieve the recognition they deserve.
22. Further subversive speeches from President Michael D Higgins.
25. Children able to attend their local schools regardless of religious faith or belief.
28. An Irish soccer team scoring goals in France. Lots of them. Don’t laugh.
30. Oscars for Irish films and actors. Just a few will do.
32. A new style of politics in Northern Ireland.
36. The staging of more plays by women.
38. Fewer tweets.
39. A greater number of handwritten letters.
46. More satire.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2015
Heroes: James M. Edwards.
Below: WWII picture of Jim Edwards (left), one of my Dad John Hull's best and oldest friends--and a hero of mine from the time I met him, which was right after we moved from Chicago to Cincinnati in the Spring of 1962. Quiet and self-effacing with (I thought) the most amazing eyes. 57 missions as fighter pilot in the China-Burma-India Theater before being shot down by ground fire behind enemy lines. Shortly before he died he told my Dad for the first time about how he escaped capture with a pistol and the help of local pro-Allies natives. Saw him and his new wife Shirley a lot in his last years. I was very close to his oldest son Bobby in elementary and middle school. I played at Jim's house on Brillwood Lane, both football and basketball, and the house next door where the Harness family lived. Jim was a genuinely brilliant, cultured, hardworking and good man. Brains behind P&G's paper products (Charmin) success. See James M. Edwards was P&G engineer, manufacturing leader. Like no P&G top executive you could meet. Serious. Intellectual. Playful. Athletic. Self-made. A well-read engineer who loved opera and theater. Liked to fish. And a Democrat. Unique. Boola Boola, sir.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2015
This Dude's Funny: "The Snooze Button", by Joshua Pierce.
Says author, comic, scholar, linguist, cyclist, philosopher and DC-based polymath Joshua Pierce: "This book is about stuff that annoys me, like waiting in lines, babies, boring sports, and job interviews. It's also about awesome things such as animals and boiled peanuts."
It's Funny. You can get it on Amazon. I've 3 copies and no you can't have one.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2015
San Bernardino: Any more fun new Ozzie and Harriet couples we can welcome to the 'hood?
Los Angeles Times about 3:00 PM Eastern: San Bernardino shooters had been radicalized 'for some time,' went to shooting ranges before attack. Guess it's taking a while to unravel this one.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 03, 2015
Don't stroke out but do read the fine Vox piece on why plenty of sane people support Donald Trump.
See yesterday's article at Vox by David Roberts, The real reason the media is rising up against Donald Trump. Especially second half where Roberts explains why people like (a) Trump so much, (b) why they like him right now and (c) what that says about us. Don't froth or stroke out. Just read. Excerpts:
...Trump does not back down, retract, or apologize, ever, not even for the most trivial thing. He refuses to allow journalists and pundits to validate their watchdog role. He recognizes that capitulating to the mainstream media is far worse for any conservative than clinging to a lie.... They have no power over him at all, and now everyone knows it.
Trump is revealing that the referees are irrelevant. All this rule breaking has the same effect: It disrupts the game as the media is used to playing it. It steps all over the unspoken agreements among various sectors of the political class in DC. It threatens the gatekeeper media, the VSPs, with something far worse than being wrong or biased. It threatens them with being irrelevant. Trump doesn't need or respect them, and they can't touch him. They can only point and gawk.
There is a faction of the US electorate that is positively wroth: angry that they are losing their country, angry at immigrants and minorities who want "free stuff," angry at terrorists for making them feel afraid, angry at liberals for rejecting good Christian values, angry at the economy for screwing them and denying them the better life they were promised, angry about Solyndra and Benghazi and Obamaphones and Sharia law and ACORN and Planned Parenthood and black-on-black crime and a government takeover of health care and Agenda 21 and Syrian immigrants on the loose and UN climate hoaxes.
They are angry at all institutions, including the Republican Party and the media, that have failed to halt America's decline.
They are mostly white, mostly older, and entirely pissed off. And Trump speaks for them, less in what he says than in his total contempt for those same institutions.
Trump appeals to many Americans for good reasons. Image: Universal Pictures.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)