change change change | gas tax

yeh, we could use some adult supervision here

Clearly, Vanity Fair and Annie Liebovitz drank the cool aid.

But where are this child's parents? Failing that, where's her management?

Did they drink it too?

when penguins fly...

Malaria Bites

Below, you'll find the digital movie I made with Compassion and Youth Specialties (and the talented Brian Boyle) as the year began.

In 1983, when I first engaged the conversation about ending poverty, the working number of deaths due to preventable causes was about 42,000 per day — these are fatalities statisticians lump together as excess deaths, meaning they don't have to happen. Causes of excess deaths include war, water-borne illnesses, preventable and treatable infections — things like that. In 2007, despite all hell breaking loose in a lot of places on planet earth, the number of excess deaths was about 27,000 a day. 27,000 needless deaths every day is stunning and inexcusable. It's also a third fewer than in 1983. As Scott Todd, the very bright man who directs Compassion's Special Operations (including HIV/AIDS and Malaria Interventions) told me: "If we can shrink it from 40,000 to 27,000, there's no reason to believe we can't shrink it from 27,000 to zero."

This video describes in four and a half minutes how malaria deaths — about a million of them a year and way more children than adults — can be stopped cold for less money than the U.S. spends every week in Iraq.



This is as close to a no-brainer as I've ever seen...
Malaria bites. Buy a net. Save a life. Bite Back

there is enough

No one should starve in 2008. Join the One Campaign in calling on President Bush and other leaders of the G8 to take immediate action to intervene in the cascading international food crisis and create permanent solutions to an unspeakable 21st century evil. There's nothing nuanced about this. No one should starve in 2008. Period.

unbelievable...seriously

The only thing missing from this New York Times investigation is sex. But money and power seem to have been sufficient to sustain a disinformation campaign against the American people.

Honestly, is this who we are?

book guy on the radio | Kids Count

Did I mention I was on the Kids Count Radio Show in Indianapolis last month? I was — talking mainly about Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, which is, for better or worse, free for the downloading. Help yourself and pass along the link.

Funny, people get riled up about the Thing 05 We Should Never Say to Kids: I'm proud of you. Really? Do you think that's an extremely subversive idea about parenting? I wonder if it's (a tiny bit) like the line from from G.K. Chesterton where he said Christianity hasn't been tried and found wanting; it's been found difficult and left untried...

Anyway, the radio program, while probably not my most lucid half hour ever, nonetheless includes a few nice moments. And, like Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, it's free.

futbol | you kids get off that roof!

Lincoln + Obama | Two Speeches on Race

Garry Wills by David Levine

Garry Wills wrote an engaging commentary in the May 1, 2008 edition of New York Times Review of Books comparing Abraham Lincoln's pivotal Cooper Union Address in 1860 with Barack Obama's More Perfect Union speech last month in Philadelphia.

I think it's well worth reading and passing along to anyone who's thinking seriously about the the 2008 presidential campaign.

gotta know when to fold 'em

In case you missed (as I did) last month's New York Times homage to Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee ...

death by a thousand cuts

No matter what, this will end as badly as it began. Someone has to put an end to it. And by someone, I mean us.

music for one apartment and six drummers

Music for one Apartment and Six Drummers
Uploaded by bert_g

really? come on Senator McCain

Senate Bill S.22, sponsored by Senator Jim Webb (D, VA)

awareness test | an exercise in not seeing

This, as some of my friends are wont to say, will preach.

Martin Luther King | April 30, 1967

For the troops to fall into line is a noble thing; for civilians to fall into line is shameful.
— Garrison Keillor, Salon, Theirs Not To Reason Why , April 2, 2008

yes they/you/i/we can

12 minutes well-spent, if only to ask, "What am I doing that contributes to this kind of hope?"

we think...

[thanks Brian]