Jonathan's blog

Here are some of the TV recommendations for this week from The Week magazine:

• American Experience: RFK (Mon, 9 PM, PBS)
• 10 Items or Less (Mon, 11 PM, TBS)
• Independent Lens: Two Square Miles (Tue, 10 PM, PBS)
• Stage Door (Wed, 10 PM, Turner Classic Movies)
• Afterlife (Thu, 9 PM, BBC America)
• Worst Week of My Life (Fri, 9:40 PM, BBC America)
• Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning) (Sun, 6:30 PM, HBO)
• The Sun (Sun, 9 PM, Science Channel)

Some friends of ours from church were mentioned in the local paper in a story about a group of adoptions that were finalized last week, including that of their 15-month-old daughter Marilena. From an article of the same title in The Midland Daily News by Kelly Nankervis:

"We believe our family was put together by God," said Fred Sitter, before Marilena's adoption was finalized. She is the second child Sitter and his wife, Connie, have adopted; David, age 5, is from Mexico. Marilena is from Guatemala. "This is what was meant to be," Fred said of how the family came to be.

Fred spoke in church a month or two ago about their experiences during the adoption process and about the metaphor of adoption into the family of God. On a related note via Today's Papers, recently there was an article in the NY Times by Marc Lacey titled "Guatemalan Adoption System Under Scrutiny":

Guatemala, where nearly one in every 100 children is adopted by an American family, ranks third behind much larger nations, China and Russia, when it comes to providing babies to American couples. The pace of adoptions and the fact that mothers here, unlike in other places, are sometimes paid for their babies have brought increasing concern and the prospect of new regulation that may significantly reduce the number of Guatemalan babies bound for the United States next year, or end it altogether. Critics of the adoption system here - privately run and uniquely streamlined - say it has turned this country of 12 million people into a virtual baby farm that supplies infants as if they were a commodity. The United States is the No. 1 destination.

In other countries, adoptive parents are sought out for abandoned children. In Guatemala, children are frequently sought out for foreign parents seeking to adopt and given up by their birth mothers to baby brokers who may pay from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 for a baby, according to interviews with mothers and experts.

Via The Huffington Post, GamePolitics.com reports on some comments by O'Reilly on his radio show. IPod owners and computer geeks...now you know where you stand.

I don't own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it's going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They're not playing the video games. They're killing real people over there.

A brief history refresher from the November 15, 2006, episode of The Writer's Almanac. This seemed particularly interesting to me. I don't think I had realized how shaky things were for us under the Articles of Confederation.

It was on this day [November 15] in 1777 that the American colonies, in the midst of a war for Independence, approved a final version of the Articles of Confederation. It was the first time in modern history that a complete system of government was drawn up and approved by a committee. The document began by naming the new country: The United States of America. The debate over the Articles had begun in the summer of 1776, and it mainly concerned states' rights. At the time, the colonies still saw themselves as fairly separate entities, and each wanted to be able to create its own laws. Also, none of the colonies wanted to be pushed around by the other colonies once they were free and independent. Many of the people debating the new form of government were afraid that a strong central ruling body would become tyrannical, just like a king. John Adams was one of the few people who imagined that the new country would be a single nation, not just an association of individual states. He was joined by Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin, but they were overruled. The central government under the Articles of Confederation had no real power. It had no power to raise armies, no power to impose taxes, and no power to enforce laws it had passed. The Articles of Confederation finally went into effect in 1781, a few months before the Revolutionary War ended. In the months after the end of the war, the soldiers who had fought for the revolution actually considered seizing power. They hadn't been paid in months, they were exhausted and bitter, and pamphlets began circulating, advocating an armed takeover of Congress. Congress would have been powerless to stop them, since it couldn't raise its own armies. The only thing that prevented the takeover was George Washington's sheer force of will. He showed up at a meeting of rebellious soldiers and spoke out against their plans, and they dispersed. There were other attempts at armed rebellion under the Articles of Confederation, the most famous of which was a rebellion led by a man named Daniel Shays, which almost took over the state capital in Boston. Congress had no authority to help Massachusetts take any action against Shays' rebellion, and some worried that the rebellion would spread to other states. It was ultimately Shays' Rebellion that changed a lot of minds about strong central government, and in the spring of 1787, delegates met to revise the Articles of Confederation, and the result was the Constitution we have today.

Via the November 13, 2006, episode of The Writer's Almanac, a poem of the same title by Ron Koertge in Fever:

Kryptonite Lois liked to see the bullets bounce off Superman's chest, and of course she was proud when he leaned into a locomotive and saved the crippled orphan who had fallen on the tracks. Yet on those long nights when he was readjusting longitude or destroying a meteor headed right for some nun, Lois considered carrying just a smidgen of kryptonite in her purse or at least making a tincture to dab behind her ears. She pictured his knees giving way, the color draining from his cheeks. He'd lie on the couch like a guy with the flu, too weak to paint the front porch or take out the garbage. She could peek down his tights or draw on his cheek with a ball point. She might even muss his hair and slap him around. "Hey, what'd I do?" he'd croak just like a regular boyfriend. At last.