It’s a bit late, but this is worth knowing about, I think. On August 25th, people of conscience in the United States will meet genocide survivors from Darfur, Sudan. Using a satellite video link from a refugee camp on the Sudanese border, Americans in a New York studio will speak live to Darfurians facing one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world. The webcast went out live and while it’s too late to join in now, it’s worth looking just to see what you never saw on the news.
Month: August 2004
On the Dalai Lama and the Pope
In a link from RavingAtheist.com, I found an interesting artile on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Romantic notions about the “peaceful” and “harmonious” nature of Tibetan Buddhist monastic life should be tested against reality. The Lithang Monastery in eastern Tibet was where a major rebellion against Chinese rule erupted in 1956. Beijing tried to levy taxes on its trade and wealth. The monastery housed 5000 monks and operated 113 “satellite” monasteries, all supported by the labour of the peasants. Chris Mullin, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1975, described Lithang’s monks as “not monks in the Western sense …
Walter Ong, Human Transformation, Catholicism and The Aesthetics of Technofuturism
I was reading this article about Walter Ong, who I knew only a little about, and I found this fascinating quotation at the end: The spoken word, as we have seen, is primary, and yet from the start it was destined�or, in another way, doomed�to be supplemented with all the devices and even gadgetry which have reduced it more and more to space. The predicament of the human word is the predicament of man himself. Its very flowering bears within itself evidence of its own limitations and eventual transmutation. The evolution of the media of communication, with the continuous psychological …
A Pretty Good Day
Today: I found out I am now an uncle! Yay! Marie, Troy, Nathaniel, congratulations to all of you! Now’s one of those times I wish I could step into a teleporter machine and visit home to see the little fellow… and everyone else too, of course. We had a meeting and managed to set up the desks in the office in a way that not only make me happy, but also leave open a nice huge space in the middle of the room, which is good for everyone. Whew. We had a lunch paid for by the University. It was …
Forget About It!
This week, Adam asks us: You’ve been given the choice of having 5 memories removed from the world’s collective memories. If you forget them, it will be as if they never happened. Which 5 do you choose? Man, this is a hard, hard question. I don’t imagine that forgetting big tragedies would be a good thing, so my answers will all have to be personal an idiosyncratic. Disco. People might remember the era, the drugs, the wild sex, all of that… I wouldn’t steal that from them, of course. But I want them to forget that horrible, abominable music. 80s …