I, for one, applaud Steve Almond.
Category: WTF
The Decline And Fall Of Europe?
The Decline And Fall Of Europe is, yes, sobering, but there’s one thing the author overlooks, which is that Europe could take immigrants from places other than the Middle East. Immigrants from Asia, for example, would probably meld into European culture well, just as they have in North America. Just as there is not inherent hostility toward Europe by, say, Chinese, Europe isn’t anywhere near as hostile towards Chinese as, say, to Turks or Lebanese. I’d like to see Europe do well. Whether it does, though, depends on its ability to change. A friend recently wrote to me in an …
The New McCarthy?
There’s a piece in the Guardian that was recommended to be by my co-worker Jim, but which slipped my mind until I found the link to the article again on Dan Drezner’s page. It’s a piece by Gary Younge titled Silence in Class, and I have to say that judging by the comments on Drezner’s site, I’m not wholly comforted by his own underwhelmed reaction. At the same time, calling it a “New McCarthyism” might be overdoing it a little. Yes, nasty little groups of rightwing students do report on their professors; this is not a surprise. Yes, some professors …
A Violently Executed Blog
Adam is right. George Will needs to shut the f*ck up instead of trying to convince us global warming is good. Adam rants: People that are able to tell their asses from hot rocks have no difficulty understanding that climate data collection and analysis has improved over the last several decades, and that all of the data we are seeing indicates that things are going to get hotter, faster – and soon. Mosquitos that carry malaria and dengue fever are spreading northward, polar bears are losing habitat, glaciers all over the world are getting smaller, and some pencil-necked twit thinks …
fightglobalwarming.com PSAs
Recently I asked some of my students why we always advertise for things that are for sale, when some of the most important things in life cannot be bought or sold. I even had them do up PSAs. Well, they did them in print-advertisement formats, but I think sometime later, I’ll show them a couple of the ads from the fightglobalwarming.com webpage. If you want to see one of them, you can click under the “think about it” section in the sidebar, or have to look at the exended section of the post.
Ubuntu in Korea, with Ramblings on Piracy, Free Culture, Bollywood, and The Long Tail
I’m just geeking out about Ubuntu Linux here, which branch out to piracy, free culture, Bollywood, and alternative distribution systems using the Internet. I already didn’t know much about what I was going on about at the point of Linux, so this al might be a load of bull puckey. Or there might be some gems mixed in with the bull turds, you never know. But if you demand people only to write about things they know really well, go read something else. If, on the other hand, you want to help disabuse me of my mistaken notions and help …
Good Night and Good Luck
I watched the film Good Night and Good Luck the other night, and, well, it’s very obvious why a film about that ridiculous monster McCarthy had to be made now. This came to my mind as I read a post over at LocoMote which, honestly, I misread the first time I saw it. But I have noticed that people are still being polite to the legions of morons who think the Iraq Invasion was a sane, reasonable action. Why are they being polite? Why are people still being apologetic for their honesty? Why is this even a concern? There have …
Those Mohammed Cartoons
I was traveling when the whole thing about the cartoons of Mohammed his the world media. My first reaction was to think, “Jeez, guys, chill out. It’s just cartoons by infidels! It’s not as if your media doesn’t make nasty cartoons too, you know. Now, I know that it’s considered wrong to depict Mohammed, and that in Islam that’s rooted in a more deep and lasting taboo on pictorial depictions of Allah. Okay, fine, that’s their religion. But the thing is, nobody has any right to force others to obey their religion. For example, Muslim extremists would probably also like …
Lunar New Year Reads, #50: North, by Seamus Heaney
Relieved exhalation of breath. Seamus Heaney (here’s his Nobel Prize website bio page) is a poet I come to again and again. The first thing I ever read of his writing, though, besides a couple of pieces in an anthology, was prose — essays, I believe, on poetics and poetry. For a few years, I read almost nothing of him, until I arrived in Jeonju. After some time, I ventured to take a look in the English-language texts collection at the Uni where I was working, and what do you know, but they had a lot of his poetry, to …
Lunar New Year Reads, #49: The Painted Bed by Donald Hall
The Painted Bed is a strong, hard book. It is painful, because, as one soon realizes, the title announces its theme, only a few pages into the book, is the deathbed of the poet’s wife, the bed of their sleeping, their dreams, the love and their sex in life, and the site of his wife’s passage into the dark realms as well. The book reads as a slow progression from outright grief, through the aftermath of a wife’s death, then into a kind of frame-cut — a jump to a bigger perspective, all the living and dying and movement of …