December 2011
1 post
Holy Emerson! “The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.”
And a friend of mine’s...
“We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those bygone, foreign states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it were to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make clear that it is mean to indicate what I am today, ass I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life. It...
September 2010
4 posts
August 2010
3 posts
“True understanding does not tire of interminable dialogue and ‘vicious circles’ because it trusts that imagination will eventually catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth.”
— Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (July-August, 1953), 392.
Watchtombreihan:
J. Cole: “Who Dat” How to make me give a shit about a rapper I never gave a shit about, in two easy steps.
1. Write and record a really good song.
2. Make a really good video for your really good song. Make it all one continuous shot. Evoke memories of Xzibit’s “What U See Is What U Get” video and the training montage from Rocky II. Include fire.
That should pretty much do it.
July 2010
1 post
The economic roots of the contemporary obsessions with deficit reduction:
In his book, Prof Rajan points to domestic political stresses within the US. Related stresses are emerging in western Europe. I think of it as the end of “the deal”. What was that deal? It was the post-second-world-war settlement: in the US, the deal centred on full employment and high individual consumption. In...
May 2010
2 posts
Last nights show...The Clean
Help me critique this...please.
So my brother is getting married and he wanted me to read something in the ceremony. I couldn’t find anything that I liked, so I tried to write my own, not expecting anything to come of it. Turns out that my bother liked what I wrote and wants me to read it. But I want to see if I can improve it. I’m no poet; haven’t written a poem since college. So I need input. I thought...
March 2010
1 post
2 tags
The Cost of "Stability" in Postwar Iraq: Womens'...
Since the invasion of Iraq, previous protections for womens’ rights have been cancelled by conservative religious political coalitions intent on abolishing those protections:
In summer 2003, L. Paul Bremer, the top administrator of the US occupation, assembled the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), described by The Washington Post as, “a body that will cooperate with [the occupation] and...
January 2010
4 posts
2 tags
“Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Shapr edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an ageing planet. Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant may now...
3 tags
Great Report on Taliban by Charles Sennot @ PRI's... →
December 2009
6 posts
2 tags
Towes on Contemporary (Pomo) Historical...
“Ultimately, it is the genealogy of identity-construction as a narrative without closure that constitutes the irreducible heterogeneity of the dead as historical agents who resist all of our attempts to construct their existence as a function of our own and to manipulate the traces of their acts as objects in the construction of our own meanings. But acceptance of the ultimate otherness and...
I’m listening to an audiobook presentation of The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. It was written in the midst of WWII and the diarist’s voice that it contains is filled with disgust and rage at the United States, at Capitalism, and at humanity. It is compelling. It is the voice of someone who has fixated on the horror of what was happening in the war and as someone...
“I have to be honest, as the world watches us … I think our ability to take...”
– Obama in Copenhagen: ‘Time for Talk Is Over’ — Daily Intel (via peterwknox) (via apsies)
3 tags
A nice quote from a book by Alice Kessler-Harris described the power of ideas or rather “worldviews” to shape history:
This book is not so much about women as it is about the power of gendered worldviews…to construct the circumstances of history by shaping the parameters with which people see. (Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity).
Obviously, this is not a unique insight these...
“If you think you are sick of Joe Lieberman now…just wait until you get sick.”
— Jim Shea, a columnist in The Hartford Courant, quoted in http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/health/policy/15lieberman.html?hp
3 tags
“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our [Constitutional] convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and...
August 2009
2 posts
Health Care Letter to Editor
I used this tool to submit a letter to the editor in support of health care reform. You should too if you are in support of this, otherwise the opportunity will pass. Obama still needs grass-roots support even though he is president. Here’s my letter:
I am writing to state my strong support for Obama’s health care reform. A system consisting of both public and private insurance...
July 2009
1 post
June 2009
10 posts
Part of Mousavi’s Speech given yesterday June 20:
I still strongly believe that the request for annulment of this election and a renewed election is a given right and it should be investigated impartially by a board trusted nationally, instead of rejecting the possibility of any positive results from the investigation beforehand; or propose the possibility of bloodshed in order to keep...
“In order to win Mousavi had taken up the progressive slogans, which he had...”
– Azar Nafisi, from an interview with Kathleen McCaul for Aljazeera.
AMA opposes public health "option"
For those of you who didn’t notice the AMA yesterday stated its decision to oppose the public health option that is being discussed as part of health care reform. This adds to a 70 year history by the AMA of opposing any state involvement in health care. One can of course understand their objection. It could lead to a decline in doctors’ salaries. But it is as if they also believe...
May 2009
5 posts
2 tags
Obama Foreign Policy at the 100-day Juncture
Godfrey Hodgson on Obama’s first 100 days in office:
Only gradually has it emerged that while Obama may understand the world’s anger at the Bush administration’s hubris and rudeness, his own foreign policy in many ways is set to continue the established themes of American policy. He might be ready to draw down US forces in Iraq; but only to send more to Afghanistan. He might...
“Darwin was my mother’s hero, though it would be years before, one summer...”
– Adam Gopnik from his new Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009).
April 2009
16 posts
3 tags
Lewis Henry Morgan, Take II
None of this is a surprise, but still… Compare this with the quote I posted earlier by Lewis Henry Morgan about progress involving a move beyond capitalism:
“The Indian tribes must be dealt with as they are—as Indians and not as thought they were white men—and with patience and forebearance. They are not only barbarians, but in a lost stage of barbarism, immensely below...
barthel:
Sonic Youth - Shadow of a Doubt
Big...
4 tags
“Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense,...”
– Lewis Henry Morgan, 19th-Century, “Evolutionary” Anthropologist, from his Ancient Society (1877)
2 tags
“Like the materials used in a collage, these pieces of evidence have different...”
– From Timothy Garton Ash’s The File: A Personal History