With all the speculation about the apparently imminent missile test in North Korea, I have to wonder if we have firm evidence that the rocket was actually fueled. The appearance of fueling is not fueling, after all. I suppose we may have the answer to this question before too long, but my cursory searches have [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
The LA Times has a story about the immigration debates and changing attitudes towards labor which suggests, misleadingly as it turns out, that a government contractor landscaper was offering up to $34/hour and unable to find work. The story reveals that the kind of landscaping I occasionally did in college and shortly thereafter–raking leaves, rolling [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
From Richard Clarke and Steven Simon’s NYT editorial While the full scope of what America did do remains classified, published reports suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran’s intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased. Clarke implies here [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Is the next big thing in today’s tour of the news. I’m immediately curious about how often this has been used in horror stories, and I’m ashamed, given how much time I spent reading them in adolescence, that no examples come readily to mind. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine by Catherine [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Two articles from the Washington Post and from Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Though it feels somewhat overoptimistic at best, I’m currently subscribing to the bluster theory. I think it’s self-evident enough that there are no viable military options that the administration is working hard on a little “Madman” theory. And “explosive carrying dogs?” [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Candace de Russy apparently isn’t.
Comments Off :: Read on
“This right here beats anything I have ever seen,” Sheriff Tom Alexander told the Asheville Citizen-Times, which reported that victims may have come from as far away as South America.. These incidents, like the well-publicized case in Germany a few years ago, admit of no sociological explanation. They are bubbles of evanescence, chance beyond our [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Here’s some of the evidence from this recent interview with Jimmy Carter: “My sartorial misjudgment becomes even more glaring when we arrive at the restaurant, a small and homely diner with bottles of Heinz ketchup and a basket of paper napkins on each table.” Heinz ketchup on the tables. Amazing how slowly time passes for [...]
That phrase, formerly much heard, had been absent from life recently until I read this (19). On a related topic, I’ve promised Clancy not to spoil 24 for her, but I have some comments on the show’s “libidinal economy,” so to speak, to share in the upcoming weeks. The word “insectile” features.
I’m not sure if this one’s been done yet, but still: Richard “Dick” Cheney was a friend to the poor. He travelled with a gun in every hand. All alongside this countryside He opened a many a door, But he was never known to hurt an honest man. It was down in Harding County, A [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
I’ve announced the upcoming Valve book event on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, about which I’m excited. Also, Mark Bauerlein has an article (currently subscription) in the Chronicle about adolescent culture and the decline of literacy. In many ways, I think Bauerlein misses the mark here; but for now I just want to note that [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Paul Laity on Lee Clarke’s Worst Cases and John Christensen on Raymond Baker’s Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. I’m curious if there has been a sustained fictional treatment of a culture/civilization steadily planning for a highly improbable total disaster scenario chosen randomly from a field of many. Posner’s [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Where the equivalent of Critique of Cynical Reason sells 40,000 copies in its first few months. I don’t think Empire compares well, but what were its American sales figures? There were about 60 million people in West Germany when it was published, so that’d roughly 200,000 copies here now. I’ve heard that the publishing industry [...]
Malcolm Gladwell has an angry article in the New Yorker about the American health care system. Like many graduate students I knew, I didn’t have health insurance in graduate school because it wasn’t provided or subvented and thus couldn’t be afforded. After severely spraining my ankle playing football, I laid off the contact sports for [...]
Though I’ve decided to teach a differently themed writing class this fall, I follow intermittently the debates about contemporary creationism. There are two stories in the Times today about it: one by Jodi Wilgoren, mentioned that the Gates foundation donates to the creationist Discovery Institute, which was mildly surprising. A charitable assumption might be that [...]
:: Read on
“They are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law.” From this Slate article. Pirates and hijackers, yes. Torturers, no. Torture has almost always been organized by the state and thus legal. I have no idea what he’s thinking here.
:: Read on
The NYT has the story. I’m still trying to decide whether I’m going to teach the “Rhetoric of Evolution” class in the fall. I don’t think the sociological significance of the ID movement, particularly its hitching onto complexity theory, has been adequately addressed. Anyone with pointers is welcome to share.
