January 3rd, 2007
I happened upon this Pravda article today thanks to a Salon piece. Both are worth a read, though the Pravda article, which discusses Condi Rice’s recent strongarm tactics regarding the Ukranian Gazprom shenanigans, is by far the more hilarious. Highlights:
Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all.
Such women are very rough [try this link! Completely wacky! -P]. They are all workaholics, public workaholics. They can be happy only when they are talked and written about everywhere: “Oh, Condoleezza, what a remarkable woman, what a charming Afro-American lady! How well she can play the piano and speak Russian! What a courageous, tough and strong female she is!
The conclusion:
Condoleezza Rice needs a company of soldiers. She needs to be taken to barracks where she would be satisfied. On the other hand, she can hardly be satisfied because of her age. This is a complex. She needs to return to her university and teach students there. She could also deal with psychological analysis.
I should mention in the interest of fairness that the article is reporting the opinion of Liberal and Democratic Party of Russia leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, not, say, that of the Kremlin. Well, at least on record. One need only think of the whole Pope Benedict-Emperor Paleologus kerfuffle to realize that quotational distancing doesn’t fool anyone.
December 1st, 2006
Ok, so a bit of guilty pleasure just now. CNN.com has a movie clip of Danny Devito’s drunken appearance on The View. I don’t really care about this, and frankly, I sympathize with his need to take pain medicine before encountering that crowd, but that’s not what I’m blogging about.
Interestingly, the clip at the very end contains a couple seconds of Bush playing a Javanese saron (presumably after he listened to a gamelan performance in Singapore). He apparently requested to play afterwards, and doesn’t seem to do so bad. I had thought, in fact, that he had been trained. But it’s raw musical talent. Good for him.
Want to be like Bush? Check out this cool vitual gamelan you can play yourself.
November 28th, 2006
Not a day goes by that someone asks us what we thought of the election results, or that we hear hosannas in the streets for the routing of the Republican Machine. Both N and I have had a hard time verbalizing our despondence; it just seems too morose to those so ravaged by the losses in 2004. But here’s a wonderfully articulate piece from Diane McWhorter on Slate that gives words to my fears. The final line: "If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush’s competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work."
Indeed, the horror.
November 7th, 2006
voter fraud
debold voting machines
robo calls
running out of absentee ballots
negative tv ads
tennessee, va, missouri
pollster.com
voter guides
letters telling naturalized immigrants they can’t vote
ted haggard
voter suppression in va
saddam Hussein sentenced to death
call for Rumsfeld to resign
neo-conservatives publicly criticize war in iraq
voter id laws
global warming
john kerry
secret cia prisons
mark foley
jack abramoff
equal rights to marriage
abortion
george allen
israel
and soooooo much more.
November 2nd, 2006
An article from Sunday on Salon.com reports on a relatively quiet decision to close the EPA’s 26 research libraries, with the promise of digitization of the contents for a less costly web distribution. However, as PEER alleges, the funds for this digitzation were never specified in the EPA budget. The seriousness of these allegations, if true, is really hard to overstate. The EPA libraries have an incredible amount of data that is not available anywhere else (as far as I’m available). In college, while researching on hill-farming (a long story), I found myself at the Region 1 library in Boston, puzzling through landslide data from soil-loss; Harvard had nothing comparable. It’s scary to think that this might just be lost. It started me thinking: how hard would it be for Google to just volunteer and digitize everything as a public service? This is at least something that can be done to undercut the Bush undercutting.
October 23rd, 2006
Can anyone explain what’s happening at the ACLU? Stephanie Strom from the NYT has been following this since 01.04, when the executive director Anthony Romero first signed while railing against federal aid terrorist blacklist regulations; then it was accused of data mining. Then there were the fundraising imbroglios of executive director Romero, then there was the report about gag orders (NYT 05.24.06). And now, it seems an internal faction led by Wendy Kaminer and Ira Glasser (executive director until 2001) has come out with a blog to voice their concerns publicly. More
October 8th, 2006
Amartya Sen visited the UCSC campus yesterday to deliver the 6th annual Maitra lecture (a lecture series plus Satyajit Ray film screening endowed by Anuradha Maitra, widow of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sidhartha Maitra). His talk was formally a bit off: a response to some critical reviews of his book (or maybe, just some criticisms found in some reviews), Identity and Violence, which few people in the audience probably read. I have not, though I did read this Slate precis when the book came out. The substance of the article/book seems to be this: the Huntington “clash of civilizations” model, which predicted inevitable conflict and drift based on narrow categories (religion, “culture”) misanalyzes people as unidimensional More
