So, from what I'm hearing, Barack Obama's kinda racist-ish white grandmother is, according to Barack, a "typical white person" who has her kinda racist-ish attitudes "bred into" her as a fundamental part of her whiteness...or something.Dig up, Obama. Dig up!
Obama's campaign explained later that Barack didn't intend, of course, to imply that ALL white people harbor kinda racist-ish attitudes like his grandmother. Just MOST, I guess.
Now, Barack apparently thinks a "typical white person" is gonna get nervous if she's alone and runs into a black male stranger on the street. Although Barack didn't come out and say it directly, the context of the statement would seem to indicate that he considers this "typical white person" reaction to be kinda racist-ish.
Of course, any female (of any race), walking alone at night, who runs into a male stranger (of any race) and doesn't give at least a passing thought to what intentions that male stranger may harbor, is naive.
The Real China and the OlympicsYou can read the rest here.
On July 13th 2001, when Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese government promised the world it would improve China’s human rights record. In June 2004, Beijing announced its Olympic Games slogan, “One World, One Dream.” From their inception in 1896, the modern Olympic Games have always had as their mission the promotion of human dignity and world peace. China and the world expected to see the Olympic Games bring political progress to the country. Is Beijing keeping its promises? Is China improving its human rights record?
When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.
We are going to tell you the truth about China. We believe that for anyone who wishes to avoid a disgraceful Olympics, knowing the truth is the first step.
"Some artists use paint, others bronze – But for Nathan Sawaya he chooses to build his awe-inspiring art out of toy building blocks. LEGO® bricks to be exact.An exhibition of Sawaya's work Architecture of the Imagination: The Lure of the LEGO® Brick is currently on display at the Stamford Museum, Connecticut, until August 18.
With more than 1.5 million colored bricks in his New York studio, Sawaya’s sculptures take many forms."
The hideous depredations of Abu Ghraib, Guantanimo, and the rest don't come from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or even Christopher Hitchens, but from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and General Sanchez. These are Christians, not book-peddling atheists, behind these actually-occurring atrocities.Strange that it's necessary to point these things out - but it is.
The 9/11 highjackers were acting from faith in god, not killing thousands fresh from reading Michel Onfray. Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and assorted Danish newspaper editors and cartoonists live under the threat of death for expressing the wrong opinions about god, not about Dan Dennett's books.
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?The New York Times reports that Obama is planning to address the issue of race in America in a speech today in Philadelphia.
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.
No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.
The year was 1968 and, worldwide, there was revolution in the air. But when John Hoyland attacked John Lennon's politics in a radical paper, he didn't expect the fiery Beatle to rise to the bait.I'm not sure what it is about this Guardian piece from John Hoyland concerning his correspondence with John Lennon that gets my goat. It's not because I'm a Lennon fan - yes, I like his music but he was, in many ways, politically naive and he gave his support to a number of causes I find objectionable - Angela Davis being a case in point. So no, it's not that.
In order to change the world, we've got to understand what's wrong with the world. And then - destroy it. Ruthlessly. This is not cruelty or madness. It is one of the most passionate forms of love. Because what we're fighting is suffering, oppression, humiliation - the immense toll of unhappiness caused by capitalism.Since then, Hoyland says "I like to think I shifted my position as well to one that was a little less naively and narrowly political."
As recently as last week I said I won't vote for Obama, but that I like him anyway. I cannot say that anymore.Looks like Clinton's prayers have been answered; this one could run and run.
He's either a cynic (per Yglesias), an idiot for not figuring this out after two decades, or a paranoid racist nutjob.
I suspect Yglesias is correct, but that right there is enough to change my opinion of him forever.
This scandal (and it really is a scandal) strikes right at the heart of what made him appealing to so many people, including me.
"Daughters. They're a mess no matter how you look at 'em. A headache 'til they get married - if they get married - and after that they get worse. Either they leave their husbands and come back with four kids and move into your guest room or the husband loses his job and the whole caboodle comes back. Or else they're so homely that you can't get rid of them at all and they hang around the house like Spanish moss and shame you into an early grave."Well, that's Officer Kockenlocker's take on it anyhow.
[T]he BBC's decision to commission a series of programmes about the marginalisation of the working class in New Labour's Britain should have been a rare opportunity to shine a light on the heart of modern life. Instead, under the banner of "The White Season", the programmes have been focused entirely on the impact of immigration and race on the white working class, as if it were some sort of anthropological study of an endangered tribe.
The message was unmistakeably clear in the series trailer, where a shaven-headed man's face is blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words: "Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?" White working people were being written out of the script, we were given to understand, and multiculturalism and migration were to blame. But in reality, it is the working class as a whole, white and non-white, that has been weakened and marginalised in the past two decades. By identifying the problems of the country's most disadvantaged communities as being about race rather than class, the BBC has reinforced stereotypes and played to the toxic agenda of the British National Party.
"So what are you going to do with your gap year, son? Work? Travel? Volunteering? What's that? You're going to make videos of freaky chin-eyed creatures for BBC3! Is there any future in that?"
"You'll see, Dad - one day my chin will be famous!"
[S]o big is counter-terrorism spending and so limited is terrorism's economic impact that, even if 30 attacks like the London bombings of July 2005 were prevented each year, the benefits would still be lower than the costs.So, if I've got this right, the Economist is suggesting that there are enormous benefits to be gained from reducing spending on counter-terrorism even if this were to result in thousands of deaths from terrorist attacks.
It's a 2D physics sandbox.
Phun is a Master of Science Thesis by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière.Download it from Phun
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.
I am getting my [solar] panels in from a Chinese plant, the only one in the world with a really solid eco-record for making them.Meanwhile, on the other side of the world:
The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.[Hat tip: Tim Blair]
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production -- silicon tetrachloride -- is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.And Fallon's relationship with the Bush administration hasn't been rosy either - he seemed ever ready to portray himself as the only person who could stop the U.S. going to war with Iran.
Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.
[I]t scares the living shit out of me that an admiral who's supposed to be a general is most likely dictating foreign policy to elected officials in our executive and legislative branches who are supposed to dictate foreign policy to him.He had to go.
At a hastily scheduled morning press conference at the headquarters of New York's exclusive Emperors Club prostitution ring, high priced call girl "Kristen" announced that she would temporarily step aside in the wake of charges that she had engaged in sex with New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.[Via Winds of Change]
"I made a serious mistake and betrayed the trust of my co-workers, my many clients, and my pimps," she said in a quiet voice cracking with emotion. "I will be taking a leave of absence to earn their forgiveness, and redeem myself in the eyes of the entire expensive whore community."
"Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country - to climb without limits."Though I am reminded of the closing lines of an old fairy story:
No question, now what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So I wonder how much point there is in trying to explain altruism on the basis of our instincts when, whatever findings you might come up with in this regard, one of the kinds of reason people will have for acting altruistically will be non-instinctive; it will have to do with moral principles or teachings, with things that have been learned. I'm not saying that such considerations will suffice in explanation, but they have an important part.Yes, but in a different subject area (Psychology, History, Politics) so I can't see how such considerations somehow lessen the point of theories that attempt to explain the development of altruistic behaviour in human species.
I expected Russell Crowe being Rogueish and Christian Bale looking Grimly Determined, and that’s what it was. It was also preposterous, and made me miss “Deadwood” very much. I’d been warned that it “falls apart” in the end, and that’s true, in the sense that a Kleenex tissue “falls apart” when hit with a high-pressure water hose. The final scenes would have been more credible if Ninjas rode into town on giant ostriches and killed everyone with light sabers.Yep.
The Senate’s majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said Mr. Bush disregarded the advice of military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, who argued that the military’s interrogation techniques were effective and that the use of any others could create risks for any future American prisoners of war.The Washington Weekly (which devotes its current issue to essays criticizing such practices) says it for me:
“He has rejected the Army field manual’s recognition that such horrific tactics elicit unreliable information, put U.S. troops at risk and undermine our counterinsurgency efforts,” Mr. Reid said in a statement.
It was a profound moral and strategic mistake for the United States to abandon long-standing policies of humane treatment of enemy captives. We should return to the rule of law and cease all forms of torture, with no exceptions for any agency.
'I am the proud offspring of Turkish immigrants. I want you to know that my great-great-grandmother was a slave, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Livingstone. She was a Circassian slave [from a region in southern Russia], and she was sold: my great-great-grandfather literally purchased her.'On a side note: the Guardian's description of white slavery (at the bottom of the quoted article) employs a curious turn of phrase when it says (emphasis added):
Around half a million Circassians ended up in Turkey, where many of the women entered the white slave trade. They were seen as more prestigious than Africans, also enslaved by the Turks, but a report in the London Post in 1856 recorded that the market had become so swamped that 'never, perhaps, at any time was white human flesh so cheap'."Entered the slave trade" makes it sound voluntary.
A fifth of British teenagers believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Eleanor Rigby were real, a survey shows.To tell you the truth, I wouldn't be surprised if their teachers were just as ignorant - we've had a couple of experiences.
[T]here are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., "more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined," Chinese food might be our national cuisine. "Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," she writes. "But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?"
YouTube [today] will be taken over by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, whose feature-length documentary "Heima" will be offered for streaming in its entirety. The rest of the page will feature the band's selections of the 10 best entries in its "Minn Heima" competition, which asked fans to create their own version of the film -- which features the band performing in far-flung locales in their home country of Iceland.Interesting - I didn't think Iceland was big enough to have 'far-flung' places.
They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.Did you spot it? That's right, the word shoah is still in Hebrew. The English equivalent would be disaster or calamity.
[T]his is based on a very unfortunate mistranslation. By way of illustration, one might say that a German advertising campaign using the word "blitz" (which simply means 'lightning') might not go down well in London.Indeed. Though I imagine, in that case, the Guardian's translation from the German would be word perfect. What The Sun would make of it is a different matter.
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print--I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen: "Wilhelm, where is the turnip?"
Wilhelm: "She has gone to the kitchen."
Gretchen: "Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?"
Wilhelm: "It has gone to the opera."
A British "community pilgrim" who planned to walk from the UK to India penniless and in the name of peace was forced to turn back in Calais after locals accused him of being a "freeloader".In other words, they judged him on his actions and not his intentions. There's a lesson there somewhere but I don't think the pilgrim gets it.
Mark Boyle, 28, a "free economy" campaigner who believes in bartering to replace money, set off from Bristol in January with the lofty ambition of reaching the birthplace of his idol, Mahatma Ghandi, some 9,000 miles away.
The plan was for Mr Boyle and two followers he picked up on the way to offer physical work and their friendship in exchange for accommodation, sustenance and general good will.
But the love-in came to an abrupt and very premature end when it became clear that there was a language barrier and that the French didn't quite get the point.
"Not only did one not speak the language, they also see us as just a bunch [of] freeloading backpackers, which is the complete opposite of what the pilgrimage is really about"
I gave the President my book. He raised an eyebrow. "Who wrote this for ya, Geldof?" he said without looking up from the cover. Very dry. "Who will you get to read it for you, Mr. President?" I replied.
Here speaks a sensibility that, thrown back 60-odd years, must have blenched - yes, blenched - at the usage 'Jerry', as being inconsiderately de-individuating, lumping-together, forgetful of the circumstance that even soldiers of the armies of the Third Reich, spreading barbarism across a continent, are particular persons, why, they too have mothers and fathers, wives, girlfriends and pets, they're not just faceless 'Jerry'. Yes, and the poor old Taliban, each reactionary one of them, each bigoted theocrat and seeker after the sole obligatory truth, the compulsory non-dancing, non-singing, non-kite-flying subservience, the eternal subordination of women, each Talibloke is a man with a face and a childhood, with dreams and hopes and attachments - like to a life-cramping, life-denying movement that would confiscate from those under its tutelage just about every important freedom the Guardian of liberal virtue is supposed to stand for. Terry Taliban, what a heaped, what a steaming insult. How vulgar. How thoughtless.Read the whole thing.
So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre!Hmm.
I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and Gödel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Gödel’s sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems.Fascinating.
The Afghan Government would collapse, to be replaced by an overt civil war fought between the Taleban and local governors in the various provinces. A million or more Afghan refugees would again flee their country, many of them ending up in the West. Deprived of support from the US, as recommended by our commentators, President Musharraf or a successor would effectively withdraw from the border regions, leaving a vast lawless area from central Afghanistan to north central Pakistan. Al-Qaeda and other jihadists would operate from these areas as they did before 9/11. This time these forces - already capable of assassinating a popular democratic politician - would seriously impact upon the stability of Pakistan, which is a nuclear state.
Jihadists everywhere, from Indonesia to Palestine, would see this as a huge victory, democrats and moderates as a catastrophic defeat. There would hardly be a country, from Morocco to Malaysia, that wouldn't feel the impact of the reverse. That's before we calculate the cost to women and girls of no longer being educated or allowed medical treatment. And would there be less terror as a result?
About 150 communities in Guinea on Sunday collectively abandoned the practice of female genital cutting - a landmark declaration in a country where more than 97 percent of women undergo the ritual, the event’s organisers said on Monday.Unfortunately, the Telegraph reports that a number of female medical students in England seem willing to put cultural traditions before health.
Delegations led by women from each village converged on the central Guinean town of Lalya to speak about genital excision and participate in the declaration. All of Guinea’s ethnic groups practice genital cutting, despite a law that forbids it.
Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.
Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam.
It isn't unusual, after you hit 40, to have the occasional unexplained ache, or muscle cramp, or sleepless night, or other types of non-dramatic complaint - though it might be unusual for those things to start happening all at once.But a lot of men don’t. Me included. I’d have still been suffering in silence if I hadn’t been rushed to hospital one night with severe abdominal pains.
That is where I was three months ago. Things got worse, in tiny increments. Within two months - by degrees so small I didn't notice them - sleepless nights sometimes became nights roiled in sweat so drenching I was woken by drops falling across my eyelids.
Previously generalised aches took root in specific areas, and once in a while turned from ache to agony.
At which point any sensible person should have seen a doctor.
The standard story of how the American GI reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of World War II runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable lying, stealing, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were lying, stealing, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average GI never was in Holland, only the airborne).
The story ends up thus: Wonder of wonders, the average GI found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles (many GIs noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers "just like us".
I must admit, when I first started blogging, I had no idea what was going to happen a few years down the track. If someone had told me 4 years ago, when I started blogging, what was going to happen, I would have wondered what weird parallel Universe they came from. But as I've found out, this one is one of the weirder ones.Ain't that the truth.
[W]hat would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad freak, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault or slashing at trees in order to allay those exciting feelings that were well-nigh uncontrollable. My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my emotions, lest it shall detract from the dignity of a white man appearing under such extraordinary circumstances.From Stanley's account of the meeting, quoted in Niall Ferguson's "Empire".
So I did that which I thought was most dignified. I pushed back the crowds, and, passing from the rear, walked down a living avenue of people, until I came in front of the semicircle of Arabs, in front of which stood the white man with his grey beard. As I advanced slowly towards him I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a grey beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it, had on a red-sleeved waistcoat and a pair of grey tweed trousers. I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob - would have embraced him, only that he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing - walked deliberately up to him, took off my hat, and said: "Dr Livingstone, I presume."
I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.Ibn Warraq
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The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately.
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected "in order to finish quickly the African people".
The message in effect is: moderate or silence your criticisms of some reactionary theocrat and/or murderous thug, for otherwise you give aid and comfort to the warmongers of the right. Should you enquire of such experts in the intricacy of political positioning whether they ought, then, to moderate their criticisms of Bush, Cheney and co, so as not to make life more comfortable for the Ahmadinejads and Hezbollahs of this world, you would find them reeling in shock at so flagrant a misunderstanding of the nature of their democratic obligations.Indeed.
Prior to the cataclysm of 146 [the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC] there had been some confusion among the Greeks as to the precise definition of "freedom". When the Romans claimed to be guaranteeing it, what did this mean? One could never be sure with barbarians, of course: their grasp of semantics was so woefully inadequate. All the same, it did not take a philosopher to point out that words might be slippery and dangerously dependent on perspective. And so it had proved. Roman and Greek interpretations of the word had indeed diverged. To the Romans, who tended to regard the Greeks as fractious children in need of the firm hand of a pater familias, 'freedom' had meant an opportunity for the city states to follow rules laid down by Roman commissioners. To the Greeks, it had meant the chance to fight each other.
Sir, All items of clothing worn in hospitals, including trousers,
carry bacteria. The Health Secretary's decision to banish long-sleeved white coats from hospitals (report, Sept 17) brings to mind work carried out by the Public Health Laboratory Service several years ago. Researchers found that the least spread of bacteria from surgeons occurred if they were naked and lightly oiled.
