And here we go. I think this election expresses, above all, the hatred, the astonishing hatred, we all feel for George W. Bush. And, to be sure, he’s earned it. So now the question becomes: what happens with Obama in office and Democratic control of both houses when they continue to carry on the same [...]
Now they’ve arrested a 13-year-old boy because a 13-year-old girl sent him a nude pic of herself. The charge? Child Pornography. Does the phrase GMAFB seem appropriate? Here’s the link. I don’t think a 13-year-old girl exploring her sexuality by taking a picture of herself and sending it to her boyfriend is worth so much [...]
I notice while over England that their neat regular rows of farm fields look suspiciously similar to the long, narrow rows of flats in their towns. I wonder how many other places modeled their cities after their farm structure, whether intentionally or not? While airport food is usually sub-standard, it seems the English reputation for [...]
Tags: Conventions · Media · Politics · Reesa · Steve · travel
James Cayne, through his management techniques, was one of the people who has caused the current financial crisis, and bears some responsibility for hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes. G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. is a master of the art of the mass layoff; tens of thousands of auto workers are without jobs thanks [...]
Years ago, when I first became politically active, I liked to speak of reformists in general and the Democrats in particular as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It was a nice, vivid metaphor, and I was young and a sucker for anything that sounded clever. Alas, I can no longer use that metaphor, [...]
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed,–that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence . . . labor is the superior–greatly superior–of capital.” — Abraham Lincoln
This concerns the bruhaha over Jessie Jackson’s recent remark concerning Obama that he’d like to “cut his nuts off.” The entire article can be found here. I just wanted to quote a paragraph I especially enjoyed: “The broadcast of the remark, which was not intended for public consumption, could have been dealt with quite easily [...]
Okay, check this out: Toby Buckell: You go, dude! The sort of blatant, obnoxious racism displayed by the editor of Helix makes me, as Bear says, ashamed for my genre. Hypocrisy would be an improvement, because at least it would indicate some degree of embarrassment for attitudes and beliefs that no one today should be [...]
Tags: Books · Politics · Steve
Elizabeth Bear linked to this article in her blog today about how the top authors feel pressure from their publishers to produce a book a year. I don’t have any issue with the main thrust of the article, but what interests me is the first sentence. In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, [...]
I’ve been re-reading Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution. In chapter IV and chapter VI he gets into the personality of the Czar and the Czarina in a discussion of how much of the personality of a leader is accidental, and how much is determined by circumstances: in particular, the circumstances of the [...]