June 2009
“I’m profoundly sad and I’m furious and I think the American people need to...”
– Warren Hern, a Boulder-based provider of late-term abortions, commenting on the shooting of George Tiller in Wichita. Quoted in Ernest Luning, “Late-term abortion doctor decries Tiller killing,” The Colorado Independent (May 31, 2009). Hern remarks that he himself may be the only remaining provider...
May 2009
Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures →
Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT’s Open Courseware project.
Rogues, Robes and Racists →
azspot:
First, there’s former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When the Supreme Court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, Rehnquist was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Rehnquist wrote Jackson a memo in which he defended separate-but-equal policies, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’...
“I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn’t fully...”
– John Lanchester (via jhnbrssndn
It’ll be interesting, perhaps frightening, to see what people do with their anger given the isolation and alienation that this system has so successfully fostered.
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the...”
– David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery for The Review of Contemporary Fiction (vol. 13, 1993) (via davidfosterwallace)
“In the nineteenth century, when a woman had been raped, or had experienced...”
– Naomi Wolf (via azspot)
Torturing Democracy - Why you should watch this... →
Bill Moyers writes: If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That’s just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. Torturing Democracy was written and produced by one of America’s outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones.
Thoroughly Modern Marx →
Despite the depth of our current predicament, Marx would have no illusions that economic catastrophe would itself bring about change. He knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, breeds and fosters social isolation. Such a system, he wrote, “leaves no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’” Indeed, capitalism leaves societies mired “in the icy...
WatchGet Ready for the End of the World!
I love Zadia on epicfu
The Right to Counsel, Weakened →
In a troubling 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Sixth Amendment’s right to legal counsel. The decision came in the case of Jesse Montejo, a Louisiana man sentenced to death for murder based on incriminating statements that he made when the police questioned him without his lawyer present. … In an angry dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the 1986...
The future of manufacturing: Here come the robots →
Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they’re also becoming far more efficient at it. They’ve shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don’t need as many manufacturing workers as before.
...
Why the Pentagon Is Probably Lying About its... →
But what is far scarier about these images Obama refuses to release and that the Pentagon is likely to be lying about now, is that it is not the evidence of lower-level soldiers being corrupted by power — it is proof of the fact that the most senior leadership — Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Rice’s collusion — were running a global sex-crime trafficking ring with...
“Because my concept of democracy as the right to live widens beyond Homo sapiens,...”
– Edward Hoagland - Curtain Calls in Harper’s (March 2009)
In the first case of its type, a federal judge in... →
(via azspot)
What Sotomayor Actually Said in 2001 Lecture →
retropolitics:
J.E. Robertson | Open Salon
In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor delivered a speech to the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and has been reproduced by The New York Times this month online. A quote taken from that speech has raised controversy, as conservatives...
85% of the World's Oyster Reefs Are Gone (and the... →
According to a new study by the Nature Conservancy, 85% of oyster reefs have been lost worldwide. That’s right: Only 15% of the world’s oyster reefs remain. In most individual bays around the world, the rate of decline is even worse, exceeding 90%, and in many cases — particularly in North America, Europe and Australia — oysters are “functionally extinct.”
Economic update: Bad, but not chaotically horrible →
So many economic indicators, so little time… Let’s see: New home sales, up slightly month-to-month (yay!) but still at historic lows and down 34 percent from a year ago (boo!). Durable goods orders surprise economists with a seemingly robust month-to-month jump, (yay!) but a key component — non-aircraft business orders — is down, again, (boo!). Weekly initial jobless claims...
Genetic survey finds healthy human skin is... →
Scientists and germophobes alike have long known that human skin—from head to toe—is literally crawling with bacteria and microbes. And a new study, published today in Science shows that skin is host to many, many more of the tiny organisms than previously thought. …
“The skin is…an ecosystem, harboring microbial communities that live in a range of physiologically and topographically...
Human fishing spree goes back 1000 years →
CALL it the myth of industrial sin. It seems fish stocks were declining due to human exploitation long before the arrival of giant trawlers and factory ships, according to marine scientists at a conference being held this week in Canada.
“We are discovering that human pressure on marine life was much earlier, much larger and much more significant than previously thought,” says Poul...
Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolano's '2666' →
tsparks:
by MARCELA VALDES December 8, 2008 edition of The Nation
If you have any interest in Roberto Bolano’s novel 2666, this pieces illuminates the connections between the novel’s dark core, the fictional city of Saint Teresa and it’s real counterpart Ciudad Juárez. Ms. Valdes seems to know a lot about Bolano’s work habits, his motivations and research; this makes the article fasinating...
“The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time...”
– Hunter S. Thompson (via poortaste)
“I mean: you knew it was happening, right? Even before you knew it was happening,...”
– Tiger Beatdown
How do we get to the point where the step between the last two sentences can be avoided? (via igather)
