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Saturday, January 31, 2004
Understating the Pres :: Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives! Helen Thomas calls him "the worst president ever." A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him "among the worst presidents in US history." No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him "the worst president the US has ever had." Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his government as the "worst ever." Even Bushie du jour, Christopher Hitchens, calls the man "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things." Only Fidel Castro, it would appear, has had kind words for our 43rd President. "Hopefully, he is not as stupid as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were." BERNARD CHAZELLE Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Making Iraq Safe For Theocracy:: Juan Cole writes :: Mass demonstrations by Women, Others, against Sudden Islamization of Law The Baghdad/London daily az-Zaman reports that there were widespread demonstrations on Tuesday by women against the order decreeing abolition of Iraq's uniform civil codes in favor of religious law, which they say "repeals women's rights" in Iraq. This story appears to have been completely missed so far by the Western news media, which is a great shame. Women are important, too, guys. Lovely. Monday, January 12, 2004
Monopoly Invented By Socialists So says a piece in Washington Free Press by Burton H. Wolfe Wolfe writes, "Ralph Anspach and Patrice McFarland have vowed that before they die the world will know that the original purpose of the Monopoly game was to teach the evils of exploitation, that it was conceived by socialists rather than its alleged inventor, and that the giant gamesmaker Parker Brothers has no right to monopolize it." . . . Anspach uncovered a series of long-buried facts. to begin with, the Monopoly game, in its original form, was called "The Landlord's Game." It was invented and patented in 1903 by Lizzie J. Magie, a follower of Henry George and his single-tax theory, as a means of teaching the evils of exploitation by landlords and the capitalist business system prevalent in America. Over the years a number of socialists such as Scott Nearing, known as the "father of environmentalism," changed the name of the game to "Monopoly." They drew up their own game boards, using street and utility names from their cities and towns. By the eary 1930s a group of Quakers in Atlantic City were playing the game on homemade boards containing the same names as on the commercial Monopoly board: Boardwalk, Park Place, Mediterranean Avenue, Baltic Avenue, etc. One evening in 1932 an unemployed salesman, Clarence B. Darow, joined the Atlantic City Quakers for a Monopoly game session. Recognizing the commerical potential of the game, and unsympathetic to the Quakers' view that it was not meant to be used for profit-making, Darrow copied the board and presented it to the president of Parker Brothers, Robert Barton, as his (Darrow's) own invention. Barton was not long duped. But instead of producing and marketing Monopoly in the only legal way permissible, as a game in the public domain like chess and checkers, he fraudulently obtained a private patent and told Darrow to keep his mouth shut. Monopoly soon became the most widely purchased and played board game of all time other than chess and checkers, earned more than a billion dollars for Parker Brothers, and made Darrow a millionaire. Business as usual. Ain't Science Grand :: The VRS 3000 is state-of-the-art software which takes in factual information from the non-virgin, performs complex, rigorous calculations, and through a process called virgination, finds the algorithm needed to restore your virginity. Hard to believe? It's true! The Society for the Recapture of Virginity What'll they think of next? Prepuce restoration? Yep. Foreskin replacement. Uncircumscision Not recent science, though. Dating from antiquity: "The prepuce is to be raised from the underlying penis around the circumference of the glans by means of a scapel. This is not very painful, or once margin has been freed it can be stripped up by hand as far back as the pubes, nor in so doing is there any bleeding. The prepuce thus freed is again stretched forward beyond the glans; next cold water applications are freely used, and a plaster is applied around to repress severe inflammation. And for the following days the patient is to fast until nearly overcome by hunder lest satiety excite that part. When the inflammation has ceased the penis should be bandaged from the pubes to the corona; over the glans the plaster is applied with the other end of the probe. This is done in order that the proximal part may aglutinate whilst the distal part heals without adhering." De Medicina by Celsus Ouch. Sunday, January 11, 2004
Life is Tough, Joe Joe Honig's dad gave him a big plasma TV for Christmas. It complicated Joe's life--for the worse. Can he give it back? Jerry Mander has an answer :: It was only after a long while and many half-steps of change in viewpoint that I finally faced the fact that television is not reformable, that it must be gotten rid of totally if our society is to return to something like sane and democratic functioning. Four Arguments for the elimination of television follow. Neil Postman [ Amusing Ourselves to Death] also provides some insights :: It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago. I say hock the big TV, buy a lot of these books and distribute them widely. (Honig, of course being a TV writer is not likely to take this advice.) Saturday, January 10, 2004
Mad Cow & Heavy Metals USDA inspection for disease in slaughtered cattle is about as effective as using a magnet to detect heavy metals in the mulch at the county dump. (No, seriously, when warned about the use of mulch made from diseased or cast off wood, trees, trimmings and so on, a county employee assured me it was safe because they used a magnet at the dump to remove heavy metals. All righty.) Sunday, January 04, 2004
Women & Traffic Wrecks, amongst the Saudis :: From print edition, New Yorker, 1-5-04 :: The Kingdom of Silence, by Lawrence Wright. "The self-effacement of an entire sex, and, in consequence, of sexuality itself, was the most unnerving feature of Saudi life. I could go through an entire day without seeing any women, except perhaps some beggars sitting on the curb outside a prince's house. Almost all public space, from the outdoor terrace at the Italian restaurant to the sidewalk tables at Starbucks, belonged to men. The restaurants had separate entrances for 'families' and 'bachelors,' and I could hear women scurrying past, hidden by screens, as they went upstairs or to a rear room. The only places I was sure to see women were at the mall and the grocery store, and even there they seemed spookily out of place. Many of them wore black gloves, and their faces were covered entirely -- not even a pair of plummy, heavy-lidded Arabian eyes apparent. Sometimes I couldn't tell what direction they were facing. It felt to me as if the women had died, and only their shades remained." ...................... A Saudi journalist: "We have the highest number of [traffic] accidents in the world, and we don't even have alcohol." Now if traffic were as heavily policed as women's clothing and behavior....... More Offline:: "Einstein said the arrow flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said that the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves ripples of consequences echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance the images and events, but some of us feel it always." Greg Iles, The Quiet Game Thursday, January 01, 2004
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