Posts tagged “articles”
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Jesus of Nazareth in the New Yorker
May 19, 2010
… Much of what he has to say [in Jesus of Nazareth] is shrewd and learned… Verhoeven, citing Crossan… imagines a man being nailed to a cross, cries of agony, two companion crosses in view, and then we crane out to see two hundred crosses and two hundred victims: we are at the beginning of the story, the mass execution of Jewish rebels in 4 B.C., not the end. This was the Roman death waiting for rebels from the outset, and Jesus knew it. — Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker
Tags: adam gopnik, articles, god, jesus of nazareth, new yorker, paul verhoeven, religion
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Huffington Post on Leonard Miller & race relations in NASCAR
May 18, 2010
Could the majority-white live audience for NASCAR really be the reason for corporate reticence in doling out the dough? If so, it is insulting on many levels. … If NASCAR sponsors really aren’t giving Miller’s group a fair shot at their dollars because of race, then they underestimate the talent he has assembled, as well as the evolving NASCAR audience which also includes statistically significant numbers of Asian, Latino and African-American fans, according to Sports Business Daily.
To be sure, racism still exists everywhere, and there are, no doubt, some in the audience who wouldn’t cheer for Miller’s team because of race. Still, to assume that NO ONE, or even just a small minority would accept a black team, is to perpetuate a stereotype created in movies and comedic routines of NASCAR fans as beer-swilling, stars and bars flying, racist yokels. Again, to look at the numbers, that just ain’t so. — Susan Deily-Swearingen on Racing While Black
Tags: andrew simon, articles, huffington post, leonard t miller, race, racing while black, sports, susan deily-swearingen
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David Swanson: What does $33 Billion look like?
May 12, 2010
According to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress has already approved $345 billion for war in Afghanistan, not to mention $708 billion in Iraq. According to the National Priorities Project, for that same money we could have renewable energy in 1,083,271,391 homes for a year (or every home in the country for more than 10 years), or pay 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for a year. There may be 2.6 million elementary and middle school teachers in our country now. Assuming we could use 3 million teachers, we could hire them all for five years and employ that extra $13 billion or so to give them bonuses. “Honor our brave teachers” anyone? — from TomDispatch.com
Tags: afghanistan, articles, david swanson, daybreak, obama, politics/government, tom engelhardt, tomdispatch
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The Oil Ride by Linh Dinh
May 6, 2010
1967—In “The Graduate,” Mr. McGuire advised Ben, “I just want to say one word to you—just one word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Plastics.”
“Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
“Yes, I will.”
Plastic is oil, hardened. By 2010, there would be plastic patches the size of Texas to choke both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Thanks to the chemical phthalate in plastic, male genitals are shrinking worldwide, and sperm counts are way down, though not low enough, unfortunately, to slow down this full-throttle-ahead “love” boat. World population is approaching seven billion, with about 30,000 people starving to death each day. — from Linh Dinh’s fantastic “The Oil Ride” at Counterpunch
Tags: articles, blood and soap, british petroleum, linh dinh, love like hate, oil
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Derrick Jensen: High On Progress
May 5, 2010
Progress. In vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean, there is forty-eight times as much plastic as phytoplankton.
Progress. One million migratory songbirds die every day because of skyscrapers, cell-phone towers, domesticated cats, and other trappings of modern civilized life.
Progress. A half million human children die every year as a direct result of so-called debt repayment from so-called third-world countries (the colonies) to so-called first-world countries (the nations that have undergone progress).
Progress is polar bears swimming hundreds of miles to ice floes that have melted away, till finally they can swim no more. Progress is nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, and “drones” piloted from an office in Florida to kill people in Pakistan. Progress is the ability of fewer and fewer people to control more and more people, and to destroy more and more of the world. Progress is a god. Progress is God. Progress is killing the world.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said that science’s claim to truth is based on its “spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command.” Anthropologist Leslie White stated that “the primary function of culture” is to “harness and control energy.” Quite simply, this culture is about enslaving everyone and everything its members can get their hands (or machines) on. What is another word for making someone jump through hoops? Enslavement. In this culture, progress is measured by the ability to enslave, to control, and to do so with ever-increasing efficiency. The ultimate goal is to control everyone and everything. — >Derrick Jensen, Orion Magazine
Tags: articles, deep green resistance, derrick jensen, environment, orion magazine, what we leave behind
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Ralph Nader’s fiction starts to become reality
May 4, 2010
There are signs that some super-rich are revolting against their “wealth fraternity.” Last fall, mega-billionaire, Warren Buffett, traveled to Washington to meet with Democratic Senators and urge them to raise taxes on the wealthy like him. He pointedly said he pays at a lower rate than his secretary.
The liberal Senators were either bemused, or moved away from him as if he had a contagious disease. Buffett is not deterred. Earlier in this decade, he joined with a thousand other rich Americans led by lawyer William Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins (founder of United For a Fair Economy) to successfully block the repeal of the estate tax (applied to 2% of wealthier decedents) by a Republican-controlled Congress. —Ralph Nader
Tags: articles, current events, fiction, only the super-rich can save us, ralph nader, warren buffett
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Paul Verhoeven interviewed in Playboy
April 30, 2010
On the surface, Verhoeven is an unlikely person to advance the pursuit of Jesusology (my term). The director of such thrillers as Basic Instinct, he has no formal training in the high academic arts. He is the only voting member of the 77-seat Jesus Seminar—a group of New Testament scholars who try to find consensus on authentic material in the gospels and letters—who does not have a scholarly background. But his insights are masterful. —Playboy on Paul Verhoeven and Jesus of Nazareth
Tags: articles, jesus of nazareth, paul verhoeven, playboy, religion
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Barry Gifford interview in the Chicagoist
April 27, 2010
CHICAGOIST: First of all, what was it like to see all of your novels in the same place, in the same book together?
GIFFORD: Well, somebody called it a milestone when they saw it. And I said, “It’s either that, or a headstone.” It’s the way I always wanted it, because really it’s all one long novel… That’s really the form I always envisioned it being in, so finally it’s done. I’m really happy. — from the Chicagoist interview with Barry Gifford
Tags: articles, barry gifford, chicagoist, fiction, interviews, sailor & lula
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Noam Chomsky warns about serious possibility of fascism in America
April 16, 2010
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said. … “The colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside. People want some answers. … They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said. And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there. “In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.” — The Progressive
Tags: articles, matt rothschild, noam chomsky, progressive, tea party
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Paul Verhoeven in the Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy”
April 14, 2010
The moderator of the discussion [at the IFC in New York City on April 8], Slate contributor Eric Hynes, noted that the filmmaker’s dour explanation of Jesus’s world “sounds just like a Paul Verhoeven movie.”
The response was immediate. “Yeah,” Verhoeven said, “but I didn’t invent it this time.”
— From the Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy” blogTags: articles, interviews, jesus of nazareth, paul verhoeven, politics, religion, speakeasy, wall street journal
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Leora Tanenbaum on Phoebe Prince and Hope Witsell
April 13, 2010
I am curious to know: why has [Phoebe] Prince’s death elicited a far stronger reaction than [Hope] Witsell’s? Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has even stepped in, berating school officials for not protecting Prince. Meanwhile, to date no one has so strongly pointed a finger at school administrators at Witsell’s school, nor have there been criminal charges brought in her case. This doesn’t make sense. Both girls were victimized similarly. Both deaths are tragic. Both girls deserve the same outcry of anger and horror. Why does Prince’s suicide resonate so much more than Witsell’s?
Because Prince, 15, more neatly fits the stereotype of a sympathetic “good” victim while Witsell does not. — Leora Tanenbaum
Tags: articles, education, hope witsell, huffington post, leora tanenbaum, phoebe prince, slut, women's issues
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Chris Hedges: How The Corporations Broke Ralph Nader And America, Too
April 6, 2010
Reblogged from TruthDig, here’s Chris Hedges on Ralph Nader, on citizen activism, and on the powerful pushback by corporations against the progressive movement in America from the late 1970s to today:
Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.
Tags: articles, chris hedges, only the super-rich can save us, ralph nader, truthdig
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Kickstarter activism: Send Ted Rall back to Afghanistan!
March 23, 2010
In 2001, Ted Rall, financed by the Village Voice, traveled to Afghanistan to cover the newborn United States invasion. Now, Rall intends to return to Afghanistan to tell the story of what has become of the region between 2001 and today, after eight and a half years of war. But this time, no newspaper or magazine is willing to cover the cost of his traveling directly into a war zone — so Rall has asked his readers, through Kickstarter, to make the project possible.
Tags: afghanistan, anti-american manifesto, articles, kickstarter, ted rall
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Nat Hentoff: “Liz Cheney, Meet Joe McCarthy”
March 16, 2010
Nat Hentoff, author of The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance, talks about the recent Liz Cheney/Bill Kristol ad on the “Al-Qaeda Seven”, called “Keep America Safe”:
In angry reaction to the Cheney-Kristol ad, Col. Davis said, “You don’t hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial.”
On March 5, 1770, civilians in a crowd harassing and threatening British troops were fired on, and five were killed. Among the defendants in a subsequent trial was the commander of the troops, Capt. Thomas Preston. At first, no lawyer in Boston would represent Preston or the other defendants on trial in Paul Revere’s widely circulated description of this “horrid massacre.” An exception was a young lawyer, John Adams, determined that this emerging new nation would be known for its justice under law.
Adams interviewed and presented eyewitnesses, and convinced the jury that Preston did not give the order to fire. He was acquitted. As a result, Adams later wrote, he himself had incurred “clamour and prejudices, anxiety and obloquy” that nonetheless prevented a “foul stain upon this country.”
Had Cheney and Kristol’s Keep America Safe been operating at the time, would they have gone after this young lawyer as a disgracefully unpatriotic Tory?
Tags: al-qaeda seven, articles, keep america save, milford daily news, nat hentoff, war on the bill or rights
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Sonia Shah: TED conference lecturer exploits African women & children
March 9, 2010
From Sonia Shah’s article at Ms. about Nathan Myhrvold and the idea of using lasers to eliminate malaria in Africa:
… At the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. “Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria,” he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria’s main victims, don’t work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead.
That’s why Myhrvold came up with his latest invention: A mini-”Star Wars” weapons system that tracks mosquitoes in the air and shoots them down mid-flight–with lasers, of course. Like a Death Ray. All you need to make one is a Blu-ray player and a laser printer, plus a few months of processing time on a supercomputer, and voila!: you’re on your way to eradicating malaria in Africa for good.
Oh. My.
Tags: africa, articles, crude, death ray, malaria, ms, sonia shah
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Derrick Jensen: “It’s time to lead, follow, or get out of the way”
March 3, 2010
Another 120 species went extinct today; they were my kin. I am not going to sit back and wait for every last piece of this living world to be dismembered. I’m going to fight like hell for those kin who remain—and I want everyone who cares to join me. Many are. But many are not. Some of those who are not are those who, for whatever reason, really don’t care. I worry about them. But I worry more about those who do care but have chosen not to fight. A fairly large subset of those who care but have chosen not to fight assert that lifestyle choice is the only possible response to the murder of the planet. They all carry the same essential message—and often use precisely the same words: Resistance isn’t possible. Resistance never works.
Meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today. They were my kin.
—Derrick Jensen, in Orion Magazine
Tags: articles, derrick jensen, environment, orion magazine, what we leave behind
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Tony Hefner on the Port Isabel Detention Center
March 2, 2010
From Enrique Lopetegui’s article at QueBlog about the recent protests demanding the closing of the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas:
“This is the pain,” [Southwest Worker's Union member Anayanse Garza] said, holding a petition, “these are the 243 signatures of the people at Port IsabeI that have been tortured, beaten and humiliated, and these orders were coming from [ICE's field office director] Michael J. Pitts, who is sitting very comfortably in his air-conditioned room, while other people are being tortured and threatened with force-feeding by having a tube inserted through their noses. I don’t care if the government says that immigrants have no human rights. Immigrants do have human rights. It’s not a crime to hunger strike, it is your right, and that’s why [Pitts] should be tried.”
… “The very same thing that happened [in my time] is happening today [at PIDC],” said [Tony] Hefner. “Stealing money from detainees, beating detainees up … If detainees from two different countries were fighting, they would handcuff them together and push them into each other and take bets on them.”
Tags: articles, between the fences, current events, prisons, queblog, tony hefner
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Kenneth Roth’s “Empty Promises?”: On Obama and Human Rights
February 25, 2010
… Two days after taking office, [Obama] insisted that all U.S. interrogators, including those from the CIA, abide by the stringent standards adopted by the U.S. military in the wake of the Abu Ghraib debacle. He also ordered the shuttering of all secret CIA detention facilities, where many suspects “disappeared” and were tortured between 2001 and 2008. Finally, he promised to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.
But it is not enough for the government to stop using torture; perpetrators must also be punished. The Obama administration has so far refused to investigate and prosecute those who ordered or committed torture — a necessary step to prevent future administrations from committing the crime. While in office, as he did during the campaign, Obama has repeatedly spoken of wanting to “look forward, not back.” And although Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a “preliminary review” of interrogators who exceeded orders, he has until now refrained from prosecuting those who ordered torture or wrote the legal memos justifying it. This lets senior officials — arguably those who are most culpable — off the hook. —Kenneth Roth
Tags: articles, human rights, human rights watch, kenneth roth, obama, torture, world report 2010
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Linh Dinh at Common Dreams: “Casino Time”
February 18, 2010
The word recession, meaning a temporary dip in economic activity, was coined in 1929 during the start of the Great Depression, so even then, we were kidding ourselves. Now, after months of babbling on about “green shoots,” the main stream media, always fluffy and clueless when not outright dishonest, are starting to use “Great Recession,” but that’s still sugarcoating it. Why not the Great Recess, as in a fun pause in labor when we can all run out and play, or, better yet, let’s give a nod to Saddam Hussein and label it, properly, as the Mother of all Depressions. —From Linh Dinh’s “Casino Time”
Tags: articles, blood and soap, commondreams.org, economy, linh dinh, love like hate
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Harvard Law Record on Nader’s super-rich: “These 17 and some of their friends may indeed be the most realistic hope we have”
February 12, 2010
From the Harvard Law Record article by former “Nader’s Raider” Robert Fellmath, regarding Ralph Nader’s “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”:
The fun of reading this book is in joining the author’s fantasy, but punctuating it with our own tactics—what we would do to correct the world’s deviant path had we the resources and visibility of these 17. The characters in this book seek structural and leveraged change—advocacy for public budgets and laws and international agreements—that properly embody more than the exploitation of narrow self-interest. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has radically shifted ground and allowed (contrary to the judgment of the people’s democratic institutions) many billions of corporate and union money to directly influence elections, those interests with capital investment in current profitable enterprise—whether it be mining the seas, polluting the earth, or collecting medical benefits for power wheelchairs and Cialis on the backs of their grandchildren—will increasingly lock-in their self-protection and their imposed external burden on others. Their free ride, notwithstanding future costs, will be further and irretrievably calcified into public law.
Tags: articles, fiction, harvard law record, only the super-rich can save us, ralph nader, reviews, robert fellmath
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Publishers Weekly on Racing While Black
February 11, 2010
Simon described the book [Racing While Black] as critical of NASCAR and said it examines the problems Miller faced building a stock car racing team with his father; his struggles securing corporate sponsorships despite his team’s successes and the inevitable problems dealing with bigoted fellow-drivers and fans in a traditionally all white sport.
… Simon said that the book even has “a surprise ending,” and said the book will provide a much-needed look at one of the few major American sports that seems closed to African Americans. “The Millers did a great deal for blacks in racing sports,” said Simon, “during years in which NASCAR itself wouldn’t let black drivers in and even sympathetic black executives at General Motors and other car companies who wanted to support the Miller team would have to do so clandestinely. After a few years the persistence of the Millers posed enough of a threat that you started to see black drivers integrating other teams.”
— Publishers WeeklyTags: andrew simon, articles, Dan Simon, leonard t miller, leonard w miller, publishers weekly, race, racing while black, sports
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Ralph Nader: Remember Zinn by organizing
February 9, 2010
From Ralph Nader’s beautiful call-to-action tribute to Howard Zinn, posted Friday at nader.org:
… Judging by similar gatherings for remembering other progressive activists and writers, the encomiums for Professor Zinn, who taught at Spelman College in the late fifties and early sixties (two of his students were Marian Wright Edelman and Alice Walker) and at Boston University until 1988, will be heartfelt, wide-ranging and inspiringly anecdotal.
Receptions will follow and those in attendance will return to their homes, hoping that what Howard Zinn spoke and wrote and how he acted will serve as an example for those who follow his public philosophy of being and doing.
Mr. Zinn’s legacy, however, needs more than sweet memories that carry forward the spirit of people. His impact needs more than the adult and youth book version (now in a television miniseries via the History Channel) to continue inspiring what the Times described as “a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history.”
Tags: articles, howard zinn, nader.org, ralph nader, young people's history
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Linh Dinh poems at Bookslut
February 5, 2010
Bookslut has just reprinted three poems from Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, the most recent poetry collection from Linh Dinh, author of Blood and Soap, Fake House, and the forthcoming Love Like Hate. Check them out here.
I Owe You These Lines
Welcome, friend, I give you
My very best friend, to eat.
I did not kill my best friend, friend,
Although I did rejoice at his death,
As I would rejoice at your death,
As you would, no doubt, fall over
Laughing at news of my demise.
With the sharpest or dullest knife,
Whatever’s handy, I’ll point the tip
Of my blade at your jugular vein,
Observe your jiggling jaw, ask
About your questionable taste
In wine, painting and poetry.
Fall is my favorite season, I somberly reflect,
As your blood pools in the sharp morning air,
As I incise a clean cross on your funny belly,
As I gut you, glancing over my thin shoulders. —Linh DinhTags: articles, blood and soap, bookslut, fake house, linh dinh, love like hate, poetry, some kind of cheese orgy
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Michael Deibert: “The Haiti I love is still there”
January 26, 2010
One night, only days after an earthquake had leveled huge swaths of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed an estimated 200,000 people there and in its environs, I found myself cruising thorough the city on the back of a moto-taxi.
A crowded, dirty but also irrepressibly vibrant city during normal times, Port-au-Prince that night presented a landscape that could fairly be described as nightmarish. Visible through the darkness, the ruined shells of buildings destroyed in the 7.0 quake looked over the fragile forms of hundreds of thousands of people reduced to sleeping in the streets, while in the air mingled the corrosive smell of burning garbage and the vomitous, cloyingly sweet stench of human decay. A city I have sporadically called home since I first visited Haiti in 1997, and whose personality had become deeply ingrained in my soul, Port-au-Prince had never seemed more desperate or defeated.
Then something happened. Despite the terrible suffering that had been visited on this poor nation of 9 million people, it began to dawn on me that, along the streets that I knew so well, life was going on after this terrible trauma.
Tags: articles, haiti, michael deibert, notes from the last testament
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Art Shay on photographing Simone de Beauvoir
January 26, 2010
From the article “Good Nudes From My Naughty World” by Art Shay, at Swans Commentary:
“It’s quite a rear,” The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik gushed. “The picture was taken in 1950 by, of all people, an American — the photographer Art Shay — in, of all places, Chicago, where Beauvoir was canoodling bilingually with Nelson Algren.”
To be singled out by The New Yorker as one “of all people, an American” who shot the picture in “of all places, Chicago” makes me feel like Ingrid Bergman stumbling upon Humphrey Bogart who as Rick says, “of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, she walks into mine” while Dooley Wilson tinkles out “As Time Goes By” on the pleasantly off-key piano.
Tags: art shay, articles, nelson algren, photography, simone de beauvoir
“articles” Posts
- May 19, Jesus of Nazareth in the New Yorker
- May 18, Huffington Post on Leonard Miller & race relations in NASCAR
- May 12, David Swanson: What does $33 Billion look like?
- May 6, The Oil Ride by Linh Dinh
- May 5, Derrick Jensen: High On Progress
- May 4, Ralph Nader’s fiction starts to become reality
- Apr 30, Paul Verhoeven interviewed in Playboy
- Apr 16, Noam Chomsky warns about serious possibility of fascism in America
- Apr 14, Paul Verhoeven in the Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy”
- Apr 13, Leora Tanenbaum on Phoebe Prince and Hope Witsell
- Apr 6, Chris Hedges: How The Corporations Broke Ralph Nader And America, Too
- Mar 23, Kickstarter activism: Send Ted Rall back to Afghanistan!
- Mar 16, Nat Hentoff: “Liz Cheney, Meet Joe McCarthy”
- Mar 9, Sonia Shah: TED conference lecturer exploits African women & children
- Mar 3, Derrick Jensen: “It’s time to lead, follow, or get out of the way”
- Mar 2, Tony Hefner on the Port Isabel Detention Center
- Feb 25, Kenneth Roth’s “Empty Promises?”: On Obama and Human Rights
- Feb 18, Linh Dinh at Common Dreams: “Casino Time”
- Feb 12, Harvard Law Record on Nader’s super-rich: “These 17 and some of their friends may indeed be the most realistic hope we have”
- Feb 11, Publishers Weekly on Racing While Black
- Feb 9, Ralph Nader: Remember Zinn by organizing
- Feb 5, Linh Dinh poems at Bookslut
- Jan 26, Michael Deibert: “The Haiti I love is still there”
- Jan 26, Art Shay on photographing Simone de Beauvoir
