An element of dark humor I guess. Feisal Abdul Rauf is an American citizen and a Sufi Imam. He has been the primary advocate for the Cordoba Initiative's building of an Islamic cultural center a few blocks from "ground zero" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park51 .
The Sufi's are considered by Al Queda as enemy #1.
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/08/22/gps.fareeds.take.sufism.cnn
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/jihadists-v-sufis
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Hey, is there any news about the game in that kipus?
Story in NYT about the Tawantinsuyu's (Inka Empire) unique 3 dimensional document objects, known as Khipus.
Way cool...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/americas/17peru.html?ref=science
OK, I cannot resist, these must WEAVE interesting tales.
Way cool...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/americas/17peru.html?ref=science
OK, I cannot resist, these must WEAVE interesting tales.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Glad Tidings
Shout! Factory an entertainment company, has just released Max Headroom (the ABC series) on DVD.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Speaking of Brave New World
Ridley Scott. His two current projects will apparently be in his recent stream of movies-really-about-now but set elsewhen.
Brave New World, by Huxley.
The Forever War, by Haldeman.
Perhaps both in 2011!
Brave New World, by Huxley.
The Forever War, by Haldeman.
Perhaps both in 2011!
Just sticking this here so i can read it.
NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, .... on the inhabitants of West-India...With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them.
By Bartholomew de las Casas, "a Bishop there and Eye-Witness of most of these Barbarous Cruelties"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20321/20321-8.txt
By Bartholomew de las Casas, "a Bishop there and Eye-Witness of most of these Barbarous Cruelties"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20321/20321-8.txt
Speaking of Culture...
Want share one of my favorite passages:
SPEECH OF THE CORINTHIANS, Congress of the Peloponnesian Confederacy at Sparta 432 BC. As recounted by Thucydides.
A Description of Athenian character.
“Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release.
Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind. They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.”
SPEECH OF THE CORINTHIANS, Congress of the Peloponnesian Confederacy at Sparta 432 BC. As recounted by Thucydides.
A Description of Athenian character.
“Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release.
Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind. They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.”
Brave New World or 1984?
I had always thought my own culture tended more towards Brave New World, than 1984. I was reading on Wikipedia (searching for the Shakespeare source of the title), about one of my favorite dystopian novels Brave New World, where i found this:
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. ( A really good book BTW -this blogger)
He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History":
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught."
Reference:
Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History, Christopher Hitchens (1998)http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/readings/hitchens_goodbye.pdf
"Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. ( A really good book BTW -this blogger)
He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History":
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught."
Reference:
Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History, Christopher Hitchens (1998)http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/readings/hitchens_goodbye.pdf
Monday, August 9, 2010
Argumentum ad ignorantiam
"An argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance, is an informal logical fallacy that asserts a proposition to be either true or false merely because it has not been proven or disproven."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
A good background video for observing the U.S.A. "culture wars".
Elliott Sober: Darwin & Intelligent Design
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://fora.tv/2010/04/22/Elliott_Sober_Darwin_and_Intelligent_Design#fullprogram
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://fora.tv/2010/04/22/Elliott_Sober_Darwin_and_Intelligent_Design#fullprogram
Saturday, August 7, 2010
OK...A few more
Some of my favorite Newman songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm3upGgRsRQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nGw_vAnqPI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jiLL2d-alc
And i guess, other things in these parts, don't change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGO42gvCSPI
And a treat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXsWH5nqPAE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm3upGgRsRQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nGw_vAnqPI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jiLL2d-alc
And i guess, other things in these parts, don't change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGO42gvCSPI
And a treat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXsWH5nqPAE&feature=related
Louisiana 1927
The other night i watched the documentary about Huey Long done by Ken Burns.
During the end credits, you hear Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, one of my favorite songs of his. Wanted to to here it again this a.m., and found this. From the BBC Four Sessions (2008).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9HgMo-Pdg
Enjoy.
During the end credits, you hear Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, one of my favorite songs of his. Wanted to to here it again this a.m., and found this. From the BBC Four Sessions (2008).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9HgMo-Pdg
Enjoy.
Friday, August 6, 2010
The Muffs
Thank you for pointing them out Joel.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22the+muffs%22&aq=f
Top This, "Onion"
From an AP story 08/05/2010
"Intoxicated and pregnant, a La Crosse woman is accused of trying to hold up a Taco John's with a hammer. Police say the 38-year-old woman told the cashier Tuesday night -- "I want a soft shell and this is a stickup..."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-intoxicatedtacost,0,2981626.story
"Intoxicated and pregnant, a La Crosse woman is accused of trying to hold up a Taco John's with a hammer. Police say the 38-year-old woman told the cashier Tuesday night -- "I want a soft shell and this is a stickup..."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-intoxicatedtacost,0,2981626.story
Thursday, August 5, 2010
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