Matt
The Watchmen and the Apocalypse
I just finished rereading the Watchmen Graphic Novel last night. The book deserves, in my opinion, every bit of the critical acclaim which has been lavished upon it. But to fully appreciate it, as with all works of literature and art, one must offer first an appraisal in historical-critical terms.
Watchmen was originally [...]
Freedom of Speech 2.0: Amazon Customer Reviews
The customer reviews of a new Playmobil® toy reveal the political and ideological contradictions of the modern era.
The toy itself, a “security check point,” seems like a strange vehicle for imaginative childhood play, not least because one goal of our newfangled “Culture of Security” seems to be the elimination of imagination. I find this [...]
World’s Biggest Polluter and Plagiarizer
An under-reported news story from Summer 2008 has just come to my attention. Bush makes a joke about the USA as a polluting country at the G8 Summit? Never heard about it. Bush press materials which were insulting to Italy are excused as accidental because — it is admitted — they are [...]
The Visions of Tom Friedman
My Fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of ‘Dumb as we wanna be.’– Thomas L. Friedman
I highly recommend Thomas Friedman’s latest editorial for the New York Times. Thanks go to my friend Kollin Min for pointing it out to me. In this piece, Friedman argues eloquently, citing America’s comparatively run-down airports and [...]
Good News about Google Books
In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, James Gleick reports some great news about Google Book Search. Great, that is, for scholars.
If you are a scholar, you should already love Google Books for the huge number of public-domain books it has archived in full text. Printed texts were formerly resistant to the modern-world’s rapid research [...]
The Real Mavericks: McCain and Palin in Defeat
Palin Tells the Truth, for Once
This comes from an AP article published Denver Post (thanks Eric Smith for the reference):
In an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Palin faulted the policies of the Bush administration for the defeat of the GOP ticket, and said, “it’s amazing that we did as well as we did.”
“I think [...]
OBAMA
I predicted the Democrats would certainly win in 2008 back in early spring, and bet a number of people $10 (I did not keep a list) that he would win.
A few weeks later, way back in April, I also blogged about my reasons for thinking so.
To read the signs of the times [...]
Are "Tax Brackets" Socialist?
The answer is: NO!
Idiocy reigns in the latest political season, as McCain calls Obama a “socialist. If he is, then Kennedy was, and Clinton was, and even most republicans except for Steve Forbes are all socialists.
The only argument the McCainists can offer for this hare-brained assertion is that Obama supports the traditional notion of [...]
what they aren’t discussing in this campaign
Why we can’t have a balanced federal budget in America
Why the worst legacy of the Bush administration is the so called “culture of security” that has replaced the American culture of freedom
VIRAL VIDEO HERE: Naomi Wolf’s End of America