There are not enough words to describe my mad love for this Chicago band. And, her voice! A pure instrument. Wait for it, wait for the last ten seconds or so….
onparkstreet
“In the land of Mahatma Gandhi, Indian gun owners are coming out of the shadows for the first time to mobilize, U.S.-style, against proposed new curbs on bearing arms.”
“When gunmen attacked 10 sites in Mumbai in November 2008, including two five-star hotels and a train station, Mumbai resident Kumar Verma sat at home glued to the television, feeling outraged and unsafe.” – Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post
I have no idea if the above is an oddity reported as a trend, or, in fact, is a trend. Interesting story either way. (Link thanks to commenter “elf”)
What kind of delusion is this?
Watched Charlie Rose last night. He and some of his guests were discussing President Obama’s political fortunes – post a Scott Brown victory – and what the President might do in order to reverse the downward trend. To give you a flavor of the conversation, I present the following excerpts from the transcript:
“CHARLIE ROSE: Joining me now, Jon Meacham, editor of “Newsweek”
magazine, in Washington, Tom DeFrank of the “New York Daily News,” and Anne
Kornblut of “The Washington Post.” I’m pleased to have all of them here as
we take a look at this week, which is important for the president, and a
state of the union which is very important to him.”….
JON MEACHAM: “Well, he has clearly found that history is a more
complicated matter than the speechifying and the glamour, really, of the
campaign…..
In politics, you don’t get credit for what didn’t happen. So I think
we should say that he did in concert with the outgoing administration and
with his own folks, he did keep us out of a more severe downturn in 2009.”….
To my mind, the real problem has been that he has a kind of
intellectual snobbishness about being simple and clear about what he wants
the country to be. What does he want it to look like when he leaves? And
it sounds odd to say that sound bites are important, but they are. Jesus
spoke in them, and his stuff has aged rather well.”….
THOMAS DEFRANK: “Why is he where he is today? I think it’s because they made a real
miscalculation on health care. They thought they could sell it. They
didn’t sell it. They lost control of the message. The critics have
controlled the message on health care for the last four or five months, and
it’s a negative message.”….
ANNE KORNBLUT: “I guess it’s confusing to me why it’s so difficult for
them to show what his emotions are. All of us who have been around him or
covered the campaign know he isn’t a robot. He actually does have emotions
and a family he cares about, and he’s extremely good at talking about the
feelings he felt growing up in extraordinary circumstances.” ….
Seriously, the entire transcript and conversation are like that: He’s misunderstood, he’s misrepresented, he’s under appreciated for all that he has done! What?
Afghanistan (Arghandab, etc) links….
– “The Taliban launched their initial attack into Arghandab in October 2007, after the natural death of Mullah Naqib. This assault marked the beginning of an intense campaign to erode the will of the population in Arghandab to resist Taliban control.
The Taliban gained control of Arghandab by using targeted violence to intimidate local leaders, supplemented with an intimidation campaign and the implementation of a judicial system to increase the Taliban’s legitimacy.”
– “The Dahla Dam and irrigation system, located in the heart of the province of Kandahar, is Afghanistan’s second largest dam. Eighty percent of Kandahar’s population lives along the irrigation system. Since it was built in the 1950s, years of disrepair have left the dam and irrigation system functioning at reduced capacity.”
– “The Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team visited the Kunar Prison construction site Jan. 14 to conduct a quality assurance check and address security issues.
PRT leaders and engineers met with Afghan National Police representatives and the construction site engineer and foreman to discuss the progress on the prison.”
– “As U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is visiting Pakistan for the first time in three years to encourage greater cooperation between Washington and Islamabad and ask what the country’s plans are for a possible military offensive against extremists in the tribal region of North Waziristan, a Pakistani Army spokesman said any action there would not happen in the next 12 months, citing the Pakistani government’s desire to consolidate current gains.”
“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp.”
The above is from Herta Muller’s novel, The Appointment
The words are brisk, painful almost, when spoken aloud. Speak them: I’ve been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp. A young woman working in a factory in communist Romania has been sewing notes into the trouser linings of men’s suits – suits that are to be sent to Italy. She is looking for a “Marcello”:
After the business with the first notes, I put Italy out of my mind completely. It took more than linen suits for export to land a Marcello, you needed connections, couriers, and intermediaries, not trouser pockets. Instead of an Italian I landed the Major.
Major Albu has summoned the young woman, at ten sharp, to be interrogated about her conduct. She has been ratted out by another factory worker – a man she has rejected romantically. For this “crime” (wanting to escape the dictatorship by marrying a mythical Italian “Marcello”), her life is completely shattered. Or rather, the shattering is accelerated because the world was never whole to begin with. Freedom is approximated only, and in short bursts, while riding on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle: Once or twice a week we’d go for a ride out of town, to the river. The lane through the beanfields – now that was happiness, good fortune, luck. The bigger the sky grew overhead, the more light-headed I felt.
The novel takes place on a tram ride to the interrogation. As she rides, the main character thinks about her past, her present, her future, all in a fragmented and non-linear dream-state. The writing is intense, vivid, impressionistic. It approaches prose poetry in some sections, and yet, the poetic elements seem utterly corrupted: how dare we extract beauty from such evil!
Fellow Chicago Boyz contributor TM Lutas has said that Herta Muller’s novels will be difficult to read. And this novel is hard to read – it meanders, it pokes, it cuts, it stings. The very pages bleed.
*How is it that such an ideology took hold of the imagination of some Western intellectuals? I can never understand it. And, speaking of capturing the imagination, is anyone familiar with the following project? I stumbled across it during one of my internet rambles:
With these failures in mind, Hamilton attempts to explain the wide acceptance of Marxist claims throughout the 20th century. The answer, he says, lies not in the theory itself, but in the way it is disseminated as people vouch for it, political parties adopt it, and academics and journalists embrace it. Hamilton draws on social psychology, conformity studies, and theories of cognitive dissonance to explain this persistence. – The Marxist Rhetoric: On the Relationship of Practice and Theory, Richard Hamilton (Mershon Center for International Security Studies)