Archive for September, 2003
Impeachment
Well, they probably won’t impeach Bush, but it seems he pretty much just admitted that he lied to congress.
Newspeak
David Neiwert’s excellent essay, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis is now up at Cursor.org, with photos! (NB See my own post on Fascism.) One of the points he makes is about the extent to which Orwellian Newspeak has come to be the norm for contemporary political debate, especially under the Bush administration:
Newspeak permeates the […]
Happiness
Jonathon Delacour, writing about Japanese aesthetics, says the following:
One of the reasons for my strong interest in Japanese literature and aesthetics is this acceptance of sadness as an essential ingredient of life. And (perhaps mistakenly) I’ve always regarded Jefferson’s assertion that the pursuit of Happiness is an unalienable Right as a kind of denial of […]
Krugman
It seems that Krugman misses the Reagan years:
Actually, I miss Reagan. I never thought I’d say that, but….
Reagan lied a little bit, and his policies were often crazy, but they wouldn’t do 2 -1 = 4. They’d say, if we have our tax cut we’ll have this wonderful supply side thing and the economy […]
English
I was at a wedding this weekend and was telling some relatives how I live in Jackson Heights, Queens where I have language difficulties because I don’t speak Spanish. Most of my neighbors are from Columbia or Ecuador. Russian, Chinese, Bengali, Korean and a host of other languages can be heard in my neighborhood - […]
Crime
Some interesting facts about crime rates and prisons:
…crime rates in America, after rising sharply through the 1960s into the early 1970s, began leveling off in 1972 and stayed level for the two decades following—nobody quite knows why. It was not until crime rates had already leveled off that incarceration rates began their steady, year-by-year climb. […]
Justice
As the entire nation mourns, I thought about all those others who die every day in the US, many for reasons that could be avoided. Looking around, I found this from an article in the Skeptical Inquirer:
Every month, including September 2001, the U.S. highway death toll exceeds fatalities in the WTC, Pentagon, and four downed […]
Priorities
Calpundit calculates that the total budget for Iraq reconstruction will be $221 billion. Here is what he says:
Let’s take the hawks at their word that Iraq is a front on the war against terror, and that stabilizing Iraq is a key part of winning the war. You might not believe it, but that’s their […]
Objectivity
David Greenberg has an excellent article discussing why reporters enjoy exposing “small” lies about personal matters more than big lies about issues of national policy:
Every day, journalists struggle to reconcile two clashing professional mandates. On the one hand, their stature rests on a reputation for fairness and objectivity; if they appear to be taking ideological […]
Spending
Two items from the blogsphere that seem to sum up the Bush administration’s attitude towards the budget:
First, via Tom Tomorrow, Billmon’s concise version of Bush’s speech:
“Iraq is now the central front in the global war against absolute evil, but it’s not so important that we have to roll back any of my tax cuts, send […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
