Archive for January, 2004
Activities
I was shocked that Bush still had the nerve to refer to weapons of mass destruction in his state of the union address last night. Calpundit notes that he did not, and offers this history of White House phraseology:
March 2003: Weapons of mass destruction.
June 2003: Weapons of mass destruction programs.
October 2003: Weapons of mass destruction-related […]
Rigged
Read this article!!! It explains very clearly what is at stake if Bush wins the 2004 elections.
…if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes […]
Bandanna
Now the french are proposing to ban Bandannas, in addition to “Islamic headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes and large Christian crosses.” I posted over the holidays that “whereas Americans are likely to see the ban on the Hijab as an interference in someone’s right to practice their own religion, the French are likely to see it as […]
Questions
I think Clark is a very smart man, and maybe others are right to say that he is the only one who can beat Bush, but I have some questions:
(1) Why didn’t he disclose that he was earning “over $800,000 lobbying former pals and peers for airline and homeland security contracts” when he was a […]
Guotie
As an anthropologist, I’m embarrassed to admit that I still get very confused by Chinese kinship terms. So I felt better reading about the the travails of Ernie, a second generation Chinese American, who accidentally called his “grandmother’s brothers daughter” a “pan-fried meat dumpling” when visiting over Christmas. (His blog, Little. Yellow. Different., is well […]
Voters
Calpundit had not one, but two posts attacking the idea that Democrats should be trying to enlarge their voting base by getting “new voters” instead of appealing to “swing voters” as they normally do. I couldn’t disagree with Calpundit more.
John Emerson (aka Zizka!), in replying to the original Nick Confessore piece, writes:
One reason talking about […]
Teeth
I often find it painfully tedious to read NY Times stories which try to individualize social problems, but this one, about one woman’s struggle against poverty, is very well written.
The people who received promotions tended to have something that Caroline did not. They had teeth. Caroline’s teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when […]
Crore
The word “crore” is Indian English for 10,000,000. (One crore = 100 lakhs.) I first encountered this word in articles about the Bollywood film industry. Bollywood writing has its own particular style that, like stuff on the E! Entertainment channel (e.g. “Bennifer“), is hard to understand if you don’t follow industry gossip regularly. Usually, […]
Compassion
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
“If America really saw the whole person of King, it would be very difficult for America to embrace him the way America does,” according to the Rev. James H. Cone of […]
Bloglines
It is hard to explain to people who aren’t computer savvy just what an RSS feed is, and why it is good for them to know. So, instead, I’ve set up a public account over at Bloglines (to log in, use the e-mail address: “bloglines@spamhole.com”, and the password: “keywords”), an online RSS feed reader. Please, […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
