Archive for November, 2005
Topknot
Guest post by tf
One consequence of France’s law against the headscarf has been that Sikh boys cannot attend public school if they wear topknots or turbans. French newspaper Libération reported yesterday that a private school will be set up by 2007 for some of these students. But AFP reported on the same day that the […]
Debut
Guest post by tf
At the risk of turning my first blog posting into a fraternal lovefest, I must take exception with one aspect of my brother’s characterization of me. I may be his older brother, but I can hardly claim to be his smarter brother. Indeed, I wish that I had a mastery of the […]
My Mycroft
Just as Sherlock Holmes had his smarter brother Mycroft, I have a smarter big brother as well: TF. Although not lazy and fat like Mycroft, he has so far been as reclusive. All that is about to change… Starting tomorrow, TF will be guest blogging here at Keywords.
TF lives in Paris, loves architecture, Edward Tufte, […]
Safer?
In his recent speech VP Dick Cheney said:
those who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq should answer a few simple questions: Would the United States and other free nations be better off, or worse off, with Zarqawi, bin Laden, and Zawahiri in control of Iraq? Would we be safer, or less safe, with Iraq ruled […]
National Intelligence Estimate
Last week, former Senator Bob Graham wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where he disclosed how the administration withheld and manipulated intelligence information from Congress in the run-up to the Iraq war:
{Bob Graham, Bush, CIA, Iraq, war}
Bruce Lee
The people of the Balkans may not be able to agree about much, but they can agree about one thing: they all love Bruce Lee!
I was going to blog about this back in September, when I heard about it on NPR (story here), but now they’ve actually unveiled the statue. The NPR story explains that […]
Declare
If the Bush administration has an ideology, it is that of executive power. John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, formerly a “mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” but one who wielded tremendous influence, and who was directly responsible for shaping the Bush administration’s policy on torture, argues in a new […]
Dear Sir/Madam
I got this SPAM/virus/phishing scam e-mail which said:
Dear Sir/Madam,
we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.
Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.
Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison
If only the FBI would use “Sir/Madam” … and then sign their messages “Yours faithfully”!
{spam}
Passbook
Writer Dilip D’Souza, a long time advocate of India’s Denotified Tribes, or DNTs, has a moving post promoting our film. He draws from his book, Branded By Law:
Passbook entries
There is an interesting sequence of entries in a bank passbook I once saw in Purulia District, West Bengal. Shyamoli Sabar, a young woman from the hamlet […]
Overdetermined
The term overdetermined, as used in social theory, was introduced by Althusser, who took it from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Wikipedia offers us a nice, concise, explanation of Althusser’s usage:
Althusser used the idea of overdetermination as a way of thinking about the multiple, often opposed, forces active at once in any political situation, without falling […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
