Archive for July, 2006
All for one …
I had always believed that d’Artagnan and his friends were fighting against Richelieu and his men for a reason, even if I couldn’t remember what it was.
Me too!
{Dumas, france, literature, Three Musketeers, translation}
London
Shashwati and I are planning a research trip to London this summer (for the film), and more than culture shock, we are preparing for price shock. When I go from Taiwan to NY I always feel that I’m being robbed at every meal, since you can eat for a week in Taiwan for what a […]
Freedom Flag
Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese illustrator who has been blogging about the war.
This piece has a cut-out cupon which states:
Yes, I live in a region with a lot of beards and I would like you to free me from them. Please invade my country in order to deliver to my address my Freedom Flag.
BoingBoing […]
The User Elite
Wikipedia and Digg are both sites which supposedly aggregate the collective wisdom of the internet. However, in reading about recent controversies involving these sites, it became clear to me that most of the content on both sites is produced by a small cadre of elite users and not by the vast majority of people who […]
Oligarchy
Having just complained about the Times habit of writing as if the poor didn’t exist, suddenly I find two articles that would make you think the Times was run by commie pinkos! In fact, the first story, about the “The Rise of the Super-Rich” sounds surprisingly like this one from the Marxist journal, The Monthly […]
War Crimes
In a recent post I briefly alluded to the nasty bile spewing forth from the pen of Alan Dershowitz. Bile that is even more disturbing when you comprehend the actual policies resulting from such logic. Since then a number of the blogs I read have responded to Dershowitz, (see Crooked Timber, Easily Distracted, and Informed […]
Stupid Shoppers
This is a general shout-out to all the stupid people out there: Thank you! Thank you for buying your memory from Apple (or purchasing a black MacBook), thank you for drinking from the mini-bar at hotels, thank you for bidding more on eBay than Amazon charges, thank you for buying your airline tickets from a […]
Proxy War
It should be obvious to all, but Ted Koppel’s excellent op-ed piece lays it out clearly:
The United States is already at war with Iran; but for the time being the battle is being fought through surrogates.
The funny thing is, it even though Iran was listed in the “Axis of Evil” from the beginning, it […]
Moral Certainty
A nice one from Kevin Drum:
It is, often, not so much war itself that people long for, but the moral certainty that comes with it; thus the venom directed even toward those who are skeptical of war, let alone those who are resolutely opposed to it.
{war, war on terror}
Kaemi
Shashwati asks why I chose to work in one of the most earthquake and typhoon prone regions on the planet. One good reason is that they are much better prepared for these things here than anywhere else. As the following map shows, the East coast of Taiwan is a regular battering ground for just about […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
