“General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man; as a result, intelligent, objective and humane thinking has hardly any effect and is even suspected and persecuted as unpatriotic.”
–Albert Einstein, The Menace of Mass Destruction
Oil Wars and Juan Gonzalez have both got the goods on Joe Barton, the Texas Repug oil profiteer-cum-congresscritter squatting in the House of Representatives, who’s coming down hard on CITGO for reasons that can only be described as blatantly political. Wikipedia, likewise, has some interesting poopy on him (pay special attention to his bat-squeeze views on global warming, which it’s clear he doesn’t understand–but hey, there must be “debate”, lest people be distracted by the terrible, irrefutable facts that cause them to spend less money on the oil peddled by Joe’s Texas pals. Just like there needs to be “debate” on the mere “theory” of evolution.)
US President George W Bush was waving to police when he fell off his bike at the G8 summit in Scotland last July, newly published police papers reveal.
Mr Bush was shouting “Thanks, you guys, for coming” when he lost control and collided with an officer, the documents obtained by Scotland on Sunday show.
The smash left Mr Bush with scrapes on his hands and arms, and the policeman needing crutches for an ankle injury.
At the time, Mr Bush laughed off the crash as a sign “I should act my age”.
“My first book, called Heartbreak Hotel, was an autobiographical book about coming of age at a Southern college campus in 1957 on the fringes of the Civil Rights movement. There was to be a climax where I felt it would be necessary for this young woman to confront a black person in a totally new environment, to make her really see the blacks around her as people instead of what they had been to her all her life, loved servants but diminished people. I couldn’t think of a way to do that without being out of character with the Civil Rights movement because at that very early time we were not marching in the streets or firebombing. It was a very delicate ‘one heart at a time’ awakening. One night in a dream an old memory returned: I had been over to visit friends in Mississippi and while we were at the local jail, visiting the deputy sheriff, there was a jailbreak. Someone shoved me into a little room and said, ‘Don’t come out of this office.’ But through the glass pane I saw the escaped prisoner run by the door. He looked in at me and I looked at him. It seemed as if we held that look forever.
“I had more or less buried that memory. And then one night I dreamed that that’s how it would happen for my protagonist: she would see a man in the middle of a jailbreak and, by his eyes, know him totally. Know his fear and his terror and know that they were her own. The whole thing became alive and real to her then.
“I’d had that experience and I could’ve thought of it but I wasn’t using it. It took the dream to call it out. If we let them, dreams will give great order to our lives.”
–Anne Rivers Siddons, interviewed by Naomi Epel in Writers Dreaming
Ever wonder what they’re really like underneath it all? Worth1000.com did, and some photoshoppers answered:
Who knew Kim Jong (Mentally) Il was so, er, American?
Somehow, I always suspected Toady Blair was into this.
King Abdullah of Jordan is a perfect gentleman. He pretends not to notice that Auntie Condi forgot her skirt!
Pro-business types tend to vote for the conservative parties; conservative parties tend to align themselves with the pro-business types. But sometimes, actions have unintended consequences…such as this, for example, as reported in the UK Independent:
Lucrative opportunities taken away on a political whim; the danger of being locked up by an over-mighty government agency; the brick wall of protectionism – the business community expects to do battle with all these things in an emerging market.
Yet this suddenly seems to be a description of doing business in that most developed of all markets, the United States of America.
In the UK, in the cash-rich Gulf states and in fast-growing India, different incidents in the past week have made people ask the same question: is it worth doing business with the US?
“Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it’s been shaped into acceptable expository prose.”
–Carol Shields (1935-2003), Unless
There’s a reason why so many people are getting more and more reluctant to loosen the purse strings nowadays. Quite aside from the nose-holding aspect of so many charities claiming to be the answer to problems better addressed by good old-fashioned socialism, you get rather unfortunate stuff like this leaking out to the media:
Sen. Rick Santorum’s charity donated about 40 percent of the $1.25 million it spent during a four-year period, well below Better Business Bureau standards — paying out the rest for overhead, including several hundred thousand dollars to campaign aides on the charity payroll.
The charity, Operation Good Neighbor, is described on its Web site as an organization promoting “compassionate conservatism” by providing grants to small nonprofit groups, many of them religious.
The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance says charitable organizations should spend at least 65 percent of their total expenses on program activities.
“When you talk about violence, people tend not to see their own violence. How many Americans are even aware that there were race riots in Cincinnati not so long ago? We have lots of violence in this country, including mob violence. We don’t think about it, because it’s not marked for us. Other people’s violence is marked as, you know, those people did it; if we do it, it’s not noticed so much.”
–Juan Cole, interviewed by Metro Times Detroit
