"But if you combine them with other features and keep them to specific topics, you could make the idea of consumer-generated media even more mainstream than it is now."James Nail! People must say to him James, you nailed that. Or possibly, more often: Nail screws up.
Antonin Scalia is the most theatrical of the present Supreme Court justices. (He’s also the best stylist, but that’s a subject for another day.)What, he picks out clothes and designs new hairdos for the other justices? I'm so ready to watch that reality show.
If the Constitution’s meaning is fixed and unchanging, asks Paul Greenberg, a columnist for the Joplin Globe in Missouri, how do you explain the fact that it has been “subject to different interpretations over the years?” Easy. Justice Scalia’s thesis is not that the Constitution’s meaning will be perspicuous and agreed on by everyone. His thesis is that the Constitution has a meaning. The history of its interpretation is a history of successive efforts to specify what that meaning is....Notice? He didn't provide links! He even quoted a specific blogger and didn't link to him!
Is Justice Scalia saying (a third question posed by blogger Wayne Besen) that “American jurisprudence has not evolved in two centuries?” No, he is identifying the jurisprudential goal, which is to figure out what the Constitution means.
"What's the problem?" said [911 operator Vernetta] Geric, 46, of East Pittsburgh.
"I have a large tree in my backyard ... there's a squirrel stuck in the tree."
"Ma'am, this is a squirrel? In a tree? What's the problem?"
"It's been there for about an hour. It's crying; it needs help. There's a problem," the caller insisted.
"Ma'am, sorry, but this isn't necessarily a police issue. It's a wild animal, sitting in a tree. It's supposed to be doing that. The squirrel will be OK. It'll climb down when it's ready," Geric said.
"Are you telling me you're not sending me an officer?"
"Sorry ma'am, this isn't a police issue. An officer wouldn't be able to do anything. The squirrel will be just fine, really."
"But police officers help people in need right?"
"Yes, ma'am. Squirrels are not people."
"Well, never mind, anyway. You've spent so much time explaining why an officer won't help me, the squirrel left. Thanks."
Frank Starik leads a group of Amsterdam poets engaged in a highly unusual civic project -- attending the funerals of the city's unmourned dead and remembering them at the graveside with a specially-composed poem.So a depressed loner commits commits suicide and a friendless woman succumbs to old age, and you, you sensitive poet, show up to use their funerals as a political platform against the people who are outraged by the murder of Theo van Gogh?
It spares people the indignity of a funeral without mourners, says Starik, a gaunt figure in a black jacket with an air of the Romantic poet about him.
"I want to give them back a life, a history," he said.
Amsterdam social services bury some 250 people a year, about 15 of whom leave no trace of relatives or friends. In such cases, the poets are called in....
Starik acknowledges there is a political aspect to the work.
"Part of the hidden agenda of this is that we have a very right-wing government, who are against foreigners, Muslims, and who are trying to reconstruct a society we had 50 years ago."
"This is not such a nice, tolerant country any more."
For migrants or asylum-seekers who die alone, the funerals are a chance to give them back their humanity and to consider their individual hopes and experiences in a climate contriving to demonise them and view them as a single mass, Starik says.
Dutch society is still reeling from the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist militant in 2004 which provoked an anti-Muslim backlash.
The murder of anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn in 2002 also saw mainstream political parties move to occupy his ground.
“All men are bores,” he wrote in “The Rotation Method” (a key essay in Either/Or).There. I feel I've done right by Soren. Very good. "Those who do not bore themselves usually bore others." Ah, there is a lesson in that for professors everywhere! In fact, I was thinking about boredom in the context of thinking about a professor who was boring me. I won't say when or where! It's not you! And, no, you don't need to remind me that I am a professor. I willingly admit that I don't bore myself. I know what that means in Kierkegaard's calculation. At least he said usually.Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.Kierkegaard was very astute on the subject of boredom. He understood “the curious fact that those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those who bore themselves entertain others.” He also understood that boredom could be far more than a passing mood of nameless dissatisfaction. In Kierkegaard’s view, boredom is essentially a spiritual malaise, endemic wherever a purely naturalistic conception of man holds sway. Hence he defines boredom as “the daemonic side of pantheism.” It is the dark side of a life devoted to amusement and pleasure. What happens when amusement palls and pleasure fails to please? Boredom yawns before one, a paralyzing abyss. (Compare Tolstoy’s definition of boredom as “the desire for desires.”) It is part of Kierkegaard’s task to show that boredom can only be defeated by moving beyond what he calls the “aesthetic” conception of life, a mode of life unleavened by moral or religious engagement.
UW's scintillating 2-1 victory over Boston College Saturday night at the Bradley Center - renamed the Kohl Center East for the weekend - gave the school its sixth national championship and so much more.
It made UW the first school to win both the men's and women's NCAA hockey champions in the same season. Two weeks ago, the UW women won their first title with a 3-0 victory over Minnesota.
The perfect comic is the comic who will say something and you say: "Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. I was, had this secret all my life. I thought I was a pervert, or I thought I was a racist, or I thought I was an idiot."(That also sounds like the secret of the Internet.)
With Hun-like aplomb, Bing ridicules everyone he can get his hands on — Dennis Kozlowski, cowboys, Romulus, per diem consultants, Chaldeans, Roman Catholics. A parody — yet, remarkably, none of the one-liners elicit so much as a chuckle. But it's the rape-as-a-weapon-of-war jokes that raise the question of whether anyone, except perhaps the author, read the manuscript before it was published. There are other mysteries. Why, for example, are we privy to unfunny, rather icky fantasies that include a castle with "prepubescent lovelies of all races and sexes frolicking between the legs of all those depraved old geezers"? The big question is why anyone would read this book. The afterword is entitled "What Have We Learned?" Well, I learned that some corporate executives think whatever they write is interesting or, even more of a stretch, amusing to others.Yeah, but these things are published because people buy them. We don't know that Bing thinks his own writing is interesting or amusing. The better assumption is that Bing (correctly) thinks he's found the formula for manufacturing one of those rectangular objects that people buy on impulse or for a gift. It's nearly Father's Day. Presumably, lots of people will think "Rome, Inc." is just the thing for Dad. He likes business, this looks funny and sexy, and the Rome angle will flatter the old man into feeling like something of a historian (or at least an HBO fan).
"It isn't simply an issue of expressing one's opinion," [said Jeffrey Schneider, vice president of ABC News.] "It's also the vituperative nature of those comments."...The problem with email is that it feels so breezy and transitory. By contrast, things written on paper seem more substantial to the writer. But things written in email are writing too, and they are much easier to send around. You may think you're just having some fun and blowing off steam when you shoot out an office email, but you're clueless and incompetent if you don't picture it bursting out into the general public. (Green's email appeared on The Drudge Report.) Kinsley and Kristol are in denial about what office email is. You think every single person in your office loves you and wants to preserve a tight circle of confidence for your sake? What a bizarre delusion!
"What did this guy do wrong?" asked Michael Kinsley, a columnist for Slate and The Washington Post who in a recent column argued that the concept of objectivity is so muddled as to be useless. "Was it having these views, or merely expressing them? Expecting journalists not to develop opinions, strong opinions even, goes against human nature and the particular nature of journalists."
"I guess there are limits — if a guy's e-mail showed him to be a Nazi, you might not want him as a network TV producer," he added. "But unless the views themselves are beyond the pale — and millions of Americans hold views like those this guy expressed — expressing those views shouldn't be beyond the pale either."
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said he was troubled by the blurring of the public and the private. "For me, I think people should be held accountable for what they put on the air or in print," he said. And there is no proof this expression of private views affected news coverage, he said.
"It was the most cozy, lovely, lush experience." (About midwives.)
"Punk culture and ideals promote all body types, all sexualities, all genders and all esthetics." (A rousing inter-generational debate, now with 119 comments.)
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