Such, Such Was Eric Blair – The New York Review of Books

And George Orwell? It would surprise, and doubtless irritate, him to discover that since his death in 1950 he has moved implacably toward NT status. He is interpretable, malleable, ambassadorial, and patriotic. He denounced the Empire, which pleases the left; he denounced communism, which pleases the right. He warned us against the corrupting effect on politics and public life of the misuse of language, which pleases almost everyone. He said that “good prose is like a window pane,” which pleases those who, despite living in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, mistrust “fancy” writing. He distrusted anyone who was too “clever.” (This is a key English suspicion, most famously voiced in 1961 when Lord Salisbury, a stalwart of the imperialist Tory right, denounced Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies and member of the new reforming Tory left, as “too clever by half.”)

tags: George Orwell, reading list

TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Jindal Admits Katrina Story Was False

This is no minor difference. Jindal’s presence in Lee’s office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story’s intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn’t there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

tags: Jindal, Republicans, GOP, lies, reading list

Nation’s Blacks Creeped Out By All The People Smiling At Them | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

A majority of African-Americans surveyed in a nationwide poll this week reported feeling “deeply disturbed” and “more than a little weirded out” by all the white people now smiling at them.

tags: Obama, The Onion, reading list, African-Americans, comedy, satire

Aquatic Sex: Pregnant Fish Fossils Found – CBS News

The fossilized remains of two pregnant fish indicate that sex as we know it – fertilization of eggs inside a female – took place as much as 30 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Thursday.

tags: reproduction, fish, biology, paleobiology, reading list, paleontology

Op-Ed Contributor – This Is the Way the Culture Wars End – NYTimes.com

PRESIDENT OBAMA wants to end the culture wars. He recently called for “common ground” on abortion reduction and an end to the “stale and fruitless debate” over family planning. His joint address to Congress this week could be an opportunity to change that debate. But to make a real difference, he’ll have to tell two truths that the left and the right don’t want to hear: that morality has to be practical, and that practicality requires morals.

tags: Obama, morality, gay marriage, abortion, Democrats, Liberals, Conservative, Republicans, reading list

The risks of a bust-up in Europe | The bill that could break up Europe | The Economist

Bailing out the same mythical Polish plumbers who just stole everybody’s jobs will be hard for Europe’s leaders to sell on the doorsteps of Berlin, Bradford and Bordeaux, especially with the xenophobic right in full cry. German taxpayers are already worried that others are after their hard-earned cash (see article). The bill will indeed be huge, but in truth western Europe cannot afford not to pay it. The meltdown of any EU country in the region, let alone the break-up of the euro or the single market, would be catastrophic for all of Europe; and on this issue there is little prospect of much help from America, China or elsewhere. It is certainly not too late to rescue the east; but politicians need to start making the case for it now.

tags: reading list, EU, Europe, Eastern Europe, Economist, euro, economics

Michael J. Totten: Christopher Hitchens and the Battle of Beirut

Last week Christopher Hitchens and I were attacked in Beirut. Less than 24 hours after we landed at the international airport, a half dozen members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party jumped us on Hamra Street when he defaced one of their signs.

tags: reading list, fascists, Beirut, Lebanon, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Totten, Nazis, swastikas

Why the United States needs to press for a “two-state” solution NOW | Stephen M. Walt

Shouldn’t someone in the U.S. government start thinking about what our policy should be in the event that the two-state solution collapses? Starting to contemplate this possibility is risky, of course, because it might undermine our efforts to create two states if it became known that we were beginning to plan for an alternative future. But the fact is that we may face that future before too much longer. If so, then it might be a good idea if somebody began thinking about how to deal with it now, so that we don’t have to invent a new approach on the fly.

tags: Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama, Israeli, Palestine, reading list

Ben White: The real Israel-Palestine story is in the West Bank | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

It is quite likely that you have not heard of the most important developments this week in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the West Bank, while it has been “occupation as normal”, there have been some events that together should be overshadowing Gaza, Gilad Shalit and Avigdor Lieberman.

First, there have been a large number of Israeli raids on Palestinian villages, with dozens of Palestinians abducted. These kinds of raids are, of course, commonplace for the occupied West Bank, but in recent days it appears the Israeli military has targeted sites of particularly strong Palestinian civil resistance to the separation wall.

tags: reading list, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, separation wall, Israel

Mozilla backs EFF in support of iPhone jailbreaking | Apple – CNET News

Mozilla has thrown its support behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s push to have the U.S. Copyright Office allow iPhone jailbreaking.

tags: EFF, copyright, jailbreaking, iphone, Apple, Mozilla, reading list

How Obama’s sentence-structure works – Boing Boing

This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls “having more than one voice in your ear.” Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama’s favorite word: “but.” What appears to be a hard line – “My view is… that nobody is above the law” – turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: “I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.” The most controversial part of the sentence – “people should be prosecuted” – gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle…if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: “The beef, assuming it’s in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I’d be eager to try it.”

tags: Obama, grammar, reading list

The New Atheism, and Something More :: Sam Harris

Mr. Comte-Sponville does address one political question, of the broadest sort. While he has no doubt that individuals can live without religion — he is, after all, a happy atheist — whether societies can live without religion, he feels, is a more complex matter

tags: atheism, reading list, books, philosophy, religion

What Facebook’s Stumble Can Teach Your Company – John Sviokla – HarvardBusiness.org

When you share information on a social site: Who owns the content? Who controls it?

tags: reading list, privacy, copyright, Facebook, TOS, social networking, social media

Good Luck and Good Riddance – News – The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper

In the first week of February, the news broke that President Barack Obama had tapped Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske to serve as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a position colloquially known as “drug czar.” The choice looks perfect from many angles: Kerlikowske would be relieved from patrolling a third-tier burg, and we’d be relieved to unload Kerlikowske. Moreover, if confirmed by the Senate, our top cop—a liberal by national standards—could take Seattle’s progressive approach to drug enforcement to Washington, D.C.

tags: Kerlikowske, reading list, Seattle, drugs, drug enforcement, Obama, needle exchange

NYU Student Protest Takes Violent Turn Overnight

tags: reading list, NYU, tuition, democracy, protests

AIDS becomes China’s deadliest disease | News Story on 365gay.com

AIDS was the top killer among infectious diseases in China for the first time last year, with 6,897 people dying from the virus in the nine months through September, a state news agency said.

tags: AIDS, HIV, China, reading list, deaths

www.dcexaminer.com >> Politics

This delay had nothing to do with sunlight — and everything to do with showmanship.

tags: Obama, legislation, campaign promises, stimulus, financial crisis, reading list

Straight Couples in France Are Choosing Civil Unions Meant for Gays – washingtonpost.com

In passing the [civil unions] law without making it specific to gays, however, France distinguished itself from other European countries that have approved civil unions or even marriage for same-sex couples. As a result of that ambiguity, the PACS broadened into an increasingly popular third option for heterosexual couples, who readily cite its appeal: It has the air of social independence associated with the time-honored arrangement that the French call the “free union” but with major financial and other advantages. It is also far easier to get out of than marriage.

tags: reading list, gay marriage, marriage equality, France, civil unions

The lights are going out all over Twitter | Technology | guardian.co.uk

[The new law] tells internet service providers that they “must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination” of accounts used by anyone deemed a “repeat infringer” – regardless of whether the person has been convicted of a crime or not.

tags: New Zealand, piracy, copyright, ISPs, protests, Internet life, reading list

Ben Smith’s Blog: Gay snipers stalk WV – Politico.com

The ad, which targets Christian voters, calls for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, something that’s already in place in a majority of states. “A weekend trip to SF for a WV same-sex couple, plus a pro-bono ACLU attorney, could easily become a nightmare for marriage in West Virginia,” says the narrator.

tags: fundamentalism, Christianists, homophobia, marriage equality, gay marriage, gay rights, reading list

Canon Has No Sense of Humor, Tries to Shut Down Fake Chuck Westfall Blog — Update: And Fails | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Holy parody Batman! I just saw over at the Fake Chuck Westfall blog (read *fake* Chuck Westfall blog folks, sorta like that *fake* Steve Jobs blog from a while back) that Canon Inc. and some lawyerish type named Douglas E. Mirell from Loeb & Loeb are trying to shut poor fake Chuck down.

tags: reading list, Canon, parody, satire, comedy, blogs

Wallace Stegner on Profanity – The Atlantic (Fiction Issue 2005)

Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for. Like any excess, it quickly becomes comic.

tags: Wallace Stegner, profanity, language, reading list

Johann Hari: Despite these riots, I stand by what I wrote – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent

Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.

tags: human rights, religion, free speech, reading list, United Nations

Why Wikipedia’s Policy to Blacklist Blogs is Outdated and Wrong – ReadWriteWeb

This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he’d tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: “The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted.” After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as ’spam’! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don’t think we’ve done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.

tags: blogs, blogging, tech blogs, wikipedia, reading list, research, journalism, ReadWriteWeb

On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.

tags: reading list, evolution, education, religion, Darwin, science

The Shorty Awards: Why Nerds Hate Twitter | Epicenter from Wired.com

It’s official. No longer the domain of the digerati, the Twitter short messaging platform has woven itself into regular peoples’ lives to help with practical matters — getting in shape, picking stocks, raising funds for a Senate run or selling cruise ship tickets. For proof, one need look no further than Wednesday night’s Shorty Awards, which honored the best Twitterers as determined by a popular vote.

tags: twitter, social media, reading list

Hit & Run > Sheriff Lott’s New Toy – Reason Magazine

The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle “The Peacemaker,” and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will “save lives.”

tags: war on drugs, law enforcement, reading list, cops, military hardware