Internal states
31st
May 2003
I
had this acute feeling - it sort of hit me with a bang - that my whole
existence was going to be on this planet. I will never know another
world, so I thought at least I should understand how this one works.
There
was a time when patriotic Americans from both parties would have denounced
any president who tried to take political advantage of his role as commander
in chief. But that, it seems, was another country.
"They
read good books, and quote, but never learn
a
language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our
straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
Elections,
money, empire, oil and Dad."
...nationalism
begins with an act of demonizing a religious "other" and creating a
sense of community by defining an "us" and a "them."
30th
May 2003
No
one in Baghdad knew who he was or the risks he was taking.
Ideas
is a program about contemporary thought.
Robin
Cook: Britain must not be suckered a second time by the White House
Y
Chromosomes Sketch New Outline of British History
29th
May 2003
Room
boxes made by Walter Vaughn
Ever
since it was invented, photography, the child of science, has been experiencing
an "artistic" adolescence.
28th
May 2003
"You
also can't say Mother Russia or Fatherland or brotherhood in texts and
that's both silly, trivial and breathtaking."
When
Stockwell Day arrived by skidoo in a wetsuit, Canadians laughed. When
George Bush arrived by fighter jet in a combat suit, Americans called
him a hero.
Sen. Robert Byrd :
Congress,
in what will go down in history as its most unfortunate act, handed
away its power to declare war for the foreseeable future and empowered
this President to wage war at will.
The
"war on terror" has made the world a more dangerous place and created
divisions which make conflict more likely, says Amnesty International.
27th
May 2003
Bush
and his fellow fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis
who can hold their breath and go without air for hours. Such is their
mental control, they can go without truth for, well, years.
In
lawless Baghdad... safety is now more prized than freedom.
"...advanced
forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes (i.e.,
kill people selectively based on their race or ethnicity) may transform
biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful
tool.”
...a
society which possesses many fine museums has a corresponding stronger
historical memory than a society without them.
The
Iraq WMD's and ties to Al Qaeda were merely MacGuffins, as Alfred Hitchcock
called devices that drove the plot but were otherwise inconsequential.
This
seems to be the era for MacGuffins.
The
MacGuffins Baseball Club
25th
May 2003
Booth
is a firm believer in the power of books -- the buying and selling,
rather than the reading of them -- to change the world.
What
would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence
agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
24th
May 2003
What
has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in
government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they
are never filled with doubts...
We
have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of
government.
20th
May 2003
I
have a theory that many (all?) cultures invent a food that is weird
or disgusting to non-initiates as a sort of a "marker."
Tonight
was a different country.
When
I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say
Take
the red pill...
19th
May 2003
There are not enough jails,
not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported
by the people.--
Hubert Humphrey
18th
May 2003
Alas!
is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
A
poem should not mean
But be.
17th
May 2003
The
Poem: Mary Cassatt: The Letter
The
Picture: Mary Cassatt: The Letter
The
Two Fronts: a drawing
16th
May 2003
Welcome
to PhotoGuide.to (for those with more wanderlust than time or money...)
14th
May 2003
Gore
Vidal ,
essayist, critic and author of best-selling books Perpetual War
for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush
Junta in an interview with Amy Goodman
13th
May 2003
Photographs
of Venice
Photographs
of Barcelona
Photographs
of Paris
The
"Great Lyre" of Ur (2550-2400 BC), with its golden bull's head, is just
one of the dazzling objects on display at a new exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
12th
May 2003
"The
Christian parallels, the philosophical underpinnings - this is a movie
that ... captures people's intellectual imagination."
Outside
the city, the Forest Mice from St. Thomas Kindergarten are on their
way to school, al fresco.
Chomsky
was the most cited living author and, overall, he ranked No. 8 on a
list that included Marx, Plato, Freud, Shakespeare, Aristotle and the
Bible.
...he
is banished. He is as water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered
up again. So that we will not be infected by the plague he carries,
Grandpa has forbidden him to come on to the land.
Darkness
and disorder, as much as they attract him, also scare him. He feels
that's where you will lose control and discover things about yourself
that, once you know them, will prevent you forever living a life of
order again.
Few
cities have been as maligned as the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta.
11th
May 2003
CBS
is developing a reality TV series modeled after "The Beverly Hillbillies,"
the 60's sitcom. A poor family from a remote corner of southern Appalachia
will be transported to a California mansion, the ensuing comic antics
shown to America.
8th
May 2003
Menus
are the Pavlov's bell of eating out. They are a literature of control.
Does
the Old Man, which has appeared in numerous paintings and in the writings
of Daniel Webster and Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, need to exist
to be remembered?
Since
the century's bloom, the Old Man of the Mountain has been old. Nature
sculpted him old, man discovered him old, notion named him old.
7th
May 2003
The
visitors' book told it all. It lay on a table in the musty hall of the
British embassy, open at a page that seemed perfectly normal until you
looked more closely.
5th
May 2003
Fifty
years ago an American expatriate opened a bookstore on the left bank
of the river Seine.
The
online walk through is comprised of 45 photographs, each with at least
one hotspot leading to another image
It
is more common to find biologists who are literate than it is to find
literary people who are biologically inclined.
Art
from Mars
Seeking
Sanctuary: Draft Dodgers in Canada
'Our
voices are lost in the tide of intolerance sweeping America':
Tim Robbins
4th
May 2003
W. H. Auden:
We
are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here
for, I don't know.
I
feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years
on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of.
Ivanwald,
which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia,
is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the
organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves
as "the Family."
In
college he had abandoned his boyhood ambition of becoming a doctor to
study philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel. Raised in the faith,
his ideas about God crumbled before the disciplined rage of the philosophers.
2nd
May 2003
William Blake:
A
truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
May
Day is closely connected to the evening before it - the " Walpurgisnacht
" or May Eve