links of interest
At The High Hat, Hayden Child's Top 10 of 2006:
#3: Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner, April 29, 2006
My God, does he make speaking truth to power look sexy. We’d been waiting years for someone to wake the press corps up to the actual shade of the President’s new clothing, and Colbert stripped the Bush administration bare in less than 25 minutes. He’s still my fucking hero.
Dan Hartland at Strange Horizons writes unhappily on Battlestar Galactica season three:
In "Occupation," the season premiere, the show fumbled every conceivable question about the tactic of suicide bombing, from its efficacy as a tool of war to the morality of its contexts of use, by making its suicide bomber a soldier, and his targets a paramilitary arm of the occupying forces. It was as if the show wanted to pay lip service to the idea of being edgy and courageous without laying any of the tedious, difficult groundwork-Battlestar Galactica wanted to enjoy the effect of the outwardly contentious without in truth something which approached even mildly controversial.
Daniel Lazare reviews Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution, a history of vegetarianism:
Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded "the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder." But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: "Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." But Franklin's contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against "sanguinary and ferocious" felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor's cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: "Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity." Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature's furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more "humane" regime.
The Independent on the issue of recycling:
Ask someone what they have done to help the environment lately and they will almost certainly cite "recycling more". Recycling in the home is certainly to be encouraged. But in one sense the act itself is an admission of failure. Being forced to recycle often means we have already acquired more material than we need.
Related: Tim Cooper's papers Beyond Recycling and Slower Consumption.
#3: Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner, April 29, 2006
My God, does he make speaking truth to power look sexy. We’d been waiting years for someone to wake the press corps up to the actual shade of the President’s new clothing, and Colbert stripped the Bush administration bare in less than 25 minutes. He’s still my fucking hero.
Dan Hartland at Strange Horizons writes unhappily on Battlestar Galactica season three:
In "Occupation," the season premiere, the show fumbled every conceivable question about the tactic of suicide bombing, from its efficacy as a tool of war to the morality of its contexts of use, by making its suicide bomber a soldier, and his targets a paramilitary arm of the occupying forces. It was as if the show wanted to pay lip service to the idea of being edgy and courageous without laying any of the tedious, difficult groundwork-Battlestar Galactica wanted to enjoy the effect of the outwardly contentious without in truth something which approached even mildly controversial.
Daniel Lazare reviews Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution, a history of vegetarianism:
Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded "the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder." But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: "Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." But Franklin's contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against "sanguinary and ferocious" felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor's cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: "Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity." Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature's furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more "humane" regime.
The Independent on the issue of recycling:
Ask someone what they have done to help the environment lately and they will almost certainly cite "recycling more". Recycling in the home is certainly to be encouraged. But in one sense the act itself is an admission of failure. Being forced to recycle often means we have already acquired more material than we need.
Related: Tim Cooper's papers Beyond Recycling and Slower Consumption.