Bell was arrested less than one month after he completed a sentence for his role in the beating of a fellow classmate, Justin Barker, at Jena High School in 2006. Police said Bell and an unidentified male were spotted Wednesday by store security after they placed $370 worth of merchandise in a Dillard’s shopping bag. [...]
Posts from ‘December, 2008’
Someone is thinking clearly
“We would like to repopulate the world with smart people,” she said. Seattle Times I’m with ya.
Publishing: awash in its own excess, without direction
As we’ve covered before, the publishing industry is in hot water because instead of finding insightful things to say, it rehashes the same shallow crap in a million facets, essentially drowning itself in its own excess and producing no real persistent sellers. This should come as no surprise, although an affirmation of our prediction: The [...]
Getting our act together
Stephen Hawking has called for a new diaspora, telling a Hong Kong press conference that humanity must leave Earth and colonise the rest of the solar system if it is to avoid extinction. The respected physicist warned of the increasing risk that some kind of natural or man made disaster – such as global warming, [...]
The new anti-semitism
The pseudo-intellectual and superstitious tropes of Judaeophobia are very much the same as they ever were. They involve the hatred of the countryside for the urban (and the urbane), the hatred of the provinces for the capital (and for capital), the disdain of the settled establishment for the subversive, and the visceral loathing of the [...]
The news media isn’t liberal, it’s pro-underdog
Let’s examine this CNN article. On the surface, it’s unbiased. But a woman died when her house was hit by a Palestinian missile, and we don’t see her face on the front page. Even more, we hear about the damage done by Israeli bombs but not much about what provoked the attack. It’s subtly biased. [...]
The Rise of Illiberal Democracy
Great reading: THE AMERICAN diplomat Richard Holbrooke pondered a problem on the eve of the September 1996 elections in Bosnia, which were meant to restore civic life to that ravaged country. “Suppose the election was declared free and fair,” he said, and those elected are “racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and [...]
Rape is eternal
From the Morning Idiotic Bloviation Dep’t: I have a project for Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton to work on together: ending impunity for rape. Rape-conviction rates are appallingly low across the globe. I don’t mean only in countries that many would think of as lacking good justice systems: Conviction rates hover just above 10 percent [...]
Passive housing, and just in time for air filters
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive [...]
Why entertainment publishing is failing
Read these excerpts, and look for the clues: I heard a contrarian argument just now from Zeitgeist Films co-president Nancy Gerstman, whose films this year have included the Oscar-plausible Katrina documentary “Trouble the Water” along with the haunting Andes plane-crash doc “Stranded,” a rare marketplace flop for her small and selective company. Gerstman writes: “But [...]
