So, appar­ently being anti-Gov­ern­ment is now a threat to national secur­ity. Espe­cially if, Howard forbid, you are on your way to a gath­er­ing of act­iv­ists to give work­shops on oppos­ing cap­it­al­ism. I thought one of the bene­fits of a demo­cracy was sup­posed to be the…

Stu­dents some­times ask me how I find the things I find. This time, I fol­lowed a link to a guy’s journal because I thought his icon was cute, and then *he’d* linked to this hys­ter­ical Voight-Kampff rip off star­ring George Bush that I’m post­ing here espe­cially for…

They say it’s sup­posed to sound the way that ancient music soun­ded but I doubt anyone back then sang as beau­ti­fully as Heather Lee. Kim says that at one point during the Bagh­da­dian Yom Kippur ser­vice, singing to beseech God to open the Heav­ens, the wor­ship­pers look up…

I’m not having a very fun day today so far. And then I read this review of the Wed­ding Crash­ers. I didn’t go to see it because it’s not my sort of film. But I’m out­raged to think one of the key points of its ‘humour’ is a man being raped by a woman and the ongoing…

I’m going to a won­der­ful con­cert tomor­row night per­formed by friends of mine from Sydney, Kim and Heather. They are eth­nomusico­lo­gists fas­cin­ated with spir­itual ancient music. They were com­mis­sioned to recre­ate the orches­tra of the second temple from 79CE and they had…

Brown has been replaced as the key co-ordin­ator for dis­aster relief. So much for doing “a heck of a job,” eh? I first read this as saying he’d been fired as head of FEMA. I’m still amazed he hasn’t been, given the ongo­ing ques­tions about arti­fi­cially inflat­ing his…

qamar posted two fas­cin­at­ing links: 1) a Kat­rina timeline which shows that Bush did indeed declare a Fed­eral emer­gency before Kat­rina made land­fall, but *then* went on to con­tinue his hol­i­day, which I still think is cal­lous; that Brown really is incom­pet­ent and as far…

If you were as out­raged by Little Johnny Howard’s com­ments on what it means to be an aver­age Aus­tralian as I was, then go read this inspir­ing post by my friend sil­verblue on being pas­sion­ately excep­tional. “I’m glad I’m not ‘aver­age’. I don’t want to be ‘aver­age’. I…

I’m very inter­ested in the reac­tions of the US media to the hur­ricane. No, cor­rec­tion, the US media reac­tion to the gov­ern­ment’s inac­tion on the hur­ricane. And it’s not just inac­tion: there seems to be a com­plete lack of com­pre­hen­sion on the part of some of the people…

I am nor­mally quite calm about nat­ural dis­asters. They are inev­it­able and life is lost and it is a tragedy, but this is the world we live in and nature is a cruel mis­tress. State-coördinated and human-instig­ated dis­asters are another thing. They infuri­ate me with a…