Thursday, September 30, 2010
Reinstate Rick Salutin << Murray Dobbin's Blog
That the Globe would fire him is indicative of the final stage of the Canadian political and economic elite’s betrayal of the country’s traditions and values. It’s all just business now and anything that isn’t business – certainly anything that questions it’s “natural” dominance – is simply dispensable. I can just imagine the suits at the Globe having a brief conversation about Rick’s column: “By the way, why are still publishing Rick Salutin?” Long silence. “Rick who?” I wonder if any of these guys ever even read him. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode where a representative of a race completely dedicated to trade and commerce, looks at Captain Picard who is trying to engage him in civilized conversation and says “Why are we speaking?”
Indeed, why are we speaking?
via rabble.ca
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Kieron Gillen’s Workblog >> On Leaving RPS
What they don’t tell you is that they don’t pick the writers randomly. From that mob of people who want to be games journalists, they can pick. And, because these are not stupid people, they pick the best available. They’re not going to pay for better writing, but since it doesn’t cost them any more, they may as well have it.
In other words, don’t think about the fact you’re replaceable. Think about the fact that out of the enormous mob of people who wanted your job, you’re the one who got it. No matter how much they treat you with disdain, they actually think you’re the best.
In other words, have some pride.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Infamous Brad – Christians in the Hand of an Angry God (part 3)
And when a group of Pharisees caught an adulterous couple, they figured they had the perfect trap for Jesus. You see, the holiness code very specifically prescribes the death penalty for adultery (Leviticus 20:10). However, Roman law said that only the Roman governor could prescribe the death penalty. So by bringing him the woman caught in adultery, they figured that they could force him to choose between offending the Jews (and losing his followers) or offending the Romans (and being put to death). Instead of answering, Jesus just crouched down and wrote on the ground with His finger for a while, then stood up and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The Pharisees slunk away in cowardice and shame, which raises the interesting unanswerable question, what the heck was Jesus writing? My theology professors’ favorite speculation was that it was a list of other death penalty offenses that the Pharisees might reasonably suspect Jesus of somehow knowing they were guilty of, daring them to start a stone-throwing festival that would have left the hypocrites as dead as the adulteress. Nonetheless, as fun as this story is, let’s not miss part of the point here. Jesus was specifically asked whether or not we as human beings should continue to enforce the holiness code in the Law of Moses, and Jesus very specifically said no. (John 8:1-11)
via Metafilter
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
“She says, ‘He got it right on the nose.’
” ‘Has that ever happened?’
“And she says, ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
And then [Drew] Carey remembers what happened next: “Everybody thought someone had cheated. We’d just fired Roger Dobkowitz, and all the fan groups were upset about it. I thought, Fuck, they just fucking fucked us over. Somebody fucked us over. I remember asking, ‘Are we ever going to air this?’ And nobody could see how we could. So I thought the show was never going to air. I thought somebody had cheated us, and I thought the whole show was over. I thought they were going to shut us down, and I thought I was going to be out of a job.”
And just over there, just on the other side of that curtain, was twice-perfect Terry Kniess, still dancing to the music. “I was like, Fuck this guy,” Carey says. “When it came time to announce the winner, I thought, It’s not airing anyway. So fuck him.”
Johann Hari – How Goldman Sachs gambled with the world’s poor – and won
There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It’s true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land – but that was a gradual process that wouldn’t explain a violent spike. It’s true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food – but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn’t the biggest factor.
[…]
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
Metafilter discussion
Treasure Island: How TV serials achieved the status of art
This is the final season of Lost, and while new dramas will continue to find both enthusiastic fans and critical acclaim, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something important is winding down. After all, the great dramas of the last decade are great precisely because they found certain limits of the form, because they figured out what it was possible to do with the available tools. That leaves future shows with few places to go, even when they are excellent (Breaking Bad) or promising (Treme). There just isn’t much new ground available.
Abortion vote ‘inevitable,’ MP says – Toronto Star
Meanwhile, the anti-abortion caucus continues to work for that day, with monthly meetings over dinner on Parliament Hill. They fly so far under the radar it’s not clear how they divvy up the cost of their researcher from their parliamentary budgets or even who they count as members. According to Szabo, “It’s under a hundred.”
Ex-Harvard student accused of living a lie – The Boston Globe
“I was just knocked silly by this,’’ said one Harvard professor, speaking on condition of anonymity, who likened Wheeler’s fabrications to a scenario from the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley.’’ “There’s something that’s pathological there. And it’s something that seems to me that needs care and clinical treatment, rather than incarceration.’’
John Williams: Believe Him or Not
His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth.
[…]
Take February, for example. What does Williams think was the true state of the [US] economy? The official unemployment rate was listed at 9.7 percent, but according to Williams’ models, the real number, including part-time employees and workers who have just given up in despair, is closer to a staggering 21.6 percent. The official February inflation rate was 2.1 percent; Williams argues that it’s really around 5.5 percent. And GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 was not 5.9 percent, as the government claims, but 2.9 percent.
i realized unemployment rate figures and the government definition of unemployment were bogus years ago. The rest… is interesting.
