January 2012
107 posts
5 tags
3 tags
Yet Another Top Ten →
What a wild year. It’s one that saw ZeitVox pass the one year mark and practically exhausted our global news watching sensibilities. Looking back, here are 10 Tumblr moments that struck us as either significant, beautiful or ridiculous.
10 » Jan 3: ‘Anonymous’ Hacktivists Attack African Government Sites
9 » Jan 24: Egypt Braces for Tuesday < day before things...
December 2011
91 posts
5 tags
6 tags
Goodluck crushing terrorists in Nigeria →
Declares state of emergency
President Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency in some northern and central parts of the country that have been hit hard by violence blamed on the radical sect, Boko Haram.
…bombings have raised fears that Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden”, and whose movement is styled on the Taliban, is trying to ignite...
4 tags
New Year’s protesters arrested in Russia →
Washington Post »
New Year’s Eve is the biggest holiday of the year in Russia, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to deliver a celebratory message, replete with his trademark tough-guy coarseness.
He sent good wishes to all the citizens of Russia, including those along the entire political spectrum, but phrased it in Russian with sexual innuendo that lent his...
3 tags
4 tags
Egypt's democracy organizations fear wider... →
The choice of targets was significant: The raided groups are not youth activists known for protests but ostensibly neutral groups working to promote democratic institutions, such as an independent judiciary, election monitoring and election campaign training.
Notably, three of them were American organizations funded in part by the State Department — an indication Egypt’s military, which...
4 tags
4 tags
“Our Internet intellectuals lack the intellectual ambition, and the basic...”
– The Internet Intellectual | The New Republic By Evgeny Morozov on October 12, 2011
4 tags
3 tags
Two Republicans claim Gingrich lobbied in '03 →
Des Moines Register »
Newt Gingrich personally urged members of Congress to vote for a controversial Medicare expansion bill in 2003, two Republicans who were in the room said this week.
…Proponents brought in Gingrich, who addressed a private meeting of Republican House members, they recalled. “He told us, ‘If you can’t pass this bill, you don’t deserve to govern as...
6 tags
8 tags
5 tags
Elon Musk to invest in making life multi-planetary →
Elon Musk, the man who helped make Internet commerce possible for the everyman by creating PayPal, wants to bring space travel to the masses as well. And not that just putting a proverbial foot in space and then returning right away to Earth. Musk hopes his private space company SpaceX will bring millions to Mars. Says the New Scientist’s Greg Klerkx:
In his Heinlein prize acceptance speech,...
3 tags
Intellectuals and Politics →
kohenari:
Over at The Stone recently, Gary Gutting had the following suggestion for the 2012 Presidential contest:
The best evidence of how capable candidates are of fruitfully interacting with intellectuals would be to see them doing just this. Concretely, I make the follow suggestion for the coming presidential election: Gather small but diverse panels of eminent, politically uncommitted...
2 tags
5 tags
“When you’re inside a myth it looks like fact, and for those who were...”
– John Gray, ‘It’s been some time now since history didn’t end’
5 tags
4 tags
The Army and the Economy in Egypt →
Jadaliyya »
Until this very day, the role of the military establishment in the economy remains one of the major taboos in Egyptian politics. Over the past thirty years, the army has insisted on concealing information about its enormous interests in the economy and thereby keeping them out of reach of public transparency and accountability. The Egyptian Armed Forces owns a massive...
1 tag
4 tags
“Democracy in both America and Britain is coming under scrutiny these days. Quite...”
– Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times, writing in The Guardian newspaper, 8 April 2010 … with a prescience for things occupy.
6 tags
5 tags
8 tags
2 tags
4 tags
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S.... →
Forbes »
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.” >continue<
A...
3 tags
Larry Craig leaves stall to lobby →
Huffingtonpost »
Having left Congress after an embarrassing 2007 arrest, former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has quietly reemerged in Washington as a lobbyist working on behalf of the coal industry…
Murray Energy owned a subsidiary that ran the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, the site of a tragic cave-in incident that took the lives of six miners and later three rescuers. The...
4 tags
The worst case for war with Iran →
Steven M. Walt @ Foreign Policy »
You see the pattern: When Kroenig is trying to justify the need for war, he depicts an Iran with far-reaching capabilities and dangerously evil intentions in order to convince readers that we have to stop them before it is too late. But when he turns to selling a preventive war, then suddenly Iran’s capabilities are rather modest, its leaders are...
5 tags
violaxcore:
Occam’s Racist: The notion that when confronted with multiple competing hypotheses for why a person published dozens of overtly racist newsletters over several years, the simplest and best explanation is that they are actually a racist.
JBcolo
4 tags
relic timepiece →
violaxcore:
Ron Paul’s appeal is that he is slightly different from the Republican field, has this libertarian fratboy fanbase, and when that stopped clock is right twice a day, people get excited. Once someone tells me they’re a libertarian everything they say afterwards is simply entertainment.
4 tags
“If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to...”
– Alan Lightman, physicist, The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith, in December Harper’s Magazine
3 tags
A New Phase? Syria Roundup | Jadaliyya →
The protests in Syria seem to be entering a new phase in which a constellation of factors are beginning to take their toll—whether or not the recent signing of the Arab League plan materializes. Among the pertinent factors at play are economic, logistical, moral/physical fatigue of regime forces, military might of part of the opposition, and the increasing organization of the internal opposition...
3 tags
“And what happens if you transgress? If you are a journalist who gets a good...”
– politicalprof
4 tags
US Troops guarded terrorist base in Iraq →
In a move that almost defies belief, is so brazen and hypocritical many will not believe it no matter how many State Department officials confirm it, the US has been guarding a terrorist training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent...
3 tags
The Revolution That Wasn't
thenewinquiry:
by Matt Pearce
“I am not a hero. I was only using the keyboard, Mona, on the internet, I never put my life in danger, the real heroes are the ones on the ground. … This revolution belonged to the internet youth, then the revolution belonged to the Egyptian youth, then the revolution belonged to all of Egypt. It has no hero, no one should steal its thunder, we are all...
6 tags
Presidential buzz surrounds leading figure of... →
CSMonitor »
Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Putin and leader in Russia’s protest movement, could pose a tough threat to his presidential bid.
He pledged “extraordinary efforts” to build momentum in the protest movement, which saw at least 30,000 mostly young and middle class demonstrators rally on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on Dec. 10 to demand that the...
4 tags
Maelstrom Building →
The dissolution of Iraq into chaos, perhaps alongside and in sync with Syria, threatens to plunge the Middle East into a humanitarian and political nightmare. If a fear of this fate conjured prudence for the first Bush Administration in its decision not to advance on Baghdad, serious labours for the sake of a viable government in Iraq seemed oddly absent in the minds of the invaders of 2003....
4 tags
Egypt Scientific Institute up in Flames →
Juan Cole »
Organizations interested in the world’s historical heritage need to drop everything and promote large scale digitization of these collections. It wouldn’t be that expensive and nowadays can be done quickly.
We are all diminished, we human beings, when a good book winks forever out of existence, or when a large swathe of human experience is irrevocably lost....
4 tags
Maybe I Would Be Alone →
Excerpt from the winning entry in the Nation’s sixth annual student writing contest by Bryce Wilson Stucki:
The only person who offered a contrary opinion was Leslie, a girl with glasses and cracked red hair like dyed hay. I was surprised that Leslie spoke up because, based on how often I saw her around the dorm, she seemed like the most career-oriented one in the group. Leslie said ...
4 tags
WHY WOULDN'T WE WRITE? →
tabularasae:
…In his Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Foucault states, “history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations,” and that “the document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of...
3 tags
Egyptian Protesters Demand Military Step Down in... →
Juan Cole »
The Egyptian military is probably attempting to split the general population from the revolutionary, left-leaning youth. They likely deliberately put al-Ganzouri in, knowing that he is generally popular in Egypt but would be completely unacceptable to the revolutionaries.
Then they probably tried to provoke the peaceful protesters in front of the cabinet building to...
3 tags
Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable? →
Kenneth Rogoff »
It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely unhealthy diet. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, 34% of Americans are obese. Clearly, conventionally measured economic...
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
One suspects the fawning over various echoes of Hitchens really misses what was valuable in the pulse of his work… a spirit where iconoclasm must, in time, work its claws into shades of neo-conservatism and the comic excesses of neo-atheism.
2 tags
“If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox”
– Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)
2 tags
“So long as Hitch can learn to keep his mouth shut about Christianity being...”
– The Onion: Christopher Hitchens Forcibly Removed From Trailer Park After Drunken Confrontation With Common-Law Wife
4 tags
Great moments in unexpected iconoclasm
Hannity presses Ron Paul in post debate interview, saying Iran has “clearly said they want to wipe Israel off the map” and Paul challenges to Sean to check his interpretation of the Farsi! Sean can only try and interrupt to throw him off track.
5 tags
Nearly a Laugh but Really a Cry →
Citizen Zed - 12/15/11
Another GOP debate? More of the interminable circus? Weariness prompts a motivation check. Oh yeah, only long cultivated and insurmountable disgust over Newt Gingrich. The Pied Piper of Political Pathology has to swim in chum filled waters, likely a bloated target for too many opportunistic jaws. Thrown into this scenario, Newt’s well honed stage presencing may...