Category: Uncategorized
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For A Few Dollars More…
The New York Times has a report on the proposed law regulating oil contracts. There’s no mention of production-sharing agreements there, but there is something a little fishy about the law, which centralizes the approval procedure for contracts for the oil under regional control. Here’s the relevant text from the NYT: [The law allows] regions…
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A day late and a dollar short… (Iraqi currency cliches continue)
Steve at Cows and Graveyards correctly connects the upcoming oil extraction agreements in Iraq to peak oil. Yes, Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and as the global demand (mostly due to 40% increase in yearly consumption caused by the burgeoning Chinese economy) outstrips supply, prices will skyrocket unless the US…
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See it. Film it. Change it. Blog about it.
Project Witness provides training and video cameras for local groups to use in their human rights advocacy campaigns. They have recently begun releasing these videos online. Check out US films like Outlawed, Rights on the Line, or The Day After Diallo, or focus your attention on the international scene: Between Two Fires dwells on Northern…
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More rankings pablum guaranteed to leave gourmets unsatisfied
The 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index looks like a better indicator than the Philosophical Gourmet’s reputation survey. This study weighted journals and then counted publications, so it’s fairly straight-forward. The controversy surrounding philosophy rankings is about to get hotter, because state schools seem to be more productive than Ivies! Michigan State U. CUNY Graduate Center…
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Philosophical Rankings: Why are we still arguing about this?
Brian Leiter writes: …[W]hat is more appalling is the nonsense about Penn State, Stony Brook, and Vanderbilt. First of all, they don’t have good departments, they have weak departments overall (with honorable exceptions etc. etc. etc.), whether you’re interested in philosophy of language or ancient philosophy or Continental philosophy. He’s responding to this claim in…
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What’s big, and red, and doesn’t seem to eat rocks anymore?
For a little more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, Phil Agre produced the Red Rock Eater News Service, a collection links and commentaries (“notes and recommendations,” he called it) that he distributed via e-mail. Agre is a professor of information studies at UCLA, and my intellectual identity was partially formed while reading his…
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Well, now we know who to blame for Bowling Alone….
Civil society starts here, with György Konrád‘s book of essays on the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution, Antipolitics: “Antipolitics is the political activity of those who don’t want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power. Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; it is…
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Clear and Present Dangers
“It is said that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the…
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Are we talking Tuskegee Airmen, or Tuskegee Experiment?
“…if they do get down to asking the forty-something asking-and-telling homos, something very, very calamitous will have to have happened.” –David Rakoff
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‘Hell is empty/And all the devils are here.’
It’s probably obvious to most people, but the complete works of Shakespeare are available online. I just discovered this, and am currently reading The Tempest. Some of my favorite Shakespeare lines appear in that play: PROSPERO Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took…