December 2010
37 posts
The Corporation →
An extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance, its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit. After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the...
No one less →
Yimou Zhang, who also directed Hero and The House of Flying Daggers, captures the intrinsic character of the Chinese people indelibly in his 1999 Not One Less (Yi ge dou bu neng shao)—a neo-realistic Chinese drama of high production value using numerous non-actors who play characters using their real names. Set primarily in a rural mountain village, a thirteen-year old girl illustrates the...
Red Rose — by Armik
flamenco guitar...
me siento volar
Godless Constitution →
[United States of America’s] Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation between church and state.” John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans—the fundamentalists of their day—would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast.” The...
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism →
Richard Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position — and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. A fiery, funny, powerful [TED] Talk.
Ethiopia: the Color and Identity Issue →
Seleda.com: We Ethiopians have a preoccupation with categorization by Qlat [skin tone, fairness]: qey, qey-dama, Teym, Tqur, etc. Is that a relatively modern construct? Is there any relationship with “color” as it is understood in the West? Is it the same preoccupation with shade as what we see in other African countries who have colonial histories with European colonizers, where the...
“Whatever with the past has gone, the best is always yet to come.”
– Lucy Larcom
2 tags
Madagascar - Memorable Quotes
Alex the Lion: Did he just say “Grand Central Station,” or “My aunt’s constipation”?
Alex the Lion: The wild? Are you nuts? That is the worst idea I have ever heard! Melman the Giraffe: It’s unsanitary! Marty the Zebra: The penguins are going, so why can’t I? Alex the Lion: Because the penguins are psychotic!
Marty the Zebra: I’m ten years old....
“The difference between an identity which is mine and I eagerly recognize as...”
– Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline
C’est la vie …
US embassy cables →
Ethiopian intelligence chief gives rare interview. — Wikileaks
5 tags
Mulugeta Kahsay - Habel Terekiba (ኅብል ተረኺባ)
To avoid falling into sentimentalism, we must not weep. With sentimentalism one cannot understand death. Sentimentalism belongs to the messianic vision of the world, which, since it expects a single man to transform the universe, inspires lamentation, discouragement, and despondency as soon as this man disappears. — Thomas Sankara
Quoted from “a death that must enlighten and strengthen...
Ethiopian Solo Piano
“The underground nightlife of Jiddah’s elite youth is thriving and...”
– a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia, quoted in a memo recently leaked by Wikileaks.
Assange 'not responsible for security breaches' →
says Kevin Rudd, Australia’s foreign minister.
Don't Shoot The Messenger →
Assange, editor and founder of Wikileaks, writes:
“Don’t shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths.”
“In what bizarro world are donations to Wikileaks blocked by PayPal, Visa and...”
– An Australian
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different...”
– Albert Einstein
7 tags
Tequila Party →
If the Reps have to fear the Tea Party, there comes the Tequila Party for the Dems.
“If the WikiLeaks site did not exist, Israel would have to invent it.”
– Sever Plocker, columnist for the daily Yediot Ahronot newspaper