Nationwide protest

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, self-appointed neighborhood watchman, who followed and killed Trayvon Martin inside his own gated community (!) is a blatant example of racism. As has been said repeatedly, if a white 29 year old man had come up to a gated community and gunned down a 17-year old white boy, all hell […]

Margaret Thatcher – Elvis Costello: Tramp the Dirt Down

The death of Margaret Thatcher has led to an outburst of celebration in the UK that has been absolutely astonishing to someone like myself, who grew up in the USA and was on the outside looking in. I had no idea that her policies could excite anything like these emotions so many years later. What […]

Gabby Giffords

Gabbi Giffords’ moving speech for gun control on Jan 30 (link to her handwritten notes): Before the shooting (speaking here after a Tea Party attack on her office, 25 March 2010): Her recovery (great husband!):

Is privacy the new taboo?

I’ve been online now for just over 5 years. Recently I accidentally found the first video I made of myself, where I self-consciously wondered whether the information broadcasting movement I was about to join had any relevance, or whether it was a half-witted attempt to engage in broader but seemingly disconnected discourses, as half-witted as […]

Charles Ferguson

I watched Inside Job the other day, the Acadamy Award winning 2010 documentary about the 2008 financial meltdown, directed by Charles Ferguson, and had a bit of a meltdown of my own. As the blurb to the posted interview with Ferguson states “the film makes the powerful case that an out-of-control finance industry took advantage […]

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

Naderev Saño, the Philippines’ lead negotiator, gives a brilliant, emotional 3 minute speech at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Doha, on 6 November 2012. It is enormously difficult to keep your chin up as a negotiator in such a slow and tedious process. But do you always have to keep your chin up? Can’t […]

Chris Rock – Message for White Voters

A sketch by comedian Chris Rock. By the way, it still gets me every time that a man whose mother is white and whose father is black is automatically considered black. How racist is that? Identity is a choice.