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 […]

Michael Wesch on…

I keep going back to Michael Wesch when I want to understand media, and have posted his work of 2009/10 here before. Here the first part of a very short talk from the same period is very engaging (especially min. 3:45-7:15). He summarizes here how in the pre-media (no-books) Papua New Guinea culture he had […]

Losing face in English

I woke up this morning thinking about the debate on this blog on Westerwelle. It seems to me that this is an interesting case of a person losing face in public because he is being forced to speak English. BTW, I think the discussion has showed that both sides lost face: Westerwelle was most obviously […]

JFK: We choose to go to the Moon

In the fall of 1962, when the USA was far behind the Soviet Union in its space program, JFK held his rivetting “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, proclaiming space to be the new frontier. I’d like to highlight two excerpts, with the minutes in the video […]

Question: Which thinker taught you to think?

http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/thinker.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOut on the streets of Tehran the opposition is protesting, disputing the June 12 election. The brutality being used against them by the riot police is just horrible. I’ve read that this election and the US election of 2000 are both being discussed as “stolen elections” and being compared, […]

Hunger

Helmut took out the trash a few days ago and said that a little old lady with a flashlight came round to the trash can and started poking through the trash he had just dumped. Man, this is Munich, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in the world. I was […]

My generation of dummies

I’m an early Generation Xer, born 1961. Like Obama. Neil Howe compares us very unfavorably to the Millennials (those born in the 1980s and 1990s). He calls us “The Dumbest Generation: The Kids are Alright. But Their Parents….” According to Howe, we “have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and […]