I was recently interviewed by the local paper. Another teacher had called the paper to recommend me for “Teacher of the Week” due to my Polska adventures, and voil: a article in the paper after living in the city less than three months.
(A few mistakes here and there, but…)
Saudi King Abdullah visited Buckingham Palace, and he received a villainous welcome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Cc_dJBKz4
Right now there is a labor shortage in Poland for the simple reason that thousands upon thousands have gone West, primarily to Ireland and the UK, seeking work. Off the top of my head I can think of five people I know who are now in the UK: two former students and three friends.
But this leaves Poland itself short. So it’s doing what the UK did: look to the East.
Warsaw, Poland 9 October, 2007 With the failure of the Polish Government’s efforts to attract Polish workers back to Poland, Chinese and Indian workers will be brought to Poland in order to make up for the severe labor shortage that exists in the country. (Poland Looks To China And India For Help)
Ahmadinejad is indeed a nut:
Not since the prime minister of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada presented an address claiming that UFOs posed a mortal threat to the future of mankind has the United Nations been treated to such a bizarre spectacle.
Many people believe the greatest threat to world peace concerns Iran’s nuclear programme, so there was understandably great interest at this week’s general assembly in New York when the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took the platform.
But instead of seeking to reassure delegates that Iran’s nuclear intentions were purely benign, Mr Ahmadinejad took advantage of his official visit to a country deemed – in the lexicon of the Iranian Revolution – “the Great Satan” to embark on a discourse about the wonders of the 12th Imam. (Will the 12th Imam cause war with Iran? – Telegraph)
It appears that he may be wanting war as much as any warmonger Christians — those hoping to hasten Jesus’ return — here in the States.
Madeleine L’Engle, author of one of the most famous books in the adolescent literature canon, A Wrinkle in Time, died last week. (Madeleine L’Engle: News)
A Wrinkle in Time was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and it’s one that has stayed with me for twenty-some years now. I read it again in college for the required course on adolescent lit, and it was just as enchanting in my early twenties as it had been twelve or so years earlier.
Last year: Landis, Ulrich, Basso.
This year: Vinokourov, Moreni, and Rassmussen.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the Tour again. What’s the point? It’s no longer a contest of who has the most endurance, who trained the most, who has the most — dare I use THE sports cliche? — heart.
It’s who can best hide his doping.
Anyone who wins a stage, a title, the Tour itself will now be immediately suspect.
Recently I found this report:
Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation’s borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic. (Ynetnews)
I guess the CIA would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pesky kids…
From Reuters, on the UK plots:
“To think that these guys were a sleeper cell and somehow were able to plan this operation from the different places they were, and then orchestrate being hired by the NHS so they could get to the UK, then get jobs in the same area I think that’s a planning impossibility,” said Bob Ayres, a former U.S. intelligence officer now at London’s Chatham House think tank.
“A much more likely scenario is they were here together, they discovered that they shared some common ideology, and then they decided to act on this while here in the UK,” he said. (Yahoo! News)
Some common ideology? What could that have been?
They were all Formula One fans? They were all passionate about Jane Austen? They were all Culture Club fanatics?
That’s it — it’s Boy George’s fault…
Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.
He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.
If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)
I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.
And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.
What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.
Bush went to visit Poland during the G8 summit. Yesterday in the car, I heard two different NPR news briefs about it — not whole reports, but simply a mention in the headlines.
Neither time did the reporter refer to the Polish president by name.
The first time was something about Bush going to Poland to visit “that country’s president.”
The second time, it was a mention of Bush meeting his “Polish counterpart.”
I’ve wondered why they didn’t use the Polish president’s name. Is the Bush’s Polish counterpart’s name so difficult to pronounce? Did the reporter not know the name of the president of Poland?
For the uninformed, it’s Lech Kaczenski. (That “n” should have an accent on it.) That would be pronounced “Ka-chenee-ski.”
Can they not pronounce it? Can they not remember it? At least they didn’t have to say “president of Poland” in Polish — that is a mouthful: “Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej”
Slate has a detailed examination of the Litvinenko murder, and the nature of polonium, the ultimate smoking gun.
Fairly damning evidence against Andrei Lugovoy:
What can be said at this point is that Lugovoy was shedding radioactivity before Sasha was exposed on November 1. For example, Lugovoy contaminated the leather sofa in Boris’s study when he visited him on October 31.
Lugovoy might not have put the polonium in the teapot himself, but he did carry it around.
Sharpton’s words about Romney bring to the debate so much that it’s difficult to know where to start.
CBS News has a great editorial about this.
Sharpton is entirely justified to question Romney on his views on the racist aspects of Mormonism. Blacks were excluded from assuming positions of power until the late 1970s. We all know, of course, that Romney will condemn that aspect of his religion — it would be political suicide to do otherwise. In that sense, we’ll never know if we got a straight answer from him. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
What’s most disturbing about Romney is his religion — a cult, by the standards of many orthodox Christians. It has all the earmarks:
Oh, wait — I just described every major monotheistic religion, didn’t I?
Romney’s Mormonism will be problematic with many of his target constituency of conservative Christians. Evangelicals tend, I believe, to regard Mormons as misguided at best, Satanically deceived at best. Many of these same individuals (who would fall into the umbrella term “fundamentalists”) call Catholics non-Christians, and Catholicism is much closer, theologically, to evangelicalism than Mormonism is.
The question is whether Romney’s views on abortion and his generally conservative views — he is a Republican candidate, after all — will weigh more favorably with traditional Christian voters than his unorthodoxy.
Cho Seung-hui went through the mandatory background check before buying the guns he used in his rampage. No criminal record, no problem.
Yet…
But what kind of a background check could have discovered all this?
If if someone has recently received significant mental health care in the same state he’s trying to buy a gun, it’s conceivable that that information could be available. But since there’s no national database of such information, all one would have to do is cross the state line.
Do we want a national database to record that kind of information? I don’t think I do.
Do we want to have background checks that include interviews with former educators? Is that even feasible?
Just what kind of background check can stop someone like this from getting a gun? The only solutions I can think of involve national databases and inquiries into very personal information.
From Language Log, I recently learned about Conservapedia, which, as you might guess from the title, is a conservative Christian version of Wikipedia. (Language Log was interested in Conservapedia’s erroneous entries on linguistics.)
Conservapedia’s welcome message includes the following explanation: “Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American.”
Conservapedia’s entry on Wikipedia begins,
Because anyone can edit it, and because of its system of governance, it does not have standards similar to those of printed encyclopedias. As with any wiki, the balance of the content in Wikipedia inevitably represents what its contributors find interesting to write about, rather than what encyclopedias traditionally contain. Thus, gossip and hundreds of thousands of entries about pop songs or celebrities are pervasive on Wikipedia. (Conservapedia)
And what does Wikipedia, in turn, say about Conservapedia? Until recently, nothing. Wikipedia redirected “Conservapedia” to “Eagle Forum,” and the entry itself was in the “Articles for Deletion” bin. Most voting for deletion feel it’s not notable, it’s trivial, etc.
And then Language Log mentioned it, and over the weekend, it’s reappeared…
According to the Washington Post:
Ryan O’Neal says his weekend arrest came after he fired a gun in self-defense to prevent his son from w him with a fireplace . […]
O’Neal’s son Griffin, 42, who has a history of alcohol and problems, was visiting. O’Neal said Griffin grabbed a fireplace , started swinging it and grazed him four or five times. (Source)
He ripped an entire fireplace out of the wall and swung it at his father? That’s some strength.
In all seriousness, I’ve noticed quite a few such mistakes in the Post lately. In all fairness, this is an AP story, but still…
I heard about this on NPR coming home the other day: Jury selection begins in animal cruelty trial of PETA activists. According to the article,
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of two animal rights activists charged with animal cruelty after they were discovered dumping dead animals in a trash bin.
Adria J. Hinkle, of Norfolk, Va., and Andrew B. Cook, of Virginia Beach, Va., are charged with 21 counts each of animal cruelty in addition to charges of littering and obtaining property by false pretenses. Both volunteered with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA.
PETA on the receiving end of an animal abuse case?
According to NPR, this is all just a big misunderstanding, the PETA defense team explains. This local PETA chapter had some kind of agreement with the shelter from which Hinkle and Cook were taking the animals. They were apparently supposed to be euthanizing animals, and the volunteers’ only mistake, PETA lawyers explain, was where they chose to leave the bodies.
There’s something more than a little odd about this. PETA, euthanizing animals? That sounds about like the NRA melting down illegal assault rifles.
I went to PETA’s web site this morning to see if I could find anything out about this odd ly ironic case. Instead, I got distracted by PETA’s State of the Union Undress (Warning: the video contains nudity). Apparently, PETA thinks if it has buxom volunteers undress while talking about animal rights, it will get a more attentive audience. One has to wonder what demographic the animal rights organization is targeting with such tactics, and whether said demographic will be receptive to PETA’s vegan animal rights position.
The Wielgus scandal in Polska right now highlights the strange role the church plays in the country’s collective psyche. Intensely Catholic, Poland is a bit of a paradox when it comes down to praxis — while most Poles label themselves “Catholic,” there is a sizable percentage that doesn’t live Catholic. Birth control is not a sin, nor is missing a Sunday mass. Still, Catholicism in Poland is big, to put it crudely. As Anne Applebaum put it in Slate,
This could only have happened in post-Communist Poland. Where else would millions of people be avidly watching the live transmission of an archbishop’s inaugural mass? (Source)
I too have experienced the occasional spectator nature of Polish Catholicism. Sitting in a bar before John Paul II died, I was privy to a speculation about who could be his successor. And the discussion included names, and it had the free feeling of fans sitting in a sports bar, discussing the upcoming NFL draft.
The relationship with Communism is equally odd. While no one wants to go back to the days of informants, secret police, and closed borders, there is a longing in some quarters for a return to the “security” of Communism. Take into consideration the fact that the unemployment rate in Poland hovers around 19% and it’s clear what that “security” is.
So when these to monolithic components of Polish identity collide, it’s bound to be explosive. Even many not-so-devout Poles have a view of the Catholic church as being a stalwart moral guide under Communism. The Polish Catholic church stood up to Communism, and eventually, Communism collapsed. But priests and bishops are fallible, weak people too, it turns out, and the lure of privileges dangled by those in charge proved too tempting to some.
But why the sudden crisis, now, in 2007? John Paul II. Craig Smith writes, in the International Herald Tribune:
Perhaps the most explosive assertion by people in the church is that the taint of collaboration was known for decades but kept quiet out of respect for — or perhaps even at the behest of — Polish-born Pope John Paul II who died in 2005.
“The church didn’t want to hurt the pope, but actually, more harm was done by keeping silent,” said Zaleski at the hilltop compound of a charitable organization he runs outside of Krakow. (IHT)
So I expect there’ll be more of the same in coming months and years.
We’ve all seen the picture of the hooded executioners putting the noose around Saddam’s neck. The International Herald Tribune and the New York Times ran it on their main pages, as did al Jazeera‘s English website. The Washington Post didn’t.
What struck me about the photo was the lack of officialness about everything.
Of course, it’s difficult to tell much of anything about the room itself with such a closely cropped photo.
Still, what immediately came to mind when I first saw this was the obvious similarity to all the beheading videos released from Iraq. It hardly looks like an official state action.