en vrac sur diigo 11/02/2007

Friends of Washoe Annotated

Our beloved friend Washoe passed
away Tuesday evening, October 30, at 8:00, after a brief illness. At
the time of her passing she was at home at CHCI, with her family and
closest friends.

Washoe was 42 years old, a long
life for a female chimpanzee. Most females in captivity live
an average of 33.5 years.

The Armenian Resolution: Pure Grandstanding Annotated

No one can deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed: Western sources, and Armenian eyewitness survivors, attest to that fact. But to this day no one has found the Ottoman “smoking gun” that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt—and don’t we want a rather high bar of proof for something as serious as genocide?—that the authorities in Istanbul ordered the “deliberate and systematic destruction” of the Armenians in the eastern part of the Empire.

Steny Hoyer tried to reassure the Turks by telling them that this resolution is “not about your government.” The Majority Leader, unlike some in the press,9 seems to realize that it was not the Turkish government that killed Armenians—it was the old Ottoman imperial one. And one might reasonably wonder why the modern Turks are so paranoid about claims of genocide being perpetrated by their predecessor regime. However, that scimitar cuts both ways: one might also ask why the Democrats in Congress are so eager to pass a meaningless, toothless resolution condemning a government that hasn’t existed for 85 years— in the process estranging us even further from one of our few close allies in the Muslim world—when the historical record fails to support their opportunistic legislation?

History News Network Annotated

Turkey has been the strongest ally that the United States has had in the Middle East since the end of WW II. The Marshall Plan started with Northern tier states like Turkey and Greece. Turkey joined NATO and was a key player in the American victory in the Cold War. As a secular government, Turkey stood against the rising tide of Muslim radicalism. To the extent that Turkey is moderating its long-term secular militancy, and moving toward fair elections, it may be providing a model for a moderate, democratic Middle East. Its economy is growing rapidly, foreign investment is in the billions. Turkey is in short, almost everything the US could have asked for in the Middle East.

But the Bush administration has, during the past five years, increasingly thrown away this asset, and now is in danger of losing a close and valued ally altogether.

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium Annotated

My conclusion from all these guesstimates is this: the cost of a search is about .3 of a cent. The value of a search is between 3 cents and 30 cents per search. It's a good business to be in.

Americans are Tourists of History Annotated

Milan Kundera once famously wrote that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit” and the primary aesthetic of totalitarian regimes, in which it facilitates a false sense of community and the idea of a universal “brotherhood of man.” It is no coincidence that we have had an extraordinary embrace of kitsch in this country in the wake of 9/11 and coincident with the rise of broad censorship of political debate, the enactment of the USA Patriot Act and its broad restriction of civil rights, and the selling of a war of aggression to the American public on the false premise of national defense. Thus, an American public can acquiesce to its government’s aggressive political and military policies when that public is constantly reassured by the comfort offered by kitsch patriotic objects, security consumerism, and the narrative that we are innocent and unknowing. In the comforting world of kitsch and in our tourism of history, torture cannot exist.

History News Network Annotated

racism is the reason the United States did not establish a European-style welfare system. He provides as an example of the dynamic what happened to Harry Truman's plan to create a system of national health insurance. Despite overwhelming public approval of the plan whites in the South torpedoed it out of fear that hospitals would be integrated.

America in the 1950s was a middle-class society, to a far greater extent than it had been in the 1920s--or than it is today. Social injustice remained pervasive: Segregation still ruled in the South, and both overt racism and overt discrimination against women were the norm throughout the country. Yet ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation's prosperity as never before. And, on the other side, the rich were a lot less rich than they had been a generation earlier.

The conventional wisdom of our time is that while this is a bad thing, it's the result of forces beyond our control. But the story of the Great Compression is a powerful antidote to fatalism, a demonstration that political reform can create a more equitable distribution of income--and, in the process, create a healthier climate for democracy.

Calenda - Les Métamorphoses du Texte Annotated

Peut-on encore soutenir l’idée d’une maîtrise du discours dès lors que se multiplient les instances intervenant dans la production et les mutations des textes ? Il s’agit de s’interroger sur ces textes qui deviennent autre chose que des textes au sens où ce terme a pu être compris et défini jusqu’ici c’est-à-dire dans une culture qui a été celle du livre.