Why we shouldn't worry about Mexican immigration.
It is not politically correct today to say that America is fundamentally a Protestant country, or that a specific form of religion is critical to its success as a democracy. Yet as historical facts, these statements are undoubtedly true, and they are the premise of Who Are We? , Samuel Huntington's new book. The United States, he argues, is a liberal democracy based on certain universal political principles regarding liberty and equality, summed up traditionally as the American Creed. But the country's success as a free and prosperous democratic society was not due simply to the goodness of these principles or the strength of America's formal institutions. There was a crucial supplement: cultural values that Huntington describes as "Anglo-Protestant." Had America been settled by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics rather than British Protestants, it would not have been the United States we know, but ...
Mensagens
The Nazi Seduction or
Why do Hitler and the Nazis continue to fascinate?
T he deluge of books about Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler apparently knows no end. In addition to those here under review, dozens of others have appeared in the past two or three years alone, and many more are sure to come. By contrast, scholarly study of Stalinism and the gulag is relatively neglected. As Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag , although "some eighteen million people passed through this massive system," we pay far less attention to Stalin's victims than we do to Hitler's. Many of the millions killed during the Stalin era were simply "driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp—a form of murder no less 'industrialized' and anonymous than that used by the Nazis." But no archival film-footage records these scenes that played out behind the Iron Curtain, no harrowing photos...
Simpsons ties knot with gay marriage
The feverish public debate in the US over gay marriages is to be played out in a forthcoming episode of The Simpsons, it emerged today. The show's producers have revealed that the cartoon classic will feature an episode in which gay marriage is legalised in Springfield. Hints about the plot line were dropped by show producer Matt Groening at a San Diego comic convention, where he revealed that Homer Simpson becomes a minister by registering online. One early favourite is billionaire Monty Burns' ever-devoted sidekick Waylon Smithers, who has been revealed in previous episodes to have a Mr Burns screensaver and dreams of a naked Mr Burns jumping out of a birthday cake. Other candidates include Homer's cohorts at the nuclear plant, Carl and Lenny, as well as Moe the bartender, the Reverend Lovejoy, Principal Skinner and Comic Book Guy. The gay marriage-themed episode is scheduled to air in January.
On July 26, 2004, numerous fires were burning across the Iberian Peninsula, testing firefighters in Spain and Portugal, who are trying to keep the blazes from destroying parks, historic towns, and people’s homes. In this image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite, a large concentration of fires dots northern Portugal (top left), another cluster appears around Lisbon, about three-quarters of the way down the coast, and a few are visible near the southern coast as well. Over the course of the next day, one of the fires in the Algarve region in the south of Portugal had grown considerably.
Bloody Hell of the week:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
Already praised by MacroMedia newsletter, Edge and Sl...
Diversity and development
IT IS, of course, fitting that the United Nations celebrate diversity. The hundreds of flags in front of its headquarters, and the 365 languages into which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated on an official UN website, are just two symbols of the institution’s commitment to the world’s ethnic mosaic. But this week’s Human Development Report, from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), takes the commitment to diversity further. Released each year since 1990, the Human Development Reports provide an update on the fight against poverty around the world, each time with a new theme. This year’s report ties two themes together, arguing that respect for diversity is integral to development. State-builders in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan will no doubt be thumbing through the report with interest, in the hope of learning something about how to make fractious ethnic groups work together for prosperity. It also offers them an opp...
The Top 10 Misconceptions about Translation
10. Paying promptly for the services of a plumber/lawyer/doctor is a must. However, the translator doesn't mind waiting indefinitely for payment...
9. Anybody with two years of high school language (or a foreign-tongued grandmother) can translate.
8. A good translator doesn't need a dictionary.
7. There's no difference between translation and interpretation.
6. Translators don't mind working nights and weekends at no extra charge.
5. Translators don't need to understand what they're translating.
4. A good translator doesn't need proofing or editing.
3. Translation is just typing in a foreign language.
2. A translator costs $49.95 at Radio Shack and runs on two 'C' batteries.
And the #1 misconception about translation and translators is:
1. The document that took a team of 20 people two months to put together can be translated overnight by one person and still ...
[Aaaah You'll like this :-) ]
The «Bilbao effect» or the «Look at ME!» architecture:
The true architectural icon is a building that is unmistakable, often provocative, and carries cultural signals far beyond its purpose. Obvious iconic landmarks include the Sydney opera house, the Pompidou centre, even the new Scottish parliament building (...)
But there are also less significant buildings that aspire to iconic status but do not always deserve the profile their sponsors demand. In this context, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has had a significant effect. (...) Its significance as a building is less in its extraordinary shape and surface (which many now consider formulaic) than in the popularity of its formal abstraction.
Read more from this speech to the Architects' Journal/Bovis Awards for Architecture dinner.
English Spelling, aaaaaah, what a lark!
More miserable news about language, then. More reason to pop off to the nearest wall and bang our heads against it. According to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary , half the people using it these days are stumped by the difference between " reign " and " rein ", and " pouring " and " poring ".
However, before we start to share out our cyanide capsules, perhaps we should pause. I, for one, am heartened to hear that people are looking things up in dictionaries at all. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that "everyone" now relies on spell-checker programs, just as they rely on grammar checkers for their punctuation.
Whenever I have pointed out that spell-checkers are inferior to dictionaries because, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you get a definition as well, I have met with pitying looks. Yet evidently - Hooray! - there are still a few people willi...
Don't judge a book by its cover, but this one sure is enticing and inebriating *-D
This book is like a good bottle of wine, behind which there is always a good story, one often embellished as the bottle is emptied. What happy symposiast, wandering home through the darkened jasmine-scented streets of ancient Babylon or Athens, would fault the storyteller or the wine for having made a better tale than mere evidence would warrant? Here too can be found inspiration—and new avenues for scholarly pursuit. (Short review by American Scientist) and First Chapter courtesy of Princeton University Press )
Now they tell us: CDs aren't forever after all
CD deterioration may start with a smattering of pinpricks or what appears to be rust creeping inwards from the edge of the disc. Certain tracks jump or emit clicking noises. Eventually, the CD loses all data and is better used as a shiny coaster . [Hah!]
Music lovers may need to haul their dusty record players out of retirement. It seems records really do keep spinning right round, baby.
In fact, vinyl records can be played even without a record player or electricity.
All it would take is a horn of paper with a needle on the end, and a pencil in the record's hole to keep it spinning (...)
[Meu Deus...]
I know, I know, my thoughts exactly:
Do we need another book about Hitler and Stalin ?
This review seems thoroughly convinced of that:
The huge books about war and the dictators keep coming, as if the historians were queuing up to dump their slabs of learning on a grave. We should be grateful. The sheer weight of these volumes, to say nothing of their weighty research, keeps the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb.
None the less, a reader facing yet another tome is bound to ask whether there is much left to be said about those two monsters. But a few pages of Richard Overy's new book are enough to remove doubt. This is a superb work, comprehensive and written with rare fire and intelligence.
Like many good historians, Overy was compelled to write by a sense of having been misled. He was taught, not so long ago, that the reason why so many millions obeyed and worshipped Hitler and Stalin was a simple one - fear of state terror. Overy sets out to show th...
El Che y The Motorcycle Diaries , in a reassessment of the Sixties' most enduring icon, from The Guardian /Observer :
'Ironically, Che's life has been emptied of the meaning he would have wanted it to have,' asserts Jorge Castañeda, author of Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara . 'Whatever the left might think, he has long since ceased to be an ideological and political figure.' Castañeda insists, though, that Che still possesses 'an extraordinary relevance. He's a symbol of a time when people died heroically for what they believed in. People don't do that any more.'
(There's another Che-based movie in the works, a Benicio Del Toro vehicle helmed by Steven Soderbergh, plus Javier Bardem that I adore :-)
After 500 years, Leonardo’s fragile portrait is starting to warp
[priceless caption] Leonardo’s most celebrated work, the Mona Lisa, has deteriorated so significantly over the last year that conservation experts at the Louvre have ordered urgent analysis of its condition, to be carried out early next year when the work is removed from its current display case and installed in a new climate-controlled vitrine. It will then be moved to a new, specially-designed gallery as part of a E2.3 million project paid for by the Japanese company, Nippon TV. Although this project was announced a few years ago, it is finally coming to fruition. A routine study of the work in May revealed that the thin poplar wood on which it is painted has begun to warp. Although the warping has occurred at the rate of “less than a millimetre” over the past year, according to Vincent Pomarede, chief curator of the Louvre’s paintings, one side is buckling at a faster rate than the other, causin...
The dark side of the poetry world
A muckraking website aims to blow the lid off the cozy practices of contemporary poetry.
The site has poets talking. Since its launch on April 1, Foetry has racked up almost 600 comments and questions, from the laudatory to the outraged, at one point receiving 1,000 page views in a single day -- quite a crowd for gossip about new verse .
Perhaps the clearest point Foetry proves is one neither defenders nor detractors notice. Randall Jarrell wrote 50 years ago that the loudest controversies in the arts were matters "from which the art could be almost wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality." The chat and the charges on Foetry's message boards are all about poets, but rarely about their poems: Aesthetic matters are almost completely absent, as they would be in a court of law.
Read on from The Boston Globe and the Foetry website, already featuring repartee with said newspaper :-)
The Tease of Memory
Psychologists are dusting off 19th-century explanations of déjà vu. Have we been here before?
" In the summer of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne visited a decaying English manor house known as Stanton Harcourt, not far from Oxford. He was struck by the vast kitchen, which occupied the bottom of a 70-foot tower. "Here, no doubt, they were accustomed to roast oxen whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl," he wrote in an 1863 travelogue, Our Old Home.
Hawthorne wrote that as he stood in that kitchen, he was seized by an uncanny feeling: "I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother's kitchen." He was certain that he had never actually seen this room or anything like it. And yet for a moment he was caught in what he describ...
Was missing Jayne Anne Phillips since " Machine Dreams "
Here's a comeback (maybe just for me ;) from Granta:
'Termite's Birthday, 1959'
" Lark is only seventeen but has a lot of responsibilites. Looking after Termite is one of them: 'Nonie is our guardian and our aunt but I'm Termite's sister. In a way he's more mine than anyone else's. He'll be mine for longer, is what Nonie says.'
Nonie hates the idea of blue cake, she says it looks like something old and spoiled, too old to eat, though it's light and delicate and flavoured with anise. But Termite likes it, and he likes pink cake that tastes of almond, and mostly he likes me putting the batter in different bowls, holding them in the crook of his arm while I bend over him, stirring. I tell him how fast a few drops of colour land dense as tinted black and turn the mix pastel. I make three thin layers, pale blue and pink and yellow, and I put three pans in to bak...
There's a extensive article on The New Yorker about the Madrid bombings.
Find the printer-friendly version here :
Here's an excerpt:
" At 7:37 A.M., as a train was about to enter Madrid’s Atocha station, three bombs blasted open the steel cars, sending body parts through the windows of nearby apartments. The station is in Madrid’s center, a few blocks from the Prado Museum. Within seconds, four bombs exploded on another train, five hundred and fifty yards from the station. The bombs killed nearly a hundred people. Had the explosions occurred when the trains were inside the station, the fatalities might have tallied in the thousands; a quarter of a million people pass through Atocha every workday. The trains at that hour were filled with students and young office workers who live in public housing and in modest apartment complexes east of the city. Many were immigrants, who had been drawn by the Spanish economic boom. "
On related news:
"El equipo de...
And the useful link of the day:
Bug Me Not
Do you know all those websites that don't let you have the information you want until you register 'for free'. There are heaps of reasons why they're a bad idea:
1) They're annoying
2) They waste time
3) They take your information and who knows what they do with it
4) You might never visit the site ever again
These sites include places like newspaper sites that need you to register before you can view their articles.
THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY (full text)
1 - Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2 - The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3 - A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4 - Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5 - A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The Guardian on Saramago's loooooooong paragraphs (is this really news now or is it just the " silly season "?:
" Despite what designers like to think, the look of a book on the page doesn't often make a crucial difference to the experience of reading. José Saramago's new novel is an exception: the sentences may not always be long, but the paragraphs certainly are.
A large minority of pages contain no paragraph breaks.
Any visual relief that might be provided by dialogue is denied by the device of embedding it in the prose, with only a capital letter to denote shift of speaker. The reader hungers for the piquancy of a single inverted comma. Even when the conversations are simple, they take some disentangling: 'Forgive is just a word, Words are all we have, Where are you going now, Somewhere or other, to pick up the pieces and try and hide the scars...' The accelerated pace of speech within the prose format make the eye stumble. Overall, the ph...
Yet another interesting book review from the NYT (jeez):
(One wonders why is it sooo diff to get these people to spell Spanish right:
it's not Bartoleme but Bartolomé)
Around 500 years ago, our hitherto slowly altering world began to change, and in amazingly swift ways -- ways that have affected us all, and make it impossible ever to go back. From a small and rather miserable peninsula -- an area commonly known as Christendom or Europe -- at the southwest corner of the gigantic Eurasian landmass, men began to venture forth in frail yet efficient wooden sailing vessels across thousands of miles of ocean. Carried westward and southward by winds and currents, they discovered what they came to term the ''new world,'' although it turned out to be many new worlds.
While this development is commonplace in all our history books, and was recalled in many ways at the quincentennial celebrations a decade ago, it is important to note how extraordinary it was. This was ...
AUGUST 2004 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, when 40,000 members of the Polish underground Home Army spilled into the streets to liberate the city from its Nazi occupiers. The revolt was inspired in part by the belief that the Red Army would come to the aid of the rebels. Russian units had advanced to the eastern bank of the Vistula River and were within supporting distance of the Warsaw fighters, but once Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the First Belarussian Front, declined to intervene, the Germans were freed not only to suppress the uprising but also to carry out appalling reprisals. Stalin would later dismiss the rebellion as the act of ''a gang of criminals.'' Norman Davies, a fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, is the foremost historian of modern Poland. Of his previous books, ''God's Playground: A History of Poland'' is widely regarded as a landmark account. This new work, '' Rising '44 ,'...
Regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His sharp-shooter’s ability to catch "the decisive moment," his precise eye for design, his self-effacing methods of work, and his literate comments about the theory and practice of photography made him a legendary figure among contemporary photojournalists. His work and his approach have exercised a profound and far-reaching influence. His pictures and picture essays have been published in most of the world’s major magazines during three decades, and Cartier-Bresson prints have hung in the leading art museums of the United States and Europe (his monumental ‘The Decisive Moment’ show being the first photographic exhibit ever to be displayed in the halls of the Louvre). In the practical world of picture marketing, Cartier-Bresson left his imprint as well: he was one of the founders and...
High-flying names a far cry from good old days
Like people elsewhere in the world, the Japanese have a fondness for the good old days. My great-grandfather's "good old days" were the 1920s, a time when there were public rose gardens in Hongo, with bushes imported directly from Kew Gardens in London. That was a time when rickshaws pulled up alongside the long black walls of geisha houses, where the drivers would get on their knees to help the geisha enter the carts. In those days, the local fish sellers considered it disrespectful to ask customers to come to their shops and would instead go to the customers' kitchens, prepare the fish, clean up and leave quietly.
The war changed all that. Great-granddad's favorite maxim was: "Minshushigi ga yononaka wo dame ni shita (Democracy was the ruin of this world.)"
But even he agreed that democracy improved some things, like the names Japanese parents gave their children. "In my day, we didn't ha...
Le Temps Des Cerises
Quand nous chanterons le temps des cerises
Et gai rossignol, et merle moqueur
Seront tous en fête.
Les belles auront la folie en tête
Et les amoureux du soleil au coeur
Quand nous chanterons le temps de cerises
Sifflera bien mieux le merle moqueur
Mais il est bien court, le temps des cerises
Où l'on s'en va deux, cueillir en rêvant
Des pendant d'oreilles...
Cerises d'amour aux robes pareilles
Tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang
Mais il est bien court, le temps des cerises
Pendants de corail qu'on cueille en rêvant
Quand vous en serez au temps des cerises
Si vous avez peur des chagrins d'amour
Evitez les belles!
Moi, qui ne crains pas les peines cruelles
Je ne vivrai point sans souffrir un jour
Quand vous en serez au temps des cerises
Vous aurez aussi des peines d'amour!
J'aimerai toujours le temps des cerises
C'est de ce temps-là que je garde au coeur
Une plaie ouverte
Et Dame Fortune m...
Regarding Portugal:
" Percepção vs Realidade
Portugal ainda é visto como um país simpático, “easy-going”, com um clima ameno, de serviços e hospitaleiro. Ou seja, a percepção dos turistas não anda longe da realidade. A costa e as praias portuguesas continuam a ser um driver da nossa oferta e posicionamento turístico. No entanto, para muitos a costa Mediterrânica dos nossos vizinhos, a Cote d'Azur francesa, as praias gregas e a ainda por explorar e com um tremendo potencial costa Adriática, constituem alguns dos destinos turísticos de preferência e difíceis de competir com.
Um possível caminho?
A imagem global de Portugal tal como Henrique Agostinho (Sociedade Ponto Verde) a sumarizou é a de um "país do conforto". Somos um país confortável que "vende roupa, do tipo desportivo casual, roupa para ir para a esplanada e para ir passear à beira mar, nada de roupa de moda que isso é para os italianos". Como tal e em perfeita sintonia com o Henrique subs...