Hat tip to Lou Proyect NY Times Sunday Book Review March 28, 2010 Who’s White? By LINDA GORDON THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE By Nell Irvin Painter Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95 Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, [...]

Not much discussion these days on this blog about China, but while everything else was going on, events in the US and China have led to a pretty bad impasse, revolving around China’s pegged and undervalued currency, but also pointing to the probable train wreck at the nearing end of China’s historic “market socialism” growth-surge. [...]

Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it’s down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet. FULL

The movement led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is poised to make a dramatic return to the forefront of Iraq’s Shi’ite politics, combining its success in recent elections with the anticipated elevation of its leader’s religious status. The Sadrists are the main faction in the Iraqi National Alliance, which is projected to have won 68 [...]

Pig in a poke. The original word was poche, French for ‘pocket.’ Or bag. The old trick was to sell someone a suckling pig, which was wriggling inside a sack. When the buyer gets home and unties the sack to inspect the family holiday supper, voila!, it’s a stray cat. Gotcha! Obama’s health care bill [...]

[Hat tip to Dennis O'Neill.] from Arundhati Roy The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given [...]

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same… FULL

EVEN THE GLOBAL WARMING ACCEPTERS ARE IN DENIAL “Now, wait a minute,” I imagine you readers objecting, “aren’t the people who accept the theory of abrupt climate change the good guys?” But they’re in denial too; they’re just in denial about a different set of propositions, social propositions rather than climatological ones. There’s so much [...]

A pregnant development… On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team [...]

Chapter 4: The Word Humiliated (written by Jacques Ellul, 1984) The invasion of the verbal realm by images results in role reversal and domination, leading us to another characteristic of our modern reality: the humiliation of the word. 1. Defacto Devaluation No one consciously tried to bring it about, yet the situation of the word [...]