Sunday, September 30, 2007

Arsene Wenger

"success in life is a happy turn of events that you make with your own attitude"

interview

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A Marijuana User Gets Arrested Every 38 Seconds in America

PhD research at its best.

and check this cool gizmo thingy

"Enforcing marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers between $10 billion and $12 billion annually and has led to the arrest of nearly 20 million Americans. Nevertheless, some 94 million Americans acknowledge having used marijuana during their lives. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals for their use of a substance that poses no greater - and arguably far fewer - health risks than alcohol or tobacco. A better and more sensible solution would be to tax and regulate cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol and tobacco."

read more

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Amazing bottle makes any dirty water drinkable

The creator hopes that the bottle could be a life-saver for refugees in disaster regions where access to clean drinking water is vital. The bottles can distill either 4,000 litres or 6,000 litres without changing the filter. Mr Pritchard's bottle can clean up any water - including faecal matter - using a special filter.

read more | digg story

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Walter Benjamin

"I feel profoundly identified with Roger's intense personal involvement with Benjamin's story -- who indeed can feel that they "get" Benjamin, or are even beginning to get a glimmer, without finding themselves becoming addicted to both the thought and the man? (As Benjamin said (roughly quoting here from memory), "thought can be as intoxicating as any narcotic, not to mention that drug we take in solitude, ourselves."

Some good conversations about Walter Benjamin's death and place in cultural studies canon

Naomi Klein talks shock therapy

"Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism".

Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine".

link