If racism has become a non-issue for minorities, as some believe, how odd that it remains a widespread and life-destroying influence on white males, which seems the basic premise of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor.
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My Weekly Credo
Not every offer to help is a passive-aggressive effort to assert control.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo
Bureaucracy is the most practical cure for irreconcilable differences.
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Why things don’t work
Incompetence trumps intention.
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A reason for Blackberries
A Blackberry’s best use is for the polite avoidance of conversation in elevators.
Continue readingMy Weekly Credo: The burden of caring
Bad things don’t happen to people who don’t care.
Continue readingSpontaneous Creation
Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, by Vladimir Arkhipov, Fuel Publishing, 304 pages, 180 color pictures, 2006. ISBN 0-9550061-3-9 Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Book Works, 158 pages, 2005. ISBN 1 870699-81-5 Two recent books from abroad attempt to document the spontaneous art making of ordinary people, one broadly and one eccentrically. Folk Archives, from Britain, covers a wide range of vernacular expression, from protest posters to shop signs. Home Made, also published in Britain, takes a certain kind of ingenuity as its subject, specifically creative responses to the acute scarcity of
Continue readingPut the X back in Xmas
Whatever the War on Christmas poseurs may say, Christ is all over the place in the holiday season. But how many blow-up Xes do you see on front lawns? How often do store clerks says “Merry Xmas”? And why don’t we call it Xgiving, too? It would make for a more efficient season and add more variety at the same time.
Continue readingA Theory of Corporate Incompetence
Even the most brilliant, historically proven governing strategies can come to grief. The Russian czars relied on a track record of dimness, bureaucratic idiocy and stubbornness to create mass fatalism. But that cocoon was breached by the disasters of the Great War. Russians who had put up with their rulers’ incompetence for decades had finally had enough. Now we see our own triumphant incompetent, George W. Bush, continuing to reel from Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes even the most cynical public actually expects performance from its highest leaders. It may be premature to expect actual heads to roll, but it does seem
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