Monday, June 29, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN (Monday, June 29, 2009)
(1)- CHE!! -- Of all surviving photographs of him, one in particular stands out: the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star.

(2)- BORES -- “There is no more infuriating feeling,” says the classicist Robert Greene, describing an encounter with a bore, “than having your individuality ignored, your own psychology unacknowledged.” One feels lifeless and resentful.

(3)- ORWELL ANNIVERSARY – It's been the 60th anniversary of perhaps the most famous book of the 20th Century: George Orwell's 1984. Our language added words and phrases as "thought police," "newspeak," "doublethink," and "Big Brother."

(4)- DON'T SWAT FLIES -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants Obama to use something other than a flyswatter the next time he's bedeviled by a fly in the White House. PETA is sending him a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher.

(5)- LONG READ -- San Francisco conceptual artist and journalist Jonathon Keats is trying to rejuvenate literature in the age of hyperspeed media by writing a story that will take a millennium to tell. But the story, is only nine words long.

(6)- EURO IMMIGRATION -- Western Europe has gone through two major stages in its recent immigration history. First, European leaders misjudged effects of immigration and, next, they miscalculated how hard it would be to stop.

(7)- HISS -- Susan Jacoby's Alger Hiss and the Battle for History gives both sides of the aisle a slap across the face, if only to bring them to their senses. She reminds us a contested historical event can be misunderstood by both sides.

(8)- POPULATION CONTROL -- "The freedom to breed is intolerable," ecologist Garrett Hardin declared in his famous 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin's called for population control and reviled Adam Smith's practical demography.

(9)- DEMOCRACY?? -- With the fall of the Iron Curtain, elections indeed swept the world. Yet democracy doesn’t seem to have delivered on its promise. The same old rulers are still there, ruling in much the same old way.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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