Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
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Tag Archives: books
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
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Posted in Back Bay Books
Tagged books, capitalism, Creating, ecology, industrial, natural, nature, Next, planet earth, revolution, the
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Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
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Posted in Ballantine Books
Tagged A, books, Desert, ecology, in, nature, planet earth, season, Solitaire:, the, Wilderness
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Former Obama Official Compares Glenn Beck’s Attacks to Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hates"
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In a new book, former senior Obama administration official Cass Sunstein compares former Fox News host Glenn Beck’s harsh attacks on his record to George Orwell’s 1984, and blasts what he calls the “the true terribleness of the contemporary confirmation process.”
Sunstein, a former law professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago, was nominated in 2009 to be director of the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a job that quickly took on the sobriquet of “regulatory czar.” His long record of books and speeches quickly became fodder for Beck, who dubbed Sunstein “the most dangerous man in America.” In his soon-to-be-released book, Simpler: The Future of Government, Sunstein notes that Beck “developed what appeared to be a kind of obsession with me” and says that the unrelenting criticism from this tea party leader and other conservative pundits triggered more threatening messages:
In Orwell’s 1984, there is a brilliant, powerful, and frightening scene of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which party members must watch a film depicting national enemies. (As it happens, the leading enemy is named Goldstein.) At times, Beck’s attacks on me, featuring my smiling face, were not entirely unlike those scenes. A new website was created, stopsunstein.com, filled with inflammatory quotations, some taken out of context to suggest that I endorsed views that I rejected and was merely describing.
I began to receive a lot of hate mail, including death threats, at my unlisted home address. One of them stated, “If I were you I would resign immediately. A well-paid individual, who is armed, knows where you live.”
Beck wasn’t the only right-wing leader who had Sunstein in his sights. In 2009, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, bashed Sunstein as “a radical animal rights extremist who makes PETA look like cheerleaders with pooper-scoopers,” and he alleged that Sunstein “wants to give legal standing to animals so they can sue you for eating meat.”
In his book, Sunstein’s response to the attacks from hunting and agriculture groups is succinct: “OMG.”
Despite all the conservative opposition to Sunstein, he survived the confirmation process and was approved by the Senate on a 57-40 vote—after having to ensure fence-sitting senators he would not in his new post ban hunting or steal guns. Following the vote, he met with Obama in the Oval Office, and Rahm Emanuel greeted him with a sarcastic exclamation: “Fifty-seven to 40! That’s a landslide!”
Mother Jones
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Former Obama Official Compares Glenn Beck’s Attacks to Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hates"
The Secret – Rhonda Byrne
READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
Genre: Spirituality
Price: $9.99
Publish Date: February 26, 2007
Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words
Seller: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc.
Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you'll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life — money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You'll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that's within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers — men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.
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Teju Cole on the "Empathy Gap" and Tweeting Drone Strikes
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“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” Thus begins a series of tweets from the writer Teju Cole, each one a famous novel’s opening line rudely interrupted by drones. He calls them “drone short stories.”
Discursive, allusive, and always thought-provoking, @tejucole stands out in a Twitterverse crowded by hashtags and throw-away jokes. The Nigerian-American writer published his debut novel, Open City, to great acclaim in 2011, but Cole may be best known (online, at least) for his “small fates” tweets about Lagos. Small Fates is inspired by the French journalistic tradition of fait divers, roughly equivalent to “news briefs.” Perfunctory accounts of crime from Nigerian newspapers are transformed with a literary, humanizing twist: “Love is so restless. When T. Dafe’s girlfriend dumped him in Surulere, he went at her with a pen knife until she was no more.​”
His drone vignettes also breathe empathy into anonymous killings that happen far away. And Cole, also an occasional Twitter essayist, previously posted a a series of tweets linking drones, Downton Abbey, the IMF, and Virgin America. It’s easy to ignore drone strikes quietly happening halfway across the world; it’s harder to ignore them when they invade our familiar cultural turf.
Seven short stories about drones.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole)
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.
4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.
Intrigued by all of the above, I telephoned Cole to ask him what it means to be a writer in the 140-character era.
Mother Jones: What was the inspiration for your drone stories?
Teju Cole: I had been thinking so intensely so much about the global war on terror, especially the heavy silence that has surrounded the use of drones to assassinate people outside this country. I just realized that we’re facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at. The weird way that things come together is that when I wrote those drone tweets, the subject was not on the front page of papers. Two, three weeks later, it’s on the front page of the New York Times and everybody is talking in a very direct way because the release of this white paper.
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Quick Reads: "Gun Guys" by Dan Baum
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By Dan Baum
KNOPF
“You would get a far better understanding,” former NRA exec J. Warren Cassidy told Time in 2001, “if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions.” In Gun Guys, author Dan Baum embeds with the flock. A Jewish Democrat from suburban New Jersey, he has been hooked on guns since childhood. Packing a sidearm and an NRA cap, Baum embarks on a pre-Newtown tour of shooting ranges, gun shows, and gun shops, tracing the rise of the AR-15, unpacking crime stats, and challenging the notion that America suffers from an “epidemic of gun violence.” He tackles this polarizing subject with an anthropologist’s eye, and in the end wonders if the left’s anti-gun sentiment distracts from a progressive agenda that working-class gun guys might support—if only they didn’t think Obama was coming for their arsenal.
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#7: Fulcrum 20019-301 Battery-Operated LED Clip-On Task Light
Posted in eco-friendly, GE, Greenworks, LG, Uncategorized
Tagged books, business, change, energy, health, security, style, toys
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#10: Seeds of Change S11034 Certified Organic Thai Basil
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Tagged books, canada, culture, gardening, lawn & garden, movies & tv, oxo, time, toys, water
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"Our Sassy Black Friend" Jamaica Kincaid
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Jamaica Kincaid’s office at Claremont-McKenna college, where she is a literature professor, is filled with hints of her political leanings. There’s an Obama mug, a statuette of the Lincoln memorial, and—”just for provocation,” she insists—a miniature bust of Karl Marx. When I showed up to interview her a few weeks before the election, and the topic inevitably arose, Kincaid paused abruptly and looked down at her outfit in mock horror. “I’m not wearing my Obama T-shirt!” she exclaimed. “I rushed out of the house! This is serious—it’s a talisman. I wear it every day.”
Her political sensibilities are not surprising, given the prominence of class and race in her work, not to mention her personal history. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in colonial Antigua, Kincaid came to the United States at 16, sent by her cash-strapped family to work as an au pair in Scarsdale, the tony New York City suburb. By 25, Kincaid had landed a staff writer job at The New Yorker, where she would remain for 20 years. Now 63, she has churned out a dozen books—including Annie John, Mr. Potter, and Autobiography of My Mother—hauled in countless awards, and, to top it off, has stayed startlingly hip: She’s hooked on Game of Thrones and Homeland, and when her cellphone goes off, the ringtone is Jay-Z and Kanye’s “Ni**as in Paris.”
Out next week, her new book, See Now Then, reveals just how current she really is. Her first novel in nearly a decade, it is very loosely based on the dissolution of her marriage to composer Allen Shawn (son of William, former editor of the New Yorker.) It’s a stark, modern anatomy of married life that packs in everything from a cross-dressing neighbor to a Nintendo-junkie son. In our wide-ranging chat, Kincaid talked about her motherly shortcomings, converting to Judaism, and her brief career singing backup for a celebrity drag queen.
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Posted in GE, Uncategorized, Venta
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