dissent
September 20, 2009
- Excerpt from A HOUSE NOT MADE WITH HANDS. The man in the wide-awake hat and darned coat paused in the taproom doorway of the Midland Counties Arms Hotel to stamp the snow from his boots. His sharp black eyes were full of whimsy as he took in the scene. Flames as long as posthorns raced up the chimney and the bottle-glass windows were ...
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July 22, 2009
- One floor below our flat in Mumbai, an Iranian revolution was taking place. As I flashback to those years, I clearly recall the face of the woman. She was plump and beautiful, a Madhubala (famous Indian actress known for her looks) on steroids. I do not remember her name, but I distinctly recall that she seemed to be forever in the balcony. She lived with her parents and brother, Mohammed, a ...
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April 3, 2009
- In a speech he gave at the Waldorf Astoria nearly 48 years ago to the day, on April 27, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said: "A wise man once said, an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." One can't help but think that, if given the chance, he would advise President Barack Obama to remember this when considering foreign policy.
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February 2, 2009
- As China faces its own domestic financial crisis, the leadership has received increasing criticism from within the country, most notably the December 10, 2008 Charter ’08, a petition originally signed by 300 dissidents, now with perhaps thousands of additional signatures. Fears of destabilization have produced a wave of crackdowns designed to squelch dissent before a series of politically ...
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January 19, 2009
- On December 10, 2008, more than 2000 Chinese citizens released a signed petition they called Charter 08 to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The name, Charter 08, came from the famous Charter 77 dissident group formed in cold war Czechoslovakia. The Chinese document calls for an end to one party rule, to be replaced by a system based on human rights ...
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December 30, 2008
- What is real and what is unreal?
In a state of delirium, pumped up with medication, laid up in bed, swathed in white from a lightbulb that hurts the eyes, I can see clearly. I can see the reality of the unreal, the unreality of the real. A cliché would refer to it as truth being stranger than fiction.
You said in art there was no difference between the true and the false. Both could ...
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December 26, 2008
- An open letter to Gerry Brown, California Attorney General: On December 31st, Time Warner Cable plans to pull fourteen public access channels and studios in Los Angeles a city whose name has, for generations, been synonymous with media and broadcasting. This move will act to solidify recent gains in media consolidation, as well as set a dangerous precedent for television programming ...
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December 24, 2008
- On December 31st, Time Warner Cable plans to pull fourteen public access channels and fourteen studios, in Los Angeles, a city whose name has, for generations, been synonymous with media and broadcasting. This move will act to solidify recent gains in media consolidation, as well as set a dangerous precedent for television programming nationally.Those of us born on the cusp of the McCarthy era, ...
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December 25, 2007
- "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic ...
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