Month: November 2004
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Semblance, Sand Dunes, and Seeing
The wind is whistling through my ears as the grasslands of Namibia whip by me in a blur. I’m in the back of a pickup truck on my way to Gobabis with my friend Erin who I’d met in Gaborone. It’s cold. I reach into my sack for my toque and polar fleece. Feeling like
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The Revolution Will Not Be Outsourced
Almost everyday I hear people discussing change. Not change of clothes but change of ideas, of politics, of society. I hear this and become enlivened. The sleepy, aching parts of me wake-up with pins and needles at these idle conversations in the dining hall line up. I want to join in the discourse with the
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Trade No Match for Aid
The Fraser Institute, in a 2002 report entitled “Economic Freedom, Not More Aid, Will Transform Africa,” surprisingly argues that economic freedom is the only thing that can save Africa. The poster child of this report is Botswana, one of few African nations which has seen enormous economic growth in the past four decades. The report
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The Automated Imagination
I worry sometimes about technology. Even as I curl comfortably in its warm embrace, I wonder if it has any sinister motives. The development of electronic storage and transmission has ensured increased accessibility to artistic works, be they literary, musical, visual, the performing arts, or any combinations thereof. But the idea that the essence of
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Human Races
A modern racist’s wet-dream is fairly simple. It’s the dream that one day science, as opposed to unproven conjecture, will legitimize racist beliefs. The power that a scientific stamp of approval would lend to racists would be priceless, forever acting as the fuel for a rationalized conservative xenophobia. Luckily, attempts to legitimize racism with even
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America’s GI Joe Foreign Policy
If the U.S.A. has an ambassador to the world, it is Bruce Willis. He is an icon for the American ideal of justice; and that ideal has a lot to do with American foreign policy. In Die Hard (1988), Bruce Willis plays a police officer who takes a trip to Los Angeles to visit his
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The Terror-Alert Media
It is now common practice for the American government, whether justified or not, to heighten the ambiguous Terror Alert Level on holiday or long weekends. Any such action, however, is not without consequence; raising the Terror Alert Level at any time can potentially have an adverse and more disastrous effect on the mindset of Americans.
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Breaking Up With Network TV
Grab a bag of chips and say a silent prayer to passivity by sitting ceremoniously in front of the tube. This is how almost everyone spends a chunk of their weekly time and, regardless of personal opinion, we’d all better get used it. Unfortunately, television, specifically network programming and all that goes along with it,
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Maligning Monogamy
I have spent much of my free time watching movies that are designated to the “college” audience. And as the common interest of our demographic is sex, that tends to be the theme. But what continues to perplex me is all the spontaneous casual sex that was going on. Where were these schools? How could
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Celebs Buy Into Kabbalah
It appears that Britney Spears, Madonna, and Paris Hilton are now Jewish. Well actually, they are just “believers” in Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism. I don’t strictly follow a religion myself, but if I did I’d probably think long and hard before choosing one. Of course, I also wouldn’t get married and divorced in