Rev. Wright

Bill Moyers' hourlong interview with Jeremiah Wright is essential viewing. Certainly, Wright didn't need a presidential candidate to defend him, not that that ever happened.

Just as interesting: the morning's NPR news brief reports on Wright's speech in Detroit yesterday, in which he "calls for more cross-cultural understanding" (NPR's words) and provides a relevant clip. The significance here is that the event offers a nice opportunity to encapsulate the general 'NPR' world-view. (A view with which the present writer agrees.)

playlist one

Check out today's WXPN playlist for the 10a hour, esp 10:30-11 (read up):

10 am Middays /w Helen Leicht

Kim Richey - I Know
Joy Division - Isolation
Mgmt - Time To Pretend
Ub40 - The Way You Do The Things You Do
Erykah Badu - Honey
Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun
B-52's - Hot Corner
Joan As Police Woman - Eternal Flame
Elton John - Madman Across The Water
The Staple Singers - Slippery People
Aimee Mann - Freeway
Rem - Supernatural Superserious
Little Feat - All That You Dream
Jimi Hendrix - The Wind Cries Mary
Mark Ronson - Stop Me

Smiths cover, new REM that sound like good old REM, the new Cosmic Thing, Joy Div. Wow.

Obama's Philadelphia Speech Today

Apologia for Rev. Wright. Is this a good rhetorical strategy? Talk radio cut the feed after the first half (Obama's personal story).

b/c everything politically relevant was in 2nd half.

Happiness (it's elsewhere)

Eric Weiner, NPR foreign correspondend, has written a book on happiness around the world--i.e., which societies are happy. Iceland, for instance. His first point is that for most of human history, it was thought that only the gods could be happy. But today we think that individual people should be happy. And that makes us unhappy.

Bad Grammar from the Associated Press

In a story filed by Ron Fournier from Nashua, NH:

(Nashua, N.H.) — In a raw populist appeal, Democrat John Edwards on Saturday accused presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton of defending a lobbyist-driven political system that is "rigged against regular Americans" and killed her plan for universal health care.

A classic case of the worst error in grammar: a lack of agreement between subject and verb. Who or what "killed her plan"? Was it John Edwards? Or was it a lobbyist-drivien political system? There is no logical way to tell. Human intuition would probably lead to the former, which is a person and not an abstraction, as the subject of the last verb. But the difficultly could easily be remedied by placing a comma before the word "and."

It's hard to understand why so many people these days are allergic to punctuation.

Gender neutrality advances slightly

The news today from Emerson College in Boston is not really that radical.
But it still represents a practical application of Judith Butler's philosphy.

Quote of the Day

“All of the old-timers knew that subprime mortgages were what we called neutron loans — they killed the people and left the houses,” said Louis S. Barnes, 58, a partner at Boulder West, a mortgage banking firm in Lafayette, Colo. “The deals made in 2005 and 2006 were going to run into trouble because the credit pendulum at the time was stuck at easy.”

-- NYT 19 Aug 07