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

Ambassador of the US Real Estate collapse

Page 3 of today's Süddeutsche Zeitung (subscription required; €) has an article on the human situation underneath the subprime Real Estate crisis in Prince George's County. It contains the following nugget of information I didn't know: the credit firm Ameriquest, formerly known for 'innovative' financing and re-financing practices--supposedly paving the way for poorer Americans to get on the way to home ownership--was founded by Roland E. Arnall. Presently Mr. Arnall lives in the Hague, since he is the US Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. To George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign he donated over one million dollars. And in 2006 he was slapped with a $300 Million fine by the Justice Department, for charging excessive interest and credit fees.

Dutch Bishop: Let's just call God Allah

A Dutch Bishop recommends that European Christians call God Allah, as is already done in Indonesia and, naturally, the Arab world.