If people want to spend time grilling Obama for unfortunate turns of phrase, wouldn’t it be better to talk about Clinton’s “kitchen sink strategy”?

Happy International Workers Day.

Have any local news broadcasts produced flood-related montages soundtracked by Rihanna’s “Umbrella”?

Sure, Google say their results are based on an impersonal algorithm, but this looks an awful lot like an insult to me.

Is there a better newspaper than pravda.ru? It’s the newspaper implied by the terminological similarity between the Weekly World News and People’s Weekly Word, a combination of flagrant falsehood and Stalinist propaganda. Case in point:

Ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten

Damn it, sometimes I fear I’m on the wrong side of the Atlantic. I’ve just noticed I missed an awesome-sounding conference about Mao, and two talks by eponymous Walter Benjamin scholar, Andrew Benjamin. Not to mention living on this continent means I can all too easily end up in a city where the temperature drops below 0° Fahrenheit (something I had, in my metric-system innocence, assumed was impossible).

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The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

— Marx, The German Ideology

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And, an early contender for post of the year: an extraordinarily insightful discussion of the recent case of a disabled girl being medically kept permanently at the age of nine.

I had intended to return to a more regular blogging schedule with one or more tremendously scholarly posts about silent films. Obviously, the problem there is that I then don’t write anything at all until I’ve got time to discuss the finer details of Hegel’s relationship to Buster Keaton. So, thanks to Rachel for tagging me with a so-called “meme,” a blog-related obligation which can obviously not be passed up.

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