Month: June 2011

Jessa Gamble expounds on the many variations:

Solitary sleep on a softly cushioned surface, between four walls and under a roof—it’s hardly typical. Anthropologist Carol Worthman has spent many years in the field studying nighttime in traditional societies. In contrast with the Western sleep model—a regular bedtime followed by continuous sleep until morning—the Eje of Congo have some level of social activity persisting through all hours. The sleeping area of a family will see coming and going as some members retire, grooming each other for parasites that might disturb their sleep, and others hear the familiar strains of a thumb piano and get up to dance.

Botswana’s !Kung have similarly staggered bedtimes in their two-metre-round huts made of sticks and leaves. The huts aren’t much of an insulator for heat, sound, or predators—they mostly just keep the rain off—and it’s easy to feel embedded in the social interaction outside the hut. This setup lends itself to a less defined difference between sleeping and waking. Adults and children alike stay up as long as something interesting is going on, and it’s perfectly acceptable to check out of a group conversation by going to sleep.

Buzzfeed compiles reactions to a certain big-busted broad on Chatroulette. Major boobage here.

Ian Leslie surveys the masters:

If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. … But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tells lies on behalf of everyone.

Alexandria, Virginia, 6.53 pm   

Hilary Spurling records the changing demographics of China. Chinese "statistics say that newborn boys outnumber girls by 118 to 100" but, according to Spurling's friends, "boys cost more":

Three years ago their average wage was between 500 and 800 yuan—roughly £50-80—a month. Today, a shortage of labour means that young women in their 20s, the elite of the migrant workforce, can earn three times as much, or more.

They return to their villages at New Year bearing gifts: anoraks, trainers, sweets and toys for the children, pretty jackets for their mothers. They also inject unprecedented sums of money into the rural economy. Young unmarried women now subsidise their parents, pay for the education of younger brothers and sisters, distribute handouts to elderly relatives, and command growing respect from the village as well as from their families.

Iran's Antigone, Haleh Sahabi, falls. A reflection:

The Islamic Republic is a republic of death and dying, a republic of fear of the living and thriving. Haleh Sahabi did not break any law to honour her father's right to a dignified burial. She exposed the banality of the evil that rules over some seventy-odd million human beings, a banality that has not even the decency of allowing a dignified burial of an 81-year-old father, without causing the death of her mourning daughter too.     

Ezzatollah Sahabi lived a long and fulfilling life. Haleh Sahabi was cut down halfway through her dignified extension of her father's causes into unchartered territories. Antigone defied a human law to observe a divine mandate, a moral commandment. Haleh Sahabi defied the ghoulish last shrieks of a dying theocracy to lay the foundation of a new ennobling legend for her people: The legend of Haleh Sahabi – the daughter who did not allow the body of her noble father stolen by ignoble fiends. 

How many brute and cruel tyrants have come and gone? But we only remember the glorious, the defiant, the courageous Antigone.

In the understandable enthusiasm for and focus on the Arab Awakening, please don't forget Iran. That was where fear first failed, where hope first emerged, and where evil still reigns.

Angles of NYC are endless:

Washington decided somewhere along the way these past few years that the Tea Party was not interested in social issues, that the gay issue was kinda dead, that it was all about the debt now. Not everyone got that memo:

Joined by Eagle Forum head Phyllis Schlafly, Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler compared gay marriage to polygamy and incest, and later argued that we shouldn’t give equal marriage rights to gay couples just as “it’s not a right of a three-year old to drive a car.” … Opposition to marriage equality was a major theme at the conference, due in part to fears that young people disproportionately favor legalizing gay marriage. Participants even received a pamphlet “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage” from Jennifer Roback Morse of The Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage. The pamphlet harshly criticized gay families as “unjust and cruel to the child” and argues that “we will not be able to maintain a free society” if gay marriage is legalized.

And here is Michele Bachmann:

Minnesota is the first state that has decided that this issue will be on the ballot in 2012, the state of New Hampshire will be taking this issue up as well, and other states. This is the time. And so I want to encourage all of you at home, if you don’t have a similar amendment, consider this in your home states. I believe this is the time to do it. So I just want to say thank you to those who continue to carry that torch.

Does anyone believe that Sarah Palin’s Fundamental Restoration of America Project would not mean the end of gay rights, if she could possibly get away with it?

It's cold and lonely work but one deranged propagandist is up to it. Erik Kain is more, er, sane.

Now, Ilyash Kashmiri, he of the amazing beard and murderous mind:

Mr. Kashmiri is considered one of the most dangerous and highly trained Pakistani militants allied with Al Qaeda. A former member of Pakistan’s special forces, the Special Services Group, Mr. Kashmiri was suspected of being behind several attacks, including the May 22 battle at the Mehran naval base in the southern port city of Karachi that deeply embarrassed Pakistani officials. He has also been implicated in the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed, including some American citizens.

He was reported to have been killed Friday in a strike on a compound in Laman, near Wana, the main town of South Waziristan. Atifur Rehman, a senior government official in Wana, said the strike killed nine people.

At some point, Romney's and Palin's point that Obama curries favor with our enemies must surely be revised. His war on al Qaeda has been relentless, brutal and skillful.