ideological criminal

When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the […]

Below is a brutal and hilarious affront to the Brandeis administration, written as a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Hoot, in response to the recent actions taken against Donald Hindley, professor of Politics. The incident is recounted in Inside Higher Ed’s article Sending in the Class Monitor.
Letter to the editor: […]

Reading bell hooks today, I came across this:
In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain […]

The Yes Men have struck again (photos, videos, and links):
Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, today [June 14, 2007].
The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the major […]

Tanya Reinhart has apparently died of a stroke in New York. Reinhart was one of the few critics of Israel that I felt could consistently be relied upon for sharp, correct, and just analysis of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights. So many other intellectual big hitters have […]

Last night, I rented The Pentagon Papers, the 2003 (made for TV?) movie about Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the top secret 7,000 page history of the war in Vietnam, prepared by the Pentagon. The document, colloquially known as the Pentagon papers, exposed widespread deception by the government that spanned four presedential administrations. Although […]

Boston has been overcome by hysteria surrounding the Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign. The swift reaction of the authorities has been to criminalize speech. Screaming fire in a theater has morphed into the mutterings of any counter cultural innuendo. The forces of repression have figured out how to succeed where there […]

The “Anybody but Rumsfeld” philosophy is just as dispicable as the ABB one. Consider what could have been asked of Rumsfeld’s replacement:
November 13, 2006
The Revolving Gates at the Pentagon
By Col. DAN SMITH
http://www.counterpunch.org/smith11132006.html
Excerpt:
They may well resurrect the charges lodged against Gates in 1987 and in 1991. They may ask him again whether he lied to […]

The following is a very short excerpt from an article called “Diversity at Brandeis: A real turkey” by Harry Mairson, which appeared in the Feb 2004 issue of The Watch, the Brandeis University magazine. It is a thorough dissection of the paradox of diversity at the university, and though it is concerned with […]

On Wednesday (6 Sept), I attended this year’s inagural event of the Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies, a panel discussion titled, “The Hezbollah-Israel War: What’s Next?” The panel consisted of Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly, a Senior Fellow of the Crown Center and director […]