A long sentence is worth the read - latimes.com "Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn't get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV.
The True Cost of US Military Equipment Embed this infographic on your site! <a href=" src=" alt="Military Equipment Costs" width="500" border="0" /></a><br />From: <a href=" This infographic takes a look at the amount of tax payer money that goes into funding specific military equipment ranging from the 'small' items to the truly gargantuan in price. The graphic then compare these prices to things that the average American can relate to such as median income, cost of a college education, health insurance, or the price of buying a home. The goal of doing this is to show the viewer how their tax money is being used compared to various other things it could be used to acheive.
Greece shows us how to protest against a failed system | John Holloway I do not like violence. I do not think that very much is gained by burning banks and smashing windows. And yet I feel a surge of pleasure when I see the reaction in Athens and the other cities in Greece to the acceptance by the Greek parliament of the measures imposed by the European Union. More: if there had not been an explosion of anger, I would have felt adrift in a sea of depression. The joy is the joy of seeing the much-trodden worm turn and roar. The violence of the reaction in Greece is a cry that goes out to the world. The attack that is so acute in Greece is taking place all over the world. We are all Greeks. The flames in Athens are flames of rage, and we rejoice in them. Love and rage, rage and love. That pushing through of a different world is not just a question of rage, although rage is part of it. For this coming Saturday action throughout the world has been called for in support of the revolt in Greece.
Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind? McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. The pages here feature a number of the surveys in facsimile: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer.
We're Spending More on Nukes Than We Did During the Cold War?! On April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama took the stage before 20,000 people in Prague's Hradcany Square to offer an ambitious global vision. "Today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," he told the open-air audience in the former Eastern Bloc capital. "To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same." The timing of his bold promise seemed perfect. Russia was ready to whittle down its destructive power; a year later, Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev would sign a treaty limiting both countries to 1,500 active warheads—though still enough to annihilate millions of people, a 50 percent reduction to each nation's atomic arsenal. Even the military brass was moving away from relying upon nuclear deterrence. But shrinking America's nuclear arsenal has turned out to be far easier said than done.
Post-Crash Fascism Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels. The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that we are locked into a significant increase in global temperatures. Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels. Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself in the realm of politics. Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. Societies, like people, deal with new challenges in ways that are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Planning for apocalypse
Tahmima Anam | The Good Muslim Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities of the Chinese general public believe their country should share a global leadership role. Read More of Indian parliamentarians have criminal cases pending against them. Read More charter schools in the United States are linked to Turkey’s Gülen movement. Read More thousand tons of chemical weapons are in North Korea’s possession. Read More of import tariffs among Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru have been eliminated. Read More trillion a year is unaccounted for in official Chinese income statistics. Read More of GDP in oil-exporting Arab countries comes from the mining sector. Read More of Europeans and Turks are opposed to intervention in Syria. Read More of Russian exports to China are hydrocarbons; machinery accounts for less than 1%. Read More of undiscovered oil is in the Arctic. Read More U.S. government shutdowns occurred between 1976 and 1996. Read More of Ukrainians want an “international economic union” with the EU. Read More million electric bicycles are used in Chinese cities. Read More is consumed by cities.