politics
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Slavoj Žižek · Shoplifters of the World Unite · LRB 19 August 2011
Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon. We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts.deltiod
Council for Tobacco Research
The Council for Tobacco Research was created by the tobacco giant Philip Morris in an attempt to find alternative reasons why tobacco smokers frequently got lung cancer, other than the obvious. It spent a lot of money on advertising and very little on actual scientific studies. It closed down in 1999. Initially called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), the Council for Tobacco Research claimed that its mission was to find out whether smoking was dangerous, and if so, "the next job tackled will be to determine how to eliminate the danger from tobacco." [1]
T he image of John McCain has been burnished so brightly by the adoring media that its shining light is blinding to the casual observer. McCain is universally depicted as a war hero who endured years of torture at the hands of the Vietnamese Communists, and who bravely refused to be released while others were not. This living saint is often lauded by his media cheerleaders as having "taken the high road," not only for his stance on campaign finance but especially for his denunciation of Pat Buchanan. M cCain has made a point of going after Buchanan in the ugliest and most confrontational way, demanding that Pat hurry up and leave the GOP and sanctimoniously declaring that Pat had "dishonored the memory" of World War II veterans by writing A Republic, Not an Empire , a book that champions a revisionist history of World War II and calls for a noninterventionist foreign policy for the U.S.
Behind the Headlines
