Does President Hugo Chavez’ recent order forcing employees at Venezuela’s state telephone company to stop using English words [the language of Empire] in favor of Spanish ones make any sense? In this biting tongue-in-cheek editorial from Venezuela’s Tal Cual newspaper, the absurdity of the plan is taken to task. According to the editorial, “Why force people to speak Spanish, if the ill-named “Motherland [Spain]” is as much our enemy as George W. himself?”
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So writes Nancy Nall.

The plagiarism involves Tim Goeglein lifting the work of Jeffrey Hart.

Nall’s conclusion says it all:

I mentioned at the top of this post that I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. (I stole that line, by the way; it’s Nora Ephron’s opening for her devastating profile of Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Now that I’ve given credit, it’s not plagiarism, it’s an homage. See how it works?) I feel bad because my old buddy Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages, is going to bear the brunt of this — the investigation, the uncomfortable announcement to readers, the search through the archives for more time bombs, the embarrassment of being took by someone any editor would trust, a self-styled intellectual and senior White House aide, for crying out loud. But either this stuff is important or it isn’t, and I say it is.

Post-script: Plagiarist comes clean.

“It is true,” Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an e-mail. “I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses.”

He said he wrote to the author of the essay, Jeffrey Hart “to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception.”

…
Goeglein has worked in the Bush White House since 2001. He formerly worked for then-Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind.

The News-Sentinel removed Goeglein’s column from its Web site Friday morning.

Some people are beginning to listen to what Sen. Obama says rather than how he says it:

While some bloggers (including our own T-Steel) discuss whether Obama’s statement:

I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal

is sexist or not, others say he’s plagiarizing from Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick:

The New York Times: An Obama Refrain Bears Echoes of a Governor’s Speeches

There were echoes in his Iowa victory speech Thursday night that may come from the influence on Barack Obama of the man who worked with JFK on “Profiles in Courage” and his Inaugural Address in 1960.

At 79, Ted Sorensen has been out on the campaign trail, introducing Obama and comparing him to the President he served almost half a century ago.

“Obama is older than Kennedy was when Kennedy ran for president,” Sorensen has been pointing out. “He’s had the same experience in the Senate as Kennedy had when he ran for president, and he’s had the same opportunity to view the country from abroad as Kennedy did when he ran for president.”

Sorensen, who doesn’t see well now and needs help getting up to speak, tells crowds, “Don’t worry about my eyesight. I have more vision than the President of the United States.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to bother looking up the research but will speak from personal experience. Anger is often perceived differently in men and women. The same anger seen as an asset in a male candidate may be seen as a liability in a female candidate. I know this because I have often been perceived as an angry woman (and therefore dangerous and unstable) rather than a rightfully angry person.

Don’t penalize Hillary Clinton for her gender.

We’re led to believe that New Year’s images are about the Old Year going out as a bent over old man…

and the New Year toddling in as a grinning infant.

That’s what the buycandy buywine buybeer folks would have us believe.

But those are degraded images. Long ago, there were far brighter symbols for this ending of one revolution and beginning a new revolution of earth around sun…

Long ago, the child of ‘the new year,’ was named Dionysus; and as an infant he was carried about by the old men Silenus and Hermes.

Back in that day, the child Dionysus, was born at this time of year …when the dark is lifting and the light of day is growing longer… and that child represented bright new life, fresh imagination, sunny impetuosity, joyous spirit without end.

Though in late forms, he was devolved into the God of drunkenness, in earliest understanding he stood for the kind of psychic intoxication that comes from knowing what could be called the et Deus, the God in all things.

And the old man who carried the child in his arms, represented the senex, the old wise man; the one who had lived long, who knew the preciousness of new life, the locations of the trip and fall places, the detours and long-cuts, the underground pathways through… and he was the child’s protector.

Long ago, the child and the old man were not separate ideas, but one. The older one did not die in order to be replaced by the younger. Instead, they represented a hieros gamos of sorts, a sacred union… two critical aspects of inner nature, that when melded, created a third: a conscious and awakened psyche.

And, only if one were severed from the other, disorder would follow. Each would falter, eventually go awry, then sicken and die… for lack of their life’s work with their balancing opposite.

In our time, in reality, many older persons remain in high spirit by creating deep friendships with the very young, and/or with ideas and attitudes that carry fresh vitality.

In our time too, many of the young feel they are living in the shelter of a mountain, because they are near the heart of an elder who is reasonably aged in love, loyalty, praise and prescience.

And, in each person’s psyche, regardless of spare number of years lived, there is a senex function too. Even in the very young, there is a source of wisdom, uncanny and reliable, if it is sought out.

In the psyche too, despite a person’s gathering decades, there is also an eternally young spirit, one that never, ever, grows old. Thus, even in the frail old, there is a source of leaping in spirit, of laughing, of creating anew daily.

New Year’s was once that time when people turned to consciously ‘remember’ themselves once again. They strove to rejoin this duality of the senex and the puer in themselves… after a long year of being worn down and away from center… having been in some ways ‘parted out’ from true self… But now, they would seek to join one valuable aspect of the core self, to another venerable aspect of human dignity…

rejoining the steady to the spontaneous;
the arid to the empathic;
the thoughtful to the impetuous;
the longing for life, to the life spark itself…

Where I grew up, in just a very few weeks from now, you’d tramp way out into the fields in preparation for disking new ground. You’d clean and then open the sluice gates on the creek, letting the new water join the old water

… and you’d see how this made the old water leap
…and you’d see how it let the new water learn to follow good currents never before known …

So may it be for you.
So may it be for me.
So may it be for all of us.

Blessed New Year dear readers.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. Commentary: Mixed messages on Hispanics - CNN.com

Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) gives all Americans the chance to gain insight into the nation’s largest minority.

You might as well give it a try. There are more than 44 million Hispanics in the United States, and the Census Bureau estimates that — by 2050 — we’ll represent one in four Americans.

And despite efforts by nativists to keep out both legal and illegal immigrants in a desperate attempt to turn back the demographic clock, Hispanics aren’t going anywhere. Why should we? In many cases, we were here first.

MORE

Comedian Jerry Lewis broke his own fund raising record this weekend on the Labor Day Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy — but he’s now under fire for an offhand remark. CNN reports:

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Tuesday denounced comedian Jerry Lewis’ use of the word “fag” on Lewis’ annual Labor Day Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy and called on him to apologize.

“Jerry Lewis’ on-air use of this kind of anti-gay slur is simply unacceptable,” GLAAD President Neil G. Giuliano said in a statement posted on the group’s Web site. “It also feeds a climate of hatred and intolerance that contributes to putting our community in harm’s way.”

In the 18th hour of the 21 1/2-hour telethon Monday, Lewis — bow tie undone and shirt collar open — stumbled around the set at the South Coast Hotel, Casino and Spa in Las Vegas, marveling at the cameraman’s ability to keep up with him.

Click on the link and see the offending clip.

(UPDATE: Lewis has apologized. See our later post HERE.)

The saga of Jerry Lewis is both an inspiring and a bittersweet one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Did your mother teach you how to make a proper apology when you were a little kid, otherwise you were grounded to your left ear for life? Me too. Did your mother or father tell you if you tried to weasel out, rather than telling the truth, it would go harder with you? Mine too.

In Western culture, an adequate apology, even for immigrants who have other ways of making recompense in their own cultures, is supposed to cover the entire ‘mea culpa’ territory and be direct, showing humility somehow, but not giving out a stilted high oratory, nor muffled as though gargling marbles.

Though most everyone carries ‘duck and cover’ as a survival instinct, public apology seems most effective when it is more along the lines of street talk, that is, down to earth, straightforward, heavy in nouns and verbs about the authentic issues and concerns… rather than vaguely stated without showing any gritty insight nor transparent accountability

Rather than carrying street cred though, Senator Larry Craig’s apology carries an odd vagary of language that a full and real apology would not. Instead of specificity in language, the limited lexicon used by the Senator gives the impression of trying to row around the huge dead elephant that washed up in his living room recently…

Senator Craig writes on his website: http://craig.senate.gov/keyportal.cfm

“To the Idahoans I represent, to my staff, my Senate colleagues and, most importantly, my wife and our family, I apologize for what I have caused.
I am deeply sorry.
I have little control over what people choose to believe…”

*****The last sentence infers that what has occurred is not an issue of facts based on knowing, but a fantasy of people’s ‘beliefs.’ Beliefs are far different than knowings. Thus Senator Craig tells us how to understand all this: beliefs can be challenged.

However, contrary to the Senator’s seeming attempt to redefine the issues, certain factual matters of law and legalities, still remain.

Let’s move to the first sentence, which covers to whom the Senator is making the apology: Idahoans, staff, colleagues, wife, family…. and all those are proper to appeal to.

Yet, it leaves out many people and groups of people who seem to have been ill-affected by his decisions in life, and his countervalent votes in public life. It leaves out people in the US who are already mortified about the state of the GOP in recent months and years. It leaves out those who currently have ‘business’ with him, who have allied with him and whom he was working on projects with, and now, have to start all over lobbying someone else. Lots of dreams of his Senatorial support died this week.

In our family if you offended the whole family and only apologized to your mother, father, and one cousin but left all others out who were nonetheless affected, that’d be a deal-breaker about your sincerity. Back to the corner you’d go to think things through more rationally.

The second sentence: “I am deeply sorry,” line has to be taken in context with an earlier line: “I apologize for what I have caused.” I wouldn’t put a cynical, “Yeah, sure you’re sorry, you’re sorry for being caught.” But, I agree with Michelle Malkin, certainly in concept: She calls the Senator’s words being a “crapweasel”
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/08/28/the-larry-craig-mess/

She’s referring to the on again, off again, Finnegan that Senator Craig has been doing to explain himself; the dodging and seeming prevaricating with great huffing pomposity.

There is huge aversion going on, as most can see. My analytic training in reading lexicon and syntactical subtext, tells me that in Senator Craig’s letter, the syntax appears to be arranged specifically in order to avoid, rather than to explicate. In other words, to present in opaque, instead of in all transparency.

“What I caused” is an effort toward accountability, but is weakened greatly by not accounting, not explicating what occurred and how it came to be. The phrase makes an inference, instead, that the writer did little or nothing that would have set this mess into motion… that some minor error set off this torque.

I don’t say this to revile the Senator; no person on this earth, as we saw recently with Mother Teresa herself, is without flaws, foibles and failings. I am more inclined to have sympathy for people who are otherwise good or trying to be to the best of their current knowledge, but who fall into a fracturing dilemma… most of us are on earth trying to learn and are doing ok some days… some days we’re better than we’re capable of being, and on other days, less than we could be… and all shades in between.

So, I’d rather say it this way, generally, whether about priests who intrude on children, whether about Neil Bush (G. W.’s brother) and his Savings and Loan debacle that caused the collapse of the hard-earned savings of elderly people… also without repair… in all these cases and so many more, the people responsible for the ‘failure’ or damage or breakage, write in big red letters that they are sidestepping, falsifying, or outright telling falsehoods when they do not fulfill the most basic apology we teach to our own little children, when adults do not speak as we would expect a five year old to speak in making a full apology that we would accept and thus begin to re-normalize relationships again.

There’s a saying in my family: if you want to make people despise you, give them Read the rest of this entry »

William Safire recently wrote about a new book and briefly discusses what we in the US call the “AT symbol,” namely @.

A sidebar in their punchy little book, drawn from the Web site (that’s archaic Times style for what the world has compressed to website) Herodios.com, compares the word for @ with what English speakers call “at.” In Czech, it would be Zavinac, “a herring wrapped around a pickle”; in Hebrew, Shabul or Shablool, “snail”; Mandarin Chinese, Xiao Lao Shu, “little mouse”; Russian, Sobachka, “doggie”; Thai, Ai tua yiukyiu, “wiggling worm.” (Henceforth, in giving my e-mail address orally, I will say “safireonlanguage, zavinac enwhytimes.com’’” and trigger a fusillade from Prague.)

Philologos, the language columnist of The Forward, goes into this a bit further:

I don’t know about Czech, Russian, Thai or Chinese, but I have some knowledge of Hebrew, and I can say that: 1) there is no such word in it as shabul; and 2) although shablul, which can indeed mean snail in colloquial Hebrew (in more precise speech it designates a slug, while a snail is h.ilazon), did have some use in the early days of e-mail in the 1990s, possibly as a translation of Italian chiocciola, it has not for many years been heard in that sense. The going word for @ in Israel is shtrudel, which means literally… well, strudel.

For a long while, I thought this was odd….

Is your hometown like mine? Strange and sweet in its profound oddities?

Perhaps you remember the piece I wrote on TMV a few weeks ago that was big news in my hometown newspaper … it was about the man in the wheelchair who was at a gas station just across the road from where I grew up.

He wheeled himself in front of an idling 18 wheeler rig whose driver did not realize he was there. The big semi started forward, and the handlebars of the wheelchair stuck in the grill of the truck. The semi headed onto the interstate and rolled at 55mph for over five miles with the man in his wheelchair stuck on the front of it, before the police pulled him over…

Miraculously, the fellow in the wheelchair was still lodged in the truck’s grill, and the road-rider was unharmed. Several other drivers on the road rolling in the opposite direction had seen the man in the wheelchair fastened to the truck’s grill like some kind of bizarre hood ornament, and they thought they were hallucinating. Well, in the midst of their self-same hallucinations, several called the state patrol. You can imagine how those conversations went.

After it was all over, honest to gosh, the young man in the wheel chair said to reporters, “It was a nice ride. I wasn’t scared.”

Ok, so, that will prepare you for this next. I grew up in a rural area in a village of 600 people. Our town was about one mile long and 5 street wide with a US highway and a railroad track running through the middle of it. About 30minutes away was a larger town which still prints a daily newspaper. Yesterday, the headline was, Rain Heading This Way. Yes. It was.

Also on the front page yesterday was a story about how the green beans are not getting enough moisture and farmers are concerned. There was also a story about a shooting at a road house, a murder over gambling debt, and the mysterious disappearance of graveyard vases.

Interpretation: Surrounding is still farm country and the farmers need the rain. Corn was NOT knee-high on Fourth of July the way it was supposed to be. Green beans will turn out bitter if they don’t have enough water. Rain is a BIG story therefore. There are gambling dens and roadhouses all up and down the backwoods, and for whatever reason, people pack heat; some people way back there still sit on their porches with shotguns across their laps.

The graveyard vases were made of metal, and there is a ten-finger discount going on amongst itinerant homeless men who troll for metal to turn in to recyclers for money . Um, well, sure, we can give you fifty dollars for them there 102 funeral vases. Just found them, did you? Ok.

But here the story I really wanted to bring to you… like I said, if you, like me, come from a small village… ‘depiction is often stranger than fiction’ as in the following story. It is 4-H fair time back home right now and… look, I am pretty sure the guy being interviewed might have been an immigrant, or English not his first language, or syntax was just weird for a moment there, or the reporter omitted a clarification… but it’s your call… If it’s dehydration that was the problem, that’s one thing, but if it’s merely being ‘that way,’ geez, maybe all of humanity is endangered… and we all need to be ‘relaxed’ more…

Here you go:

Pig At Fair Dies Because of Stress
Tribune Staff Report
— A female Grand Champion pig that died at the 4-H Fair was not neglected, but probably died because of a high level of stress.

The gilt, or young female pig, was found dead in her pen Tuesday, said St. Joseph County 4-H Fair Board Director Lee Slavinskas.

“Earlier at the show, she was showing signs that she was stressed, and we relaxed her,” he said. “She was in heat, which puts a lot of stress on their bodies.”

According to fair veterinarians, Slavinskas said, the animal was not diseased nor carried an infection, so there isn’t a risk that other animals will become ill.

“All animals are checked when they’re brought in,” he said. “That animal got as much attention as it possibly could have gotten.”

To combat the heat, topping 90 degrees the past several days, the pigs are given plenty of water and have fans blowing on them constantly. 4-H leaders walk through the livestock barns hourly to make sure all the animals are safe and comfortable.

Pigs don’t perspire, Slavinskas said, and many animals are cared for better at the fair than at home.

“These are not household pets … she was a champ and sometimes, unfortunately, (death) happens the week of the fair.”

Some musicians seem like they’re made to lead the world. Some seem born citizens of the earth, regardless whichever country, heritage, religion they’re born into. Regardless what their parents wanted for them; regardless of childhood introjects… they travel the world, often as what I’d call ‘rememberers,’ musicians who help us remember that water can flow through stone.

If spoken words are capable of too easily offending some, destroying and dividing us, then music seems far more often able to unite, to cross tightly controlled checkpoints that bar babblers and blabbers, but let through musicians carrying a stringed, wind, or percussion instrument… like water through stone. Maybe the musicians who are Rememberers could for a while, lead the detente talks, the conciliation talks, the cease fires and peace agreements. Arion of Methymna and Orpheus of Thrace are celebrated in song to this day, for Arion surrounded Thebes with walls by the power of music, and Orpheus tamed the wild beasts by the mere might of song. Some element inside the mythic is always very real.

Tisha B’av is about mourning what has been destroyed and finding a way to build a new, even more beautiful temple, whether cultural, personal, religious or creative. Here are some musicians who are pylons and piers and guy wires and girders for bridges across roiling waters:

Jewish-Muslim music: Gerard Edery…”I’m not naive about the political reality, or about how polarized Jews and Arabs have become.” Edery is a singer and classical guitarist …Standing before a room full of Muslims, this Jewish musician launched into “a very Jewish song” in Hebrew about Elijah the prophet. Then, “without even thinking,” he started teaching the audience the words. “At first, I sensed a hesitation from the audience… After a few measures…700 to 800 Muslims [were] singing with me in Hebrew.” Edery, who was born in Casablanca, moved to Paris at age 4 and then the United States at age 8… Like those of Central Asia, Jews and Muslims in pre-Inquisition Spain, the place of Edery’s maternal ancestry, “shared similar, musical, poetical and artistic” license. There was a tolerance and a cross-pollination…”I’m not a politician or a scholar. I’m a musician. And I believe in doing what I can through music…: “We should all delve into our past and embrace all our traditions, whether Jewish or Muslim. Let me sing to you in Arabic and you can sing to me in Hebrew and let’s realize, very specifically, that we Jews and Arabs are from the same soil.”

Hindu-Muslim music: Bismillah Khan’s ancestors were court musicians who played in Naqqar khana in the princely states of Bhojpur. His father was a shehnai player in the court of Maharaja Keshav Prasad. Despite his fame, Khan’s lifestyle retained old world Benares: his chief mode of transport was the cycle rickshaw. A man of tenderness, he believed in remaining private, and that “musicians are supposed to be heard and not seen.” He was a pious Shiía Muslim and also, like many Indian musicians regardless of creed, a devotee of Mother Saraswati. He often played at various temples and on the banks of the river Ganga in Varanasi, besides playing outside the famous Vishwanath temple in Varanasi. Khan is one of the finest musicians in post-independent Indian Classical music and one of the best examples of Hindu-Muslim unity in India. He said, “Even if the world ends, the music will still survive… Music has no caste”.

AfricanAmerican-Jewish music: In New York, The American Symphony Orchestra wove this: concerts that “contribute to the current political debate by presenting a moment of history when matters were different. Not nostalgia, but rather the exploration of different models from which to draw inspiration for the present and future. The composers on this program born into Jewish families who integrated African-American materials in their work–Gershwin, Gruenberg and Gould–did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their African-American contemporaries and colleagues. The composers of African-American descent–Price, Ellington and Kay–who integrated European traditions with African-American traditions, did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their non-African-American contemporaries and colleagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Of script-breaking and violence prevention.

The wide-spread belief that women talk more than men? It’s a myth. And I have some theories as to where it comes from.

NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. NOTE: Broken link has been FIXED on this post.

Today’s Guest Voice post is by Hunter Hatfield, currently a doctoral student in linguistics and cognitive science at the University of Hawaii with a previous M.A. in philosophy. In between these academic jaunts he spent a decade in the computer industry. He publishes the thoughtful weblog Goat Skin Pants.

Why Choose “Cultural Relativity”?

By Hunter Hatfield

This post was inspired by a couple recent ones from Marc Schulman and Michael van der Galien, but it isn’t particularly in opposition to or support of their posts. Each of them happened to bring up the notion of cultural relativity in ethics, and this inspired me to reflect on the concept a bit.

Generally speaking, cultural relativity is the idea that morals are relative to a specific culture, and therefore not real or true. The sun is real. It is independent of us and it would be there if we had never existed. However, according to the common concept of cultural relativity, morality, right and wrong, are phenomena of cultures that have no independent existence. We don’t say the sun exists only relative to something else. It’s there. But not so, say the cultural relativists, about morals. There is no independent right and wrong.

Of course, hundreds of articles and volumes have been devoted to these notions over hundreds of years. I’ve deliberately kept it non-academic, hoping my own thoughts would be of interest. I’d enjoy any feedback.

My interest in this post is in why anyone would ever want to be a “cultural relativist”? Why would someone declare a person or an action wrong and then turn around and refuse to declare something in another culture or society as wrong? Typically, when this occurs, a charge of cultural or moral relativity is levelled. Action X is bad for Culture X but Action X is okay for Culture Y, so clearly the person doesn’t really believe in real objective right and wrong at all.

Why would so many people want to take such a seemingly inconsistent position or declare that morality is not real? As always, there are many factors at play. I’m going to list a few good and bad reasons to adopt a stance of cultural relativity, as it is defined in each section. The good ones are, of course, the ones that I think are legit and intriguing.

Bad Reason 1: It’s okay for the good guys. The person wants to justify the actions of those with whom they sympathize and, at least subconsciously, they don’t care how inconsistent they are as long as the people they care for are treated well. This reason is quite common, but in most versions isn’t particularly compelling if we are trying to figure out how to behave. I will let this one go. However it’s worth noting that the motive for inconsistency sometimes a good one — to help others.

Negative Reason 2: There is no right or wrong. This is what a cultural relativist is usually assumed to believe. The person doesn’t believe in right or wrong at all; morality is like hemlines. They go up; they go down; and there’s no particular reason why one is better than the other. A good number of people will argue for this, but it isn’t clear how much this belief actually changes their lives and the actions they take. You can find people breaking the bounds of conventional morality espousing this, and find people who are as conventional as they come.

One problem is that people are as attached to their culture as they are to specific moral beliefs. Again, this is the popular conception of cultural relativity as spelled out earlier, and I agree with the critics if this were the only justification. I at least want to say that honesty really is good and slavery bad, and that isn’t just something we all pretend together. (Gross simplification, I’m aware.)

Neutral Reason: Humility. I am personally a big fan of humility, and there are good reasons to exercise humility in our judgments of others and their cultures. After all, history is filled with ethnocentric morality as an excuse or a reason to dominate others. At the same time, humility by itself isn’t a complete moral philosophy. We have to act at some point and must make the best moral guess we can.

Positive Reason 1: There is more than one right way to live.

Read the rest of this entry »

Crazy? Brilliant? Both? Neither? You make the pick. This is what happens when you write huge posts at 3 AM.

Whiteness Candidates and Post-Racial America.

Be forewarned: It’s long–four sections, over 3,000 words and six pages single-spaced.

“And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this, and certainly the commander in chief, who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.” Laura Bush

Dear Mrs. Bush,
With respect… You are an older woman of a certain age and so am I. You try to help people, and I try to help people too. You are a mother who loves her children; I am a mother who loves her children also. You support adult literacy projects, and because my family of immigrants could not read or write, I am committed to adult literacy too… your mother-in-law, Mrs. Bush elder, and I, were keynoters together at NY Literacy Partners.

But, you and I are different too. Your husband is the leader of ‘the free world.’ My husband is the leader of a cub scout pack of little boys who just earned their fishing badges. You live in a heavily guarded mansion; I walk alone on the streets. You have maids and chefs; I clean my house and cook pretty good posolé y csirke paprikás… no complaints.

You Made A Serious Error
In all sincerity, you made a grave mistake with your statement: “…no one suffers more than their president and I do…” You may have meant it as an unmindful figure of speech, however your choice of the words “their president,” uses a formal title, rather than what real people say when they are deluged by real suffering… Those who suffer speak in the familiar, the personal: “my husband,” “George,” “my mate.” Not, “their president.”

Your choice of the word, “watching,” implies observation from a distance. We all know you are not cheek-to-cheek with an M-14 or 16 rifle, nor are you expected to be. But, ‘watching’ cannot be compared with ‘the face-up and face-down’ suffering of military families and their loved ones who are ‘breathing sand’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor to the families of dear ones who are no longer breathing at all.

Certainly you and your husband suffer from whatever you bear. But it cannot be that ‘no one suffers more than you.’ Forgive me for saying so, but your comment fell far beneath a wisdom line that the soul eternally maintains.

La Madrina, The Godmother Rises to Speak
Mrs. Bush… forensic analysis of words aside, in my ethnic traditions, when a younger woman makes an error, an older woman steps in to speak to her. Truly, someone older than you ought have la platica, a talk with you… not about your comment per se, but about the mindset that produced these seeming bombastic words. Since I am older than you, I humbly step up to be the point woman, the platicadora, to have a talk with you today…

Read the rest of this entry »

…Two decades into India’s phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It’s running out of workers, writes Tim Sullivan, Associated Press Writer.

“There may be a lot of potential — Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year — but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say…

” ‘The problem is not a shortage of people,’ said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. ‘It’s a shortage of trained people.’

” ‘This is really the Achilles heel of the industry,’ said James Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, an investment firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has studied the issue…”

For more click here…

Over the weekend, as you may know by now, Newt Gingrich said this in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women:

The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.

Whatever the problems with this English-only view — I do think that any political community, including one as vast as the U.S., needs a common language to facilitate communication, but it is completely ridiculous to suggest that learning other languages should be abolished (such linguistic isolationism is entirely counter-productive in a world that is growing ever smaller with the increasingly rapid and kinetic expansion of the forces of globalization, positive and negative alike) — the particular problem with Gingrich’s comment lies in his use of the word “ghetto”. Just what did he mean by it?
Read the rest of this entry »