Early Monday
* BP claims the Deepwater Horizon link has been partially contained. I’m partially impressed. Scientific American points out that what’s happening today will have consequences for decades. Elsewhere in oil news, the oil lobby is fighting efforts that would make them more accountable for the actual costs of their toxic industry, while elsewhere in the world the tar sand rush is on.
* Climate change: still real.
* The financial reform bill: better than you’d think?
* Aesthetic controversy in Detroit! Can street art be moved and preserved?
* Aesthetic controversy in Scranton! The Office should not survive Michael Scott.
* Terror in Greenwich! Old-money WASPs being forced out of their homes and nonprofit boards by Jews, Catholics, and “others.”
* Popular Science remembers your cities of the future.
* Today cell phones don’t cause cancer. Live your life accordingly.
* And dueling commencement addresses: Rachel Maddow (part 2, part 3), Glenn Beck. Stay for the end of the Beck for some really intriguing anti-intellectualism that pits eggheads and their so-called “expertise” against the mighty Holy Spirit. Guess who wins.
Gerry Canavan 
“The fascist leader characteristically indulges in loquacious statements about himself. In contrast, the liberal as well as the radical propagandist has developed a tendency to avoid any reference to his private existence for the sake of “objective” interests to which he appeals: the former in order to show his matter-of-factness and competence, the latter because his collectivistic attitude would be jeopardized if he should play up his own personality. Whereas this “impersonality” is well grounded within the objective conditions of an industrial society,
it has definite weaknesses considering the orator’s audience. The detachment from personal relationships involved in any objective discussion presupposes an intellectual freedom and
strength which hardly exists within the masses today. Moreover, the “coldness” inherent in objective argumentation intensifies the feeling of despair, isolation, and loneliness under which virtually each individual today suffers – a feeling from which he longs to escape when listening to any kind of public oratory. This situation has been grasped by the fascists. Their talk is personal. Not only does it refer to the most immediate interestsof his listeners, but also it encompasses the sphere of privacy of the speaker himself who seems to take his listeners into his confidence and to bridge the gap between person and person.”
Alex
May 17, 2010 at 10:32 am