I Gallantly Solve the Economic Crisis

October 11, 2008 – 6:21 am

I’ve heard more or less the same things that you have: the sub-prime mortgage crisis has affected all sorts of markets, leading to all sorts of problems. The Dow has been plummeting. Paul Newman died.

What this all basically adds up to is that the country is on the brink of almost certain doom. It’s hard not to picture a future full of warming one’s hands over oil drum fires, sleeping in tree houses, and eating old tennis shoes while desperately trying to convince myself it’s roast beef.

In fact, I won‘t be surprised when the entire Earth becomes a barren wasteland. Also - because I happen to believe that the Mad Max series is really a sophisticated form of prophecy - I believe that people will assemble into wild tribes that rove the landscape in strange vehicles, wearing improbable armor, wielding axes, and searching for gas to take back to Thunderdome. It is a bleak future with terrible dialogue, and we must do all that we can to prevent it from ever taking place.

That being said, I have applied my powers of immense concentration to the economic problem at hand.

I’ve spent years training both mind and body in the hidden martial arts temples of the far East. I did many splits, and shattered stone tablets with my forehead. When I wasn’t busy doing that, I surrounded myself with scented candles and meditated. Finally, I know the names of some pretty smart books.

So, you see, I’m at least as qualified to advise the entire nation as every celebrity that ever ran their mouth about any socio-political issue ever. Maybe more so, because I’ve never “accidentally” leaked a sex tape.

My fantastic ideas: Read More »

By Joe Hormes | Posted in Business World, Columnist, Current Affairs, Editor's Pick, college, humor | Comments (0)

The World For Barack Obama

October 1, 2008 – 7:57 am

Should McCain defeat Obama in the US Presidential election, the world will descend into a state of mass depression.

Political and psychological despair piling on top of the worst global economic recession since the 1930s is the last thing we need. I don’t say this lightly.

The Bush years have been hard on planet earth. Add to that the general absence of inspirational leaders on the global stage, and from Patagonia to Tokyo, you have an overwhelming desire for something exciting and meaningful. And Obama, for better or for worse, is filling that void.

I am seeing people from all nationalities buoyed by the Obama factor. The detractors will tell you it’s all about his soaring speeches and it doesn’t mean anything as far as reality goes. Read More »

By Nasser Ali Khasawneh | Posted in Columnist, Current Affairs, Feature, election 08, politics | Comments (14)

Sarah Palin, the Wilting Flower Hidden From the Media

September 29, 2008 – 8:44 am

Last week, CNN reporter Campbell Brown called on Republicans to stop being sexist and expose Sarah Palin to the media for open questioning. What Campbell is calling sexism is the benefit of protection that docile white women receive from white men for performing their gender. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who stood firmly for women’s rights and was clearly an autonomous being, Palin stands for regressive policies that remove agency from women, thus affirming patriarchy.

Prior to the introduction of black women to America, white women were openly despised. In the theocratic culture women were blamed for the sins of man. It was the black female slave that resulted in the elevation of white womanhood, by allowing for another level of hierarchy. As long as white women supported white men, their lot in life was improved.

With the suffragette movement white women were again attacked by white men. The desire to vote and have a say in how the country was run was deemed threatening to patriarchy. They were called harridans, their femininity was questioned, and they were socially maligned.

Each time white women seek to achieve social equality with white men they are subject to slut-shaming and social discipline. As long as they are willing to accept their place in the social hierarchy, which is solidly beneath white male headship they are “protected” beings. This fragile wilting flower exists to uphold white male hegemony.

It may seem that Palin is thwarting the delicate flower ideology because she is seeking a position of power; however what must be understood is that her power is clearly subject to male control, whereas Clinton was seeking control in her own right.

It’s obvious by now that Palin’s job is to say what McCain tells her to say. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, feminism, politics, racism, women | Comments (3)

Obama Wins the Debate

September 27, 2008 – 4:52 pm

I have bemoaned the fact that politics these days are all about gloss and image, simple statements and sound bites, with little to no room for complex thought. That it matters more whether a candidate looks presidential than whether they can actually answer a policy question, or that people care more whether they’d like to have a beer with a person than whether that person is actually conversant with foreign affairs or the economy.

But after last night’s debate, I revised my opinion, because Barack Obama won on a level that utilized the medium to a profound extent. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, TV, election 08, north america, politics | Comments (3)

Republicans and Democrats Debate “the Issues.” Sort of.

September 27, 2008 – 4:43 pm

I’m not especially versed in politics. I know the basics: things like which amendment grants us the constitutional right to punch dolphins, or who that president was that bit the head off of a bat and got banned from the Alamo. But I’ve been doing a little reading on the internet of late, and I’m a little surprised. Now, I don’t know how many of you will have heard this, but there’s an election coming up.

Apparently, tensions are running incredibly high because, for the first time in history, a tiny alien in a white guy robot suit is facing off against… *gasp* a black guy. There are many calling this the most momentous election in recent history, and for good reasons.

Of course, I’m something of a newcomer to the world of political discourse, so I might not throw around words like “paradigm,” or “rock the vote,” or “flag.” But I’m bringing something of my own to the table: impartiality. I base this claim on the simple fact that I don’t like either of the major parties. I never really have.

In terms of campaigning, the issues don’t matter. Rather, it’s whoever can enforce their perception of whose fault those issues are that will win the day.

Politics is a matter of seizing the moral high ground. If you could replace Obama and McCain with the pure, unfiltered spirit of liberalism and conservatism respectively, then this is what I believe the debates would sound like: nothing but sniping, infighting, and the conspicuous lack of any sort of logic. Logic doesn’t win elections, after all. So everybody get ready for Joseph’s Political Jamboree (and Lobster Boil)! Read More »

By Joe Hormes | Posted in Columnist, Current Affairs, election 08, humor, north america, politics | Comments (2)

The Islamabad Marriott

September 21, 2008 – 5:43 pm

I wanted to tell you why I thought the bombing in Islamabad just happened. That’s what I ought to talk about, in this world of terrorists and wars on terror and conspiracy theories about military intervention into civilian affairs and covert operations that create terrorists.

But can I tell you instead that the crenulations on the very top of the Islamabad Marriott are a sort of jaunty seventies mihrab shape? – a nod in the direction of both Islam and the modernist obsession with geometry.

Islamabad is full of that kind of architecture: tall buildings with porthole windows, triangular houses that fail to be A-frames. Pakistani architects strove in the sixties and seventies to create that perfect, progressive, modern form, that departure from tradition that would mark the beginning of an enlightened and prosperous age.

When I was a kid, my mother would go to what was then the Holiday Inn and enter it through a side door. I was often with her. She’s American and non-Muslim, so she had an alcohol permit with which she would buy bad vodka, worse gin, and some half decent beer to bring home for the party we would be having the next night. It was Murree Brewery beer with a horse involved somewhere in the logo. She would walk in, hand a man behind a high counter her permit, which he would inspect as he chatted her up, and she would come away with the loot and a sense of exasperation: at the fact of the permit and that all it bought her was lousy local booze.

Over the years, that building has acquired thicker and thicker skin. Coats of paint and concrete blockades have built up on it until you can only park far across the road or in the next city block in order to come in for their conferences, or weddings, or expensive Thai food, or bad local booze.

Rich people go to the Marriott; poor people guard them.

Not that it mattered in the flames of that inferno, anymore, except that the guards were already dead by the time the guests started running. Read More »

By Kyla Pasha | Posted in Current Affairs, Religion, islam, obituary, south asia, terrorism | Comments (4)

Yes, Feminists KNOW that Sarah Palin is a Woman

September 20, 2008 – 4:53 pm

As the first woman nominated by the Republican party to the vice presidency, Sarah Palin has achieved a form of celebrity status. It is simply not possible to tune into any news program for an extended period of time without seeing an image of her, or catching a daily sound bite. Publicly we have become obsessed with discussing her virtues and her failures.

Many feminists actively supported Hillary Clinton and so when Palin implied that she could be substituted for Hillary many looked at her credentials and declared her resoundingly anti-feminist. With the introduction of intersectionality, modern feminism has expanded to cover the life experiences of a diversity of women.

No matter what feminist theory one chooses to advocate, each focuses on improving the lives of women through the validation of women’s agency and the affirmation of women’s bodily integrity. When we consider Palins positions from a feminist lens, she is clearly not a feminist.

Some in the media have taken the rejection of Palin by feminists to mean that somehow she is not considered a woman by us.

Jim Quinn stated on the September 15th broadcast of the The War Room with Quinn & Rose,“If you don’t agree with the feminist scolds, then you’re not a real woman — even if you are a very feminine working mom. But even if you’re an actual man, never mind a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag, you’re a real woman solely because you nod your head like a windup clapping monkey every time you read the latest editorial from Ms. Magazine.”

However, there is a large difference between declaring someone anti-feminist and declaring someone a non-woman. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, feminism, north america, politics, women | Comments (6)

American Incursions Into Pakistan: Who Pays The Price?

September 13, 2008 – 12:40 pm

I’m watching Capital Talk on Geo TV out of the corner of my eye as I research madly for news from Pakistani and foreign press sources about American troops on the ground in northwest Pakistan. I’m watching this show and I’m switching to other news shows, where it’s being reported that, where earlier we were told that President Bush ordered operations in July without informing Pakistan, now we’re being told, through the Pakistani Ambassador Hussein Haqqani that no such order was ever given.

We are meant to be satisfied with the news that it was just the one time and the US will not make any more incursions.

In one corner of the screen, as Capital Talk proceeds in heated debate over whether the Pakistanis fighting in the northwest are militants or terrorists and what will happen with the nukes, there is a surreal animated graphic: the Two Towers are falling as two tiny airplanes collide into them again and again. Under it says in Urdu: “Who’s responsible? Who’s paying the price?”

All evening it’s been like this. News story after news story about how American troops have attacked targets in northwest Pakistan and killed women and children. Women and children. Read More »

By Kyla Pasha | Posted in Current Affairs, election 08, politics, south asia, terrorism | Comments (1)

The Heroes of the New Cold War (And What Idiots They Are)

September 9, 2008 – 4:06 pm

A lot of people want a New Cold War. After all, the War on Terror is just too confusing and troublesome and, let’s face it, terrifying. Poker-faced Soviet villains had hot side-kicks. Hollywood loved them. And for all of their bluster, they didn’t operate via sleeper cells or strap bombs onto women with mental disabilities just so they could blow up people and puppies. Medvedev’s no Osama, we can take him!

Oh, and backing Kosovo independence with no UN approval is totally not the same thing as backing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At all. Hey, look over there, it’s a bear with a semi-automatic!

Of course, the Russian Federation’s own, rather special, government, was itching for this confrontation as well. How else to distract the rest of the country from the fact that, for all of Russia’s economic growth, an oil-based economy is not the greatest of ideas? Or the fact that journalists are getting shot in the head and the country’s free press has reached of the mythical Yeti, occasionally glimpsed, but mostly regarded as a figment of our collective imagination? Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in Columnist, Current Affairs, europe, politics | Comments (1)

Asif Ali Zardari: Woe to Pakistan?

September 6, 2008 – 4:18 pm

The problem with democracy is that sometimes the person that comes into power is exactly the person you wish would get arrested and sent to prison forever. In the case of Pakistan, it has come to pass that the most odious of political figures, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, is now president of the Islamic Republic, with a two-third majority and - God help me - the mandate of the people.

Unlike the man he effectively replaces, General (ret) Pervez Musharraf, Zardari represents, in the most technical sense, at least, the federation of provinces. Three of the four provinces elected him by outright majority. The fourth and most populous province, the Punjab, did not, but that is no obstacle. Zardari is nevertheless president of Pakistan.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), of which he is co-chair with his son, represents the popular vote and arguably the largest voter base in the country. This was determined in the general elections of February 18, 2008. Now the PPP holds the two highest offices in the state, the presidency and the prime ministership.

Known throughout his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s political career as “Mr. Ten Percent” for skimming money from state coffers and ferreting them away in foreign bank accounts, Zardari is now the self-proclaimed democratic revenge of a nation both plagued by military dictatorship and aggrieved by the loss of its beloved sister, Benazir. “Democracy talks,” he said in his first presidential address today, “and everybody hears.”

I hear he’s no longer interested in repealing the law that allows the president to dissolve the assembly whenever he sees fit. Read More »

By Kyla Pasha | Posted in Current Affairs, politics, south asia | Comments (2)