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Baramin...good grief, I'd never heard that term
From the Boston Globe:
Conservapedia is just like Wikipedia, except that its 11,000 entries read like they were personally vetted by Pat Robertson and the 700 Club. Fed up with Wikipedia's purported liberal bias, Conservapedia's founder, Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, has created "an encyclopedia you can trust."This would be funny if these people weren't so sad, and such fascists. Baramin--sounds like "varmints" but it's supposedly based on Hebrew.
And you can trust them, to give you some pretty loopy definitions. Their entry on kangaroos, for instance, says that, "like all modern animals . . . kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood."
You may not recognize the word "baramin." It's a 20th-century creationist neologism that refers to the species God placed on earth during Creation Week. Special for kids: I wouldn't use that word on the biology final. Although maybe your parents could sue the local school board for failing to teach the Book of Genesis in science class.
More on Conserva-kangaroos: "After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters."
Who knew?
Some excellent clone-hunting going on at VVork: stacks of audio loudspeakers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and stacks of books (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) by artists. A while back it was "neon week."
"I feel that my stack of loudspeakers is more profound than yours because..."
Marisa Olson Collections 1: Sound Files
images Olson posted to Nasty Nets, reBlogged
Marisa Olson Collections 2: Knives
Marisa Olson Collections 3: Knots
A week or so ago Atrios linked to this Charlie Rose interview with Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist and ostensible Middle East expert, which aired in 2003, right after America thought it had "won" the Iraq war. Watch it if you can without hurling. Friedman condescendingly lectures people in Muslim countries, bragging shamelessly about the lessons "American boys and girls" have taught them. It never seems to occur to him that four years later Iraq might be a charnel house because of his and Bush's bad judgment call. (The US service deaths passed 3500 this week.) His jingoist cry that "American power in the service of American ideals" had to teach a lesson to a Muslim country--any Muslim country, it doesn't matter if it attacked us or not--is pure Rudyard Kipling racism. This was him at the height of his post shock and awe preening but he still hasn't apologized for all the people he helped to kill. Here's what he said:
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"Retribution against the wrong country for 9/11 was bad enough without claiming it as a triumph for American ideals.
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
Two fairly active threads on Cory Arcangel, Paul B. Davis, and matters BEIGE: the conversation starts here and seems to be continuing here. So far Paddy Johnson's questions from last fall--about Untitled Translation Exercise in particular--aren't being answered, although some good points have been made overall. Once again some fairly persistent commenter(s) are avoiding the issues and accusing me of personal belligerence and hostility. This rather proves my point that the discussion around BEIGE these days isn't about issues but about declaring for or against certain artists. We need to get over this.
Update: A couple of comments about UTE have been made since I posted.