Clooney Comes Out

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…just not out of that closet. ;)

Rather, he’s just made the startling public admission that — believe it or not — he’s a liberal. And he’s not afraid to admit it.

I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I’m proud of it.

Too many people run away from the label. They whisper it like you’d whisper “I’m a Nazi.” Like it’s a dirty word. But turn away from saying “I’m a liberal” and it’s like you’re turning away from saying that blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus, that women should be able to vote and get paid the same as a man, that McCarthy was wrong, that Vietnam was a mistake. And that Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11.

This is an incredibly polarized time (wonder how that happened?). But I find that, more and more, people are trying to find things we can agree on. And, for me, one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we’re all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it’s not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

[…] Bottom line: it’s not merely our right to question our government, it’s our duty. Whatever the consequences. We can’t demand freedom of speech then turn around and say, But please don’t say bad things about us. You gotta be a grown up and take your hits.

(via Mike)

Update: Apparently there’s a bit of a tussle going on between Clooney and The Huffington Post, where the above-quoted passage was posted.

It’s George Clooney versus Arianna Huffington in a standoff worthy of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

The newly minted Oscar winner says he did not write a blog posted Monday on commentator Huffington’s Web site, though he gave her permission to use a compilation of his critiques of the Iraq war from interviews with Larry King and London’s The Guardian.

“Miss Huffington’s blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts,” Clooney, 44, said in a statement issued Wednesday. “I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog.”

schrodingerscat

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I was just looking over the list of tags used on my site in the past month as displayed on my archives page, when one tag in particular suddenly gave me the giggles. A simple mis-parsing, and I ended up with two competing definitions for the same tag.

schrodingerscat can categorize entries related to:

  1. The famous quantum mechanics thought experiment involving a cat in a box proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (“schrodingers cat”);
  2. The fecal matter produced by said Austrian physicist (“schrodinger scat”).

This was far, far too funny for a few minutes.

Vidal on Oscars and Politics

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One of these days I’m actually going to start reading more of Gore Vidal’s work, as each time I’ve run across him (beginning with his role as the Democratic incumbent facing down up and coming right-winger Bob Roberts in Tim Robbins’ excellent political satire), I’ve found him fascinating and incredibly intelligent.

There’s a two part interview with Vidal in TruthDig conducted just before the Oscars that has some wonderful quips in it. Part one looks primarily at the then-upcoming Oscars:

If [Brokeback Mountain] were to win an Oscar, would it be a step forward in tolerance? How important is Hollywood in this equation?

Well, it never has been, and I don’t see why it should be suddenly now. That it was made at all and that it was made so honestly and so well is a good thing, better than to make a mess out of it, or not try at all….

Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what … they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual.

There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said “oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.”

To get over that training, that’s generation after generation. And it has not done the character of our nation much good. And that’s why we are a joke to the rest of the world, because we carry on about sexual matters everyone else has forgotten about.

Part two concentrates on more political matters:

This is old news now, but in terms of terrorism, there was a lot of protest against the Palestinian Oscar nominee, “Paradise Now,” with a 36,000-person petition to get the film dropped from the roster because it sympathized with “terrorists.”

Never forget there are 1 billion Muslims on Earth. The United States is far too small a country to play big boss – and now far too insolvent a country; we have no revenues, we can’t repair our own infrastructure, much less rebuild the cities that we’ve just knocked down in the Middle East. I think we should learn a little modesty, we’re not number one! At invoking terrorism, yes, we’re pretty good at provoking people to hate us. In fact we’ve been quite successful at that. But we live in a small country, a vulnerable country, a country with no defenses, only “homeland security.” But there’s no true security here – anyone can do anything he wants and will!

Right, so now we have these proposals to build a wall on the Texas/Mexico border, to fill in the tunnels….

Oh it’s just Looney Time, but you see, we have no educational system for the general public. If you come from a well-to-do family, you get a fairly good education, but you get a lot of propaganda along with it. And we have a media that is quite poisonous and only echoes what the administration—and corporate America, which owns the administration—wants us to hear. So the average person has no information, or what he has is so distorted. How can he make up his mind intelligently on any subject?

(via Slog)

iTunes “Metal on Metal” by Kraftwerk from the album Industrial Revolution, 2nd Edition (1977, 3:18).

International Women’s Day 2006

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Today is International Women’s Day.

International Women’s Day is the universal day that connects all women around the world and inspires them to achieve their full potential. IWD 2006 launches another year of working progressively for women’s equality worldwide. It is an important day around the world because the collective power of women is witnessed by milions, and the brave achievements of women past, present and future are respectfully honoured.

Hooray for women!

Er. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put that. ;)

(via MeFi)

iTunes “My Reign Falls” by Monster and Mother Earth, The from the album Unhooked: The Humpy’s Alehouse Anthology (1995, 3:21).

ENG101: Group Project: Learning Everyday English

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Of course, every English class must have at least one group project. When it was first announced that ours was coming up, I ended up getting three different invitations to various groups. The next day, we spent the first part of the day listing common issues for people to group themselves around, and I ended up surprising the group I chose to join.

This group was primarily made up of international students (one from Nepal, one from Korea, and two from Indonesia, plus one other native English speaker of Japanese descent) who’d chosen to work on a presentation on how to improve their everyday English skills, and at first it was hard for them to understand why I’d want to be in their group — after all, I was a native speaker, and didn’t seem to struggle with the language terribly often. I assured them that English can be something of a pain in the butt even for those of us that have grown up with it, and that I do occasionally have to work on how to phrase something or what words I want to choose.

I’m not sure they believed me…but the group worked out well anyway. ;)

We ended up crafting a short essay to hand in to JC, a brochure to use as a handout, and did a short (10-minute) presentation in front of the class summarizing the information in the essay. Here’s the brochure (5Mb .pdf), the paper is behind the cut (as usual).

Final score: 4.0.

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ENG101: Problem/Solution: Parking and Line of Sight

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Our fourth paper in ENG101 was a problem/solution. Initially this one drove me up the wall, as the stated parameters were to find a limited, personal real-world issue. This meant I couldn’t come up with something fun (along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, and I had a devil of a time coming up with a suitable topic — most issues I have in my life either aren’t that big, or are so big that there’s no one simple solution (for instance, the ongoing project of rebuilding my credit score).

In the end, though, I did manage to come up with something, and got another perfect 4.0. So far, so good…

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