• economics
• race

From The Financial Times:

Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, [Brazil's President] Mr Lula da Silva told reporters: "This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing."

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• internet

Thought I'd share an archival tool that's pretty useful. Most stuff on the internet, we think, is ephemeral and can be removed. However, a lot of stuff on the Internet is actually archived by the wayback machine, which allows you to enter a URL and see what the website looked like and check out its content from years before (going back to the late 90s, if the website was up).

Example: Penn State's website from Feb 2007 1997

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• religion

What do you all think? Is Michael Spencer at AlterNet right that Evangelicalism is collapsing? There seems to me to be some truth in it, but it also seems to be part of the ongoing narrative that the Right is a failure and is collapsing (something I can't quite bring myself to believe, what with the Democrats' failure to offer much of a strong cultural narrative to keep the country "on their side," unless Obama proves to be a stronger uniter than other Dems).

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• Humor

Kinda funny

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• cyborgs

A chimp in a zoo premiditates rock collection to throw at zoo visitors. Violent little cyborg, isn't he?

The fact that the ape stayed calm while preparing his weapons but used them when he was extremely agitated proves that the planning behavior was not based on an immediate emotional drive.

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• digital media
• privacy
• technology

A classmate sent me this New York Times article:

FACEBOOK has a chief privacy officer, but I doubt that the position will exist 10 years from now. That’s not because Facebook is hell-bent on stripping away privacy protections, but because the popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things personal, dissolving the line that separates the private from the public.

As the scope of sharing personal information expands from a few friends to many sundry individuals grouped together under the Facebook label of “friends,” disclosure becomes the norm and privacy becomes a quaint anachronism.

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• technology

I'm sitting in the Harrisburg airport awaiting my flight to LA (and then later off to San Fran for 4C's). On the drive here, I heard a BBC report that the archbishop of Modena, Italy, is asking folks to give up texting, social networking sites, and video games for Lent. His reasoning:

Monsignor Benito Cocchi said foregoing the activities would help them "cleanse themselves from the virtual world and get back into touch with themselves"

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• bloggling
• memory
• war rhetoric

Thank you everyone at the Blogora for the opportunity to guest blog here. Like Joe, I'm feeling some uncertainty about contributing "good ideas," but I'm excited to engage in conversation here!

"As Martin Walser puts it, as 'long as something is, it is not, what it will have been. When something is over, one is not anymore the one to whom it happened... Although the past, when it was the present, did not exist, it now imposes itself, as if it had existed in the way in which it imposes itself now'" (Zehfuss 518).

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