Hoping that America really is capable of change

A thought-provoking opinion piece by Doron Taussig of the Philadelphia City Paper, which I’m re-publishing in this space without permission (I’m sure the CP guys won’t mind) but which you may link to here.

Regarding electioneering and vote-rigging, a controversial issue from the 2000 election to which Taussig alludes, Mike Gallen The Expatriate alerts everyone to something fishy in West Virginia.  And in the spirit of my adopted city’s overcoming the Curse of Billy Penn, I’d like to say: GO PHILLIES!! The city is hopping and I can’t believe the size of the crowd for the parade!  Also, check out these photos from the celebrations Wednesday night.  Okay, now onto the main event…

Tonight is a good night to be a Philadelphian

Think about it: a generation has passed since 1983 and Philadelphia’s last major championship.  But more important than the championship are Philadelphians themselves.

One thing I really love about this city is the camaraderie of its citizens.  A friend and I trekked to City Hall, across South Street, and down Passyunk Avenue, and everywhere we went I was struck by how in this moment, every Philadelphian, regardless of race and religion, were hugging each other, cheering, all equally on the edge of tears.  Brotherhood – that’s what this city’s about.

The problem is mix-taxation, not over-taxation

Two of my posts, “Can the United States go… bankrupt?” and “If I were running for president,” have generated a pleasant amount of traffic.  Now, I really should be getting to work on my lecture (not to mention fundraising for the World University Project — arrrgg!), but I think the ongoing crisis merits a few more comments.  And in the interest of debate, click on the still from The Grapes of Wrath (1940) to go to an interesting blog post.

Who is Sifr Nil?

One of the mosaics Sifr Nil enjoys using as his Facebook profile

I’ve received some e-mails asking whether I’m Sifr Nil, author of the mysterious new blog Cyberquran (al-qur’an as-cyber).  Were I so imaginative.  No, I’m not Sifr Nil — but apparently I may know who he is.

The astute reader will have noticed the play behind his pseudonym: “sifr” (صفر) is Arabic for “zero, empty,” whence we English-speakers get the word “cipher“; and “nil,” of course, is a synomym for “zero” or “nothing.”  In other words, “Sifr Nil” is a double negative (befitting his first “sura”).  Evidently he is also something of a cyberculturalist, as well as a peculiarly kabbalistic Muslim.

Friends have noted the similarity between his poetic style and mine, leading at least a few to suspect him and I of being one and the same.   The similarity is definitely notable, and I’m seriously flattered that someone out there has been moved enough by my poetry to emulate it.  However, there are definite differences.

For one thing, a friend speculated that English is not his first language.  From the point-of-view of content, his use of cybernetic metaphor is not something that would have occurred to me since, as all of you know, I’m a bit leery of transhumanism (although it’s interesting he chose to use my “super-tribe” post as one of his first “hints”).  Additionally, I’ve never been comfortable with the depiction of God as “emptiness,” although I’m familiar with it from the post-Holocaust theological works of Richard Rubinstein.

So, now comes the scoop — an e-mail from the poet himself!  I wrote him many of the questions friends have been asking me.  What follows was his interesting and somewhat laconic reply.

Perspective and the end of human life

This week I’m hosting guest blogger Wanda Robinson, a student a La Salle University.  She’s writing about euthanasia, a topic with some bearing on the upcoming presidential election.  It’s a brief essay, but despite its brevity she manages to raise a lot of troubling questions about capitalism, relativism, logotherapy and the meaning of life, and perspective, mostly from her own personal experience.  Give it a read!

Can the United States government go… bankrupt?

Seems like a ludricous idea; after all, how can a government go bankrupt?  Well, according to this powerpoint presentation (which I’ve also provided in video form above), if administrative agencies and municipalities like school boards and entire towns can go belly-up, then so might a national government.  Consider also the recent troubles in Iceland.  Russia has come to their rescue, providing them a €4bn loan from the goodness of their hearts.  Time for a Mr. Rogers moment: “Can you say, ’satelite state’ boys and girls?  How about, ‘return of the Soviet bloc’?”  Of course, one has to wonder whether Russia, with its own earthshattering fiscal crisis, can really afford any financial adventures into the North Atlantic.

What I’m most curious about is what precisely a federal bankruptcy would mean.  Would it be a scenario like that which happens to a company, i.e., it will be restructured and recreated into something signficantly different?  If so, what happens to you and me, J.Q. Public, during the intervening limbo?  What would the new United States government look like, and how would it operate?  (Would it even still be a democratic republic?)

The apocalyptic picture is one painted by Michael Hodges, cumrudgeon author of the Grandfather Report, and John Rubino, the alarmist hack behind DollarCollapse.com, as well as Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It and How to Profit from the Coming Real Estate Bust (very humanitarian titles, wouldn’t you say?)  Two years ago I corresponded with Hodges (Rubino wouldn’t return my e-mails).  We had a bit of an irascible back-and-forth, and I disagreed with much that he said.

Or would federal bankruptcy mean the slashing and burning of government-provided services and programs?  Again, if so, what happens to you and me down here, on the street?  I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

What have I wrought? New questions, it seems.

Well, it looks like in the few hours of its existence, my last blog entry is already tearing across Philly cyberspace.  Perhaps now would be the time to offer some addendums to the questions I raised.  *cough

First things first, Iggles blog has raised the subject of proportionality:

Secondly, how typically heavy-handed is this of the Eagles / NFL?  Rather than just saying the team expects the cheerleaders to project a wholesome image and will remove those who don’t, they send in the lawyers to shut down their access to social networking sites that pretty much the entirety of the under-35 population in this country uses.  Because it sure would be terrible if those cheerleaders were out there sticking up basically-naked pictures of themselves.

Second, if you click on that link, yep, you definitely have to wonder where the heck the “wholesomeness” is.  I suppose the word means something vague, an idea orbiting somewhere around “family values.”  But this still begs the question — how do skimpily clad women bounding through the air reflect a good Christian home life?  To be fair, I suppose it means that good Christian girls can still have fun, but the increasing sluttiness (and smuttiness) of cheerleading calls this into question.  Then again, in our era of sexual liberty, “slut” is itself a concept in need of serious re-examination.  Consider this illustrious list of cheerleader scandals.

Third and finally, a lot of e-mailers are writing, essentially, “They signed the contract, so that’s that.”  Fair enough.  But could not the contract itself be in violation of their civil liberties, regardless of whether the cheerleaders “knew what they were getting into”?

At no point should it be interpretted that I am personally against nigh-naked women flying through the air, performing stratospheric leg splits and other feats of arousing acrobatics.  In the interest of full journalistic disclosure (ahem) I thoroughly enjoy their craft.  I’m just curious about the philosophy behind it, that’s all.

“Wholesome” cheerleaders? Do they have social lives (or civil rights)?

The cheerleader squad for the Philadelphia Eagles exercises and practices in my neighborhood gym. The other day a lawyer came in and took a few of them aside. I overhead her instruct them to delete their Facebook and MySpace profiles immediately, explaining that membership in online social networks is a breach of contract.

Evidently “the team” (read: the owners) feels it cannot regulate what they put on their profiles: I recall her saying that the team wants to promote a “wholesome” image, and so therefore doesn’t want any of its corporate imagery associated with “inappropriate things,” i.e., sexy photographs, suggestive messages, and the like. The last thing I heard her say is, “If you feel these profiles are important for your modeling career or personal life, then keep them — but then you will relinquish your position on the squad.”

If I were running for President…

…this would be my platform: