M-L-M Mayhem!

I can't believe there's a video from 1991 of Samir Amin speaking about Eurocentrism. Yes, I know it's long and most of you won't bother to watch it, but I cannot help but post a video of one of my academic idols. Yes, I geek out over a nearly 80 year-old Egyptian marxist (in his sixties in this video, though)... But check out his kick ass late-80s/early-90s David Byrne esque coat. It would make anyone a fan!

Batman is always beating up on the mentally ill and locking them away in the inhumane depths of Arkham Asylum!

After watching the drawing/animation made of David Harvey's lecture on the financial crisis, I ran into this gem by the same production company: After accidentally tuning into an episode of Oprah the other day (and then quickly turning off the television) I was once again reminded of how much I hate the whole "Secret" you can get whatever you want if your mental will is strong enough crap that Oprah, and others like Oprah spew. This animated talk by Barbara Ehrenreich, I believe, is a good response. Except the garbage found in books like The Secret , or the health-and-wealth doctrine of the Christian right (God wants you to be rich, if you aren't rich it's simply because you're not praying hard enough or because God doesn't like you), is nothing all that new. Nor is it all that "secret"... It's pretty much another reiteration of the bourgeois ideology common very common in America: if you work hard enough you'll succeed; if you...

This is an excerpt from a piece of short fiction I'm trying to clean up for publication. Unfortunately it was already rejected once by Strange Horizons... I'm posting this small excerpt here so that friends and comrades can comment/critique and let me know if it's just worth abandoning altogether. [And the short story, for any interested parties, is itself an excerpt of an unpublished novel.] When I was thirteen my brother returned from the war. His body was intact but his mind was an amputated limb. He would stare at the wall for hours. Sometimes he would scream until he lost his voice. Other times he would hold conversations with the ghosts of dead comrades. And though his madness was occasionally punctuated by moments of lucidity, my parents committed him to the lunatic asylum. Since Koenag had lost the war the veterans were an embarrassment. The patriots saw them as Koenag’s failure to retain independence. Those who welcomed the invaders saw my brother and his ...