Support your local bookseller

I've been surprised by how many UCSB graduate students and faculty speak of Amazon as if it were the only place to buy books. How about supporting independent bookstores? You can find them (and other "indie" businesses) at indiebound.com.

When time is too short to visit one locally, there's always powells.com (where the workers have a union contract) and alibris.com, a database linking hundreds of independent booksellers. Come on, folks, let's support businesses that actually care about books, rather than selling them as just another commodity!

One man's views on war, from the 1700's

Our Lord, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to endure without complaint, certainly does not wish us to cross the sea and cut the throats of our brothers because some murderers dressed in red, and wearing hats two feet high, are enlisting citizens by making a noise with two little sticks on the tightly stretched skin of an ass. And when, after battles won, all London glitters with lights, when the sky blazes with fireworks, and the air resounds with the noise of thanksgiving, of bells, of organs, and of cannon, we mourn in silence over these murders, the cause of public gaiety.

~English Quaker Andrew Pitt, as quoted by Voltaire, in Philosophical Letters, published 1733.

A Farewell Salute

Too bad Blogger has awkwardly cropped this and other images, at least on my browser ... click on the cartoon to see the original.

Howard Zinn on Barack Obama

"Obama will not fulfill that potential for change unless he is enveloped by a social movement which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough that he fill his abstract phrases about change, fill them with some real, solid content."


Click here to see the video and transcript of this commentary from The Real News Network.

Thanks, Prez, for closing Guantanamo ~ now shut down the School of the Americas!

A Turkish 'I apologize' campaign to Armenians

The fate of Armenians in 1915 remains taboo in Turkey, but some intellectuals are taking action.

By Esra Özyürek
January 5, 2009
Los Angeles Times

Two hundred Turkish intellectuals last month launched an Internet signature campaign for an apology to Armenians for the 1915 massacres. "My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Armenians were subjected to in 1915," the brief statement reads. "I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them."


Click here to see rest of article