I'm in the news.

Today's Statesman Journal ran a story quoting me about Colin Powell's visit to Willamette. I discuss it here

Give Thanks No More; It’s Time for a National Day of Atonement (CommonDreams.org)

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.

[...]

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

3,000 hits!

Just passed the 3,000 mark on the counter (which, I might add, is smart enough not to count hitting refresh as a new hit). So traffic has been picking up. Actually, the counter wasn't on the site for a few days after I changed the template because I didn't copy the code of it over to the new template. Fortunately goggle had a cached copy of the site before I changed it and I was able to nab it off there. I wonder how often people wind up using google's cache as a backup of last resort...

Halloween costume

Never got around to posting this picture of my Halloween costume (a young Republican, very scary).

Flight Plans

Going to CA for Christmas. Fly there 12/20 and return 1/7.

the other religion

Went to my first men's basketball game yesterday.

I skimmed this article, written before the game which talked about Gardner-Webb being a "cupcake" that is an easy team.

But, we barely beat them in the last few seconds (ESPN story). This is going to be a rough year...

RC (not the cola)

This week all my reading for Scopes and Methods and half my readings for Latin American politics are about Rational choice theory (RC). This morning I wrote four pages summarizing and asking questions about an article on RC's application to Latin American politics co-authored by the professor of the class. That was not the most elegant sentence in the history of the English language. Anyhow, it's a little stressful to be writing about someone's work for her, but the upside is knowing that any errors will be quickly corrected...

For an interesting read about how bad people are at making decisions read this New Yorker piece. Thanks to my friend Jay for sending it a year or two ago.

Doing well. I'm actually on top of reading. Which means I should get on top of a bunch of other stuff like research for my end-of-term paper...

condo!

This is a unit in the condo complex where I'd like to buy. It'll probably only be up for a few days until it sells. Applied for a loan at my credit union today and it looks like if my dad co-signs I'll be able to do it. Exciting stuff! It's just weird to think about being a home owner... My readings about rational choice theory await.

Plugging Along

I'm doing okay. Some days I wonder what the hell I'm doing here and other days I can't see being anywhere else. I've been posting to Rulablog a lot, so if you're interested in Latin America check it out.