The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Author: mongreldogs

  • The Appeal of Apocalypse

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    mongreldogs
    in

    What is so seductive about the end of the world? Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of…

  • Why I’m a Technophile

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    mongreldogs
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    For you to understand this post, there are two things about myself I should tell you — they’re already well-known to any of my friends: I drink a lot of Coke. I have catastrophically bad eyesight. More below the fold.

  • Are you safer?

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    mongreldogs
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    In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things…

  • Ubi Dubium

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    mongreldogs
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    There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi…

  • More from the First Interworld War

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    mongreldogs
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    Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky,…

  • Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

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    mongreldogs
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    Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the…

  • More propaganda

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    mongreldogs
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    from a war that was never fought. 🙂 I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of…

  • New, if silly, pursuit

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    mongreldogs
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    So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the…

  • Pondering Hate Crimes and Hate-Crime Laws

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    mongreldogs
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    Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been…

  • Nothing But a Dream

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    mongreldogs
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    One of the things that goes along with advising Student Council at my school is orchestrating the annual Talent Show. For the past four years, that’s included performing as the first act — largely because I badger my fellow faculty into performing, and I feel I shouldn’t ask them to do something I’m not willing.…