"I am evaluating your GIScience MA application and it is very impressive indeed."
Email from fifth-year program director
Started so I don't have to make one post reflect my whole day. I can just picspam, videospam, and quotespam you to my heart's content.
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The continent of Africa is made up of fifty-four countries with a total population of nine hundred million (900,000,000), but most media coverage presents it as one country, hot and dusty, with boundless plains full of nature reserves and refugee camps. The continent is reported either as overpopulated, so people can’t grow enough food and starve, or depopulated by AIDS and war. The Africans in these stories rarely dress in suits and tires. Either they carry Kalashnikovs or they’re half-naked with prominent ribs and bare breasts. Or it’s Nelson Mandela.
“The festering disaster of our age,” said Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger, of Africa’s tragedy in the 1970s. Former British prime minister Tony Blair called 1990s Africa “a scar on the conscience of the world”. And UN food-supply expert Jean Ziegler predicted that in the new millennium Africa would drift off the Western world’s radar like a “raft at sea night”. Africa is also known as the “dark continent” and the “lost continent”. Clearly, Africa has an image problem.
UN studies show that not Africa but the Arab world has the poorest, weakest, most illiterate, underdeveloped, unhealthy, benighted, and backward populations on the globe, but whenever even the tormented Iraqis think of misfortune, Africa springs to mind. One resident of Baghdad said of humanitarian aid workers who try to decide what’s best for Iraqis: “What are they thinking of? We’re not Africa. We don’t live in trees”.
"Linda Polman in “AidSpeak”
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Voltaire
"You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions; so that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another."
François de la Rochefoucauld
"For people who are gay or support gay marriage, I get how seeing thousands of people come out to make this statement is incredibly disheartening, but take solace in this: Gay marriage is happening. Like many drive-through window lanes, it ain’t going backwards. And your bonus is this: You get gay marriage, and all your political opponents are going to get is Type-II Diabetes"
Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show”
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I can’t tell you much more about the customers today, because of my limited contact with them. I work in the kitchen, so I don’t see much of the clientele. What made today so difficult—more difficult than always being behind on food, running out of one thing or another, needing to be in two places at once, etc—was the attitudes of the other employees.
No one really stopped talking about the reasons why today was as busy as it was. The people I work alongside kept going on and on about how powerful it was to be part of such a righteous movement, and how encouraged they were to know that there were so many people who agree with Dan Cathy. They went on at great length about how it was wrong not just for gays to marry, but to exist. One kid, age 19, said “I hope the gays go hungry.”
I nearly walked out then and there. That epitomizes the characteristics of these evangelical “Christians” who are so vocally opposed to equal rights. Attitudes like that are the opposite of Christ-like.
"Thats more from our anonymous gay Chick-fil-A employee who is speaking out after yesterday’s record-setting sales day for the chicken company. Bigotry sells! (via newsweek)
(via newsweek)
