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“The New Yorker’s latest “satirical” cover provides an almost too perfect footnote to Nas’ visual and vocal meditations on the implications of Obama’s potential presidency.”
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“Whites make up 66% of the general U.S. population, but only about 40% of large cities. Sooner or later, the pendulum was bound to swing back, and that appears to be starting.”
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“Beijing citizens have been told not to pick their noses, yawn or scratch their heads when talking to foreigners during the Olympics.”
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“A 62-year-old monk from a small friary near Milan has just released his second heavy metal album.”
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“Either way, it doesn’t really matter to me. Life will prolly be harder for a black kid than a white kid in America any way you dice it, regardless of whether that kid’s named Lawrence or LacKquan.”
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“A war bonnet to Cree people or the Prairie Indian people, it’s a sacred thing,” Dorothy said. “It’s used in ceremonies, in peace treaties, used in official addresses. It’s not used as a costume to walk on a stage with a deer-skin bikini.”
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“The thing is, in spite of all the corporate bullshit, Pixar has proven their unfailing loyalty to the story and the characters. Disney, on the other hand, has proven its unfailing loyalty to the *genre*.”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Arnold Layne wrote:
re: reverse flight. The US still pays about half for gasoline as Europe, and countries outside the US and Europe are putting more and more cars on their roads. Gas prices here will continue to climb for more than a few years, and demand for inner city real estate will climb as well. The poor will inevitably be pushed out to the suburbs.
What will they find there? First, little if any public transportation. Suburbanites fought hard to prevent bus lines and light rail from reaching the suburbs of many metro areas. Retrofitting such services will be grueling because sprawl often was not designed to accommodate efficient routes. Also, the areas that still need coverage are much larger than that of the central city.
The poor will also find that retail is congregated in pockets where transportation for both distributors and middle-income consumers (with cars) is optimized. These shopping centers will compete heavily with any businesses that try to develop in the deteriorating and often abandoned single store and solitary strip mall locations. Also, those commercial relics are prime targets for conversion into low-income housing, further driving up costs for start-up businesses looking to get closer to potential consumers.
Further, the housing in the suburbs is deteriorating. Many tract developments were built by companies that cut corners, and the planned lifespan of those houses barely exceeds the length of the average mortgage. Add to that a baby-boomer generation that has just entered its dying-off phase, and an accompanying drop in demand. Even without the recent burst of the real estate bubble, many of those houses were about to become worth less than their owners paid. Buying real estate in the suburbs is a speculator’s nightmare that will last for many, many years.
Finally, what jobs will they find in the suburbs? Service industry employment, of course, but what else? The manufacturing and heavy industry that exists is well established with growth plans that center on automation, existing structures and infrastructure. The business models for high-tech companies, themselves firmly established, rely heavily on distribution through the internet and shipping companies like UPS and FedEx.
As fuel prices climb, I can easily see middle-class in-flight to urban areas snowballing, with an attendant upheaval in the overall economic situation. The next two decades will be very interesting, to say the least.
Posted 20 Jul 2008 at 5:37 pm ¶
Phrone wrote:
I recently got into an argument with some friends who expressed disdain that Disney was making a movie with a black princess. Evidently, my white friends felt offended that a major, influential corporation was trying to represent people who were not them. Now I’m rooting for this movie, just to show them that a Disney movie about a black woman can be just as good, if not better, than one about a white woman (or, arguably, a white-washed woman.)
Am I hoping against all prior experience and a great deal of current evidence? Yeah, basically. But I’m still holding out hope. And if that’s how I, as a non-black, feel about the movie just from one conversation, I can only imagine that a lot of black women probably feel the same.
Posted 20 Jul 2008 at 9:51 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:
I find it ‘interesting’, to say the least, that the black princess was first matched with a white guy, then a middle-eastern hero but never a black prince…
Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 10:54 am ¶
Lisa wrote:
The Chinese government is trying soooo hard to make Beijingers not act Chinese, they might as well make everyone wear white face and blonde wigs.
And they would never register the disconnect of this with the whole racial triumph propaganda surrounding the Olympics.
Ironically, there will actually be FEWER foreigners in Beijing this summer than there normally is, with residents and tourists, due to the visa crackdown and deportations.
But I love the whole, “Don’t make fun of the cripples to their faces” admonition. Unfortunately, they forgot the “Don’t make fun of the foreigners to their faces” one. I pity the average person trying to reconcile the “we hate evil foreigners, kick them out!” and the “welcome foreign friends!” propagandas right now.
Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 11:48 am ¶
Renee wrote:
@Phrone …I think that you are being unrealistically optimistic when you consider Disney’s history of racist imagery in their movies. I will go and see this but with the expectation that “their” princess will probably not resemble anything that I would imagine a black princess to be.
Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 1:49 pm ¶
lunanoire wrote:
@ Arnold Layne,
Yep, it’s worrisome that we are moving to land use patterns seen in Brazil and other nations.
Suburban poverty in the US seems to be pretty bad b/c the infrastructure (transportation, etc) is insufficient compared to cities AND people are less likely to have the option of growing their own food and raising animals compared to rural life.
Posted 22 Jul 2008 at 9:59 am ¶
gatamala wrote:
This:
lmbao
Posted 22 Jul 2008 at 12:38 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:
Add to that a baby-boomer generation that has just entered its dying-off phase, and an accompanying drop in demand.
^^that should have been in my comment
Posted 22 Jul 2008 at 12:38 pm ¶