You know it exists, but, much like a cat having sex, you’ve never seen one in the wild.  The dollar coin, the elusive (perhaps annoying?) coin that Americans resist with all their casual might in favor of the cotton-printed counterpart.  Meanwhile, the rest of the Earth uses a 1-coin for daily transaction, perhaps most famously the British pound (which is, fortunately, the exact price of a Broomhill Chip-Butty).
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All too often the blank is ignored. Perhaps from disinterest or boredom, maybe from the legitimate claim that such things have no substance, the blank has been subjugated by the sweeping authority of facts, symbols, and straightforward representations. In short, the blank is slave to the dominion of stuff, the dominion of things.

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Democracy in many ways is a loaded term, an ambiguous word with multifarious interpretations. But in all its incarnations and formulations there is a specific commonality that can, perhaps, best define what we mean – that democracy is nothing more than the activation of individual political beings in place of political subjects. (more…)

They pull all of us into the conference room around 9:30. The government’s five-thousand dollar plasma is showing the commemoration of the Pentagon’s 9/11 Memorial. On the broadcast some General is at the podium speaking in flighty words, issuing prayers and summing up all the virtues of the people in attendance. The whole presentation is more subdued than one of, say, Goebells’, but the differences in rhetoric are buried somewhere deep in the Earth next to my sentimentality. (more…)

Last night, Barack Obama gave a speech in front of 80,000 people that some have called ”an amazing, unbelievable moment,” a “terrific speech,” and “the most impressive campaign speech…I can recall in my lifetime.”  Emotions ran high in Denver, and this was made abundantly apparent through cut-away shots of people in tears as the nominee spoke.  I, of course, have different views of political speeches, and see an inherent danger in speech that appeals primarily to emotions, as I have covered before.

But something became incredibly clear last night in a way that, as far as I can tell, no one has bothered to point out. (more…)