“Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew celebrate their nomination at the Republican National Convention, June 1968.” Taken by White House Photographer Ollie Atkins. From the Oliver Atkins Photograph Collection.
Nixon Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who resigned in the midst of the October War in 1973 and was replaced by Gerald Ford, was famous for his alliterative insults. Here’s a passage from a Time Magazine article about him:
“In a 1969 speech against war protesters, he said, ‘A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.’ ‘In the United States today,’ Agnew told a 1970 audience in San Diego, ‘we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.’ He went after ‘pusillanimous pussyfooters’ and ‘vicars of vacillation’ and ‘the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’”
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To follow up a bit, Google Translate can’t guess that basic Zulu phrases are Zulu, nor can it guess that Xhosa phrases are Xhosa (it’s been saying they are Portuguese or German, but of course, not translating them). Firefox isn’t offered in any South African languages besides English and Afrikaans. Facebook (as seen above) isn’t either. Now, I’m not complaining, just thinking out loud. I don’t speak Afrikaans, no less isiZulu or isiXhosa, so I’m in no place to, for example, translate Firefox…
[Images from Wikipedia and Facebook]
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It’s funny that Google Translate knows some Afrikaans. (Here you can download Firefox in Afrikaans and here is Facebook in Afrikaans. Gmail isn’t available in Afrikaans, and if it were, I wouldn’t use it. New Gmail features get rolled out to “English (US)” first, and who knows about Labs support.)
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me: this is such a depressing issue of harper’s weekly this week
ag: depressing week this week too
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Breaking News Alert
The New York Tmes
Sunday, April 26, 2009 — 2:20 PM ET
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New York Times Swine Flu News Alert Prompts U.S. to Declare Public Mental Health Emergency
American health officials on Sunday declared a public mental health emergency over increasing cases of psychosomatic swine flu, saying that they had confirmed 2.75 million cases of the disease in the United States and expected to see more as investigators review tweets, emails, blog posts, and Facebook status updates.
Officials reiterated that swine flu is “a lot like the flu flu” and that “if you wash your hands, you’ll probably be fine,” but acknowledged that most Americans affected with psychosomatic swine flu had probably not read the second paragraph of the News Alert where it was reported that “most of the cases had been mild” and that “the emergency declaration frees resources to be used toward diagnosing or preventing additional cases and releases money for more antiviral drugs.” The officials were similarly resigned that people won’t read this second paragraph either. An unnamed CDC source who asked for anonymity because he’s not authorized to make ‘correlation/causation’ statements said that most hysteria in the United States can be blamed on 24 hour cable news, including “Howard Dean,” “the financial crisis,” and “rioting due to psychosomatic swine flu.”
[The actual news alert was sent out at 1:45ish EDT and linked to this story.]
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At least one student at the University of Chicago who felt perfectly fine before getting a NYTimes.com News Alert over email about swine flu confirmed to us in an interview that he began to feel ‘slightly ill’ after reading the message.
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“The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the ‘politics of fear’ is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration’s policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.”
[From Mark Danner’s second of two articles in the NYRB on American torture. This is the first.]
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Here’s a breakdown of where the $230 million in federal money Senator Dick Durbin got for Illinois in the Omnibus Appropriations Act is going to go. It includes money for the CTA Circle Line and also for Promontory Point in Hyde Park. Hyde Park Progress brings up a good point when they ask just what $4 million can do for the lake front when actually fixing on the Point would cost more on the order of $130 million.
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