Sam Han | Eportfolio

The difficult trade-off between development and democracy. A propos to comments made by Zizek in the post below regarding the utterly ridiculous assumption that capitalism and democracy are linked entities.

Sorry, let’s try that once more.

The original is so good. I was afraid to click but I’m very happy I did. This is a great flip.

Choice Zizek quote:

“I hope I’m not a unique idiot.”

“So Bill Gates grabs all the money he can, something like $40-$50 billion, and then he gives half of it [to charity], and he’s the greatest humanitarian ever? That’s obscene.”

While the obesity debates in the America have taken the underclass and African Americans as their primary populations of concern, it seems that clergy too are suffering disproportionately from health issues. As The New York Times reports, “Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could.”

The trend has caused several churches to take special measures. In the United Methodist Church, for instance, “some church administrators have been contacting ministers known to skip vacation to make sure they have scheduled their time,” according to Duke health research professor Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell.

There are a variety of factors that go into this alarming trend—dwindling congregations (especially for mainline Protestant congregations), and thus fewer volunteers, as well as new technologies that allow congregants more frequent access to clergy. But the overarching reason, clergy health studies suggest, is overwork due to poor boundary maintenance.

Read more here.

Tags: clergy, New York Times, public health

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True Story. In the height of the Canibus vs. LL beef, I was eating dinner in front of the TV and I get a call from my boy Chris KKA (Koreanly Known As) Minho, who I grew up with. We went from nursery school, elementary school, Korean language school, Sunday school, etc. together. He was like “Yo, you MUST turn to HOT97 right now because Flex is playing LL’s response.” The response was of course “The Ripper Strikes Back,” which Flex repeatedly started up from the top and “dropped the bomb” on. It was such a moment. I remember grabbing a cassette and just letting it record all the way through just to see if Flex would ever let it play somewhat cleanly without his (in retrospect, off-beat though at the time seemingly awesome) scratching.

The next day, the entire Form II (8th grade) at Fieldston was leaving for Washington, DC, for a class trip. I put “Ripper Strikes Back” on a mixtape I made for that trip and I remember thinking I was the man, playing it for all my friends. Ha, I guess I thought I was Funkmaster Flex in some small way, being the only one with the song on tape amongst my friends.

Thinking back on it, I feel a mix of nostalgia, accomplishment and a strong dash of embarrassment.

True Story. In the height of the Canibus vs. LL beef, I was eating dinner in front of the TV and I get a call from my boy Chris KKA (Koreanly Known As) Minho, who I grew up with. We went from nursery school, elementary school, Korean language school, Sunday school, etc. together. He was like “Yo, you MUST turn to HOT97 right now because Flex is playing LL’s response.” The response was of course “The Ripper Strikes Back,” which Flex repeatedly started up from the top and “dropping the bomb” on it. It was such a moment. I remember grabbing a cassette and just letting it record all the way through just to see if Flex would ever let it play somewhat cleanly without his (in retrospect, off-beat though at the time seemingly awesome) scratching.

The next day, the entire Form II (8th grade) at Fieldston was leaving for Washington, DC, for a class trip. I put “Ripper Strikes Back” on a mixtape I made for that trip and I remember thinking I was the man, playing it for all my friends. Ha, I guess I thought I was Funkmaster Flex in some small way, being the only one with the song on tape amongst my friends.

Thinking back on it, I feel a mix of nostalgia, accomplishment and a strong dash of embarrassment.

Harvey has never looked so good!

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

You have probably never even heard of Shirky, and until this interview I hadn’t either. When I ask him to define what he does, he laughs, and admits that often when he’s leaving a party someone will say to him, “What exactly is it you do?” His standard reply – “I work on the theory and practice of social media”– is not just wilfully opaque, but crushingly dreary, which is funny, because he is one of the most illuminating people I’ve ever met.

Wait, are you telling me that a tech writer for The Guardian, one of the better UK papers, is unfamiliar with Shirky? I know that we in the States often suffer from intellectual synecdoche (taking what is local and attributing global consequences to it) but come on. To not know one of the major thinkers behind this whole Web 2.0 thingie…that’s just inexplicable.