Browsing PBH By Articles

Who Is Julian Assange?

Have you seen the cartoon where the hero repeatedly avoids disaster by a whisker? Meet Julian Assange. He looks more like the evil nemesis to Austin Powers than a man who strikes fear into the hearts of world leaders. Tall, skinny and pasty white, he makes you want to rush him to the hospital for an infusion of Vitamin D. Whatever he is, Australian Julian Assange has captured the imagination of the world with his release of 250,000 diplomatic cables from the US Department of State.

Many wonder how he’s able to fly unimpeded in this day of increased airport security. He regularly travels internationally with the ease of a foreign dignitary, yet in April Wikileaks released a classified video of a US Apache helicopter firing indiscriminately on Iraqi civilians. Two Reuters News Service employees were shown killed in the attack.

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Are Technical Fouls Ruining The NBA?

Put your thinking caps on, because it’s time for a quiz. Which one of these situations can result in a technical foul during an NBA game:

A. Kobe Bryant, in frustration, bounces the ball with extra force after being called for a blocking foul, resulting in the ball accidentally bouncing into the second row of seats

B. Dwight Howard gets tangled up with a defender and throws an elbow into his opponent’s chin to “create separation”

C. Lebron James gets called for a questionable charge, and deals with his disappointment by grimacing and jogging away from the referee

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Thanksgiving & Black Friday: A Tale Of Two Americas

Turkey, NFL, and family drama. It’s the most American of holidays. We brave invasive TSA pat-downs to brave invasive aunt interrogations. Families pose a little too forced in maybe a little too bright sweaters for the holiday picture. Siblings smile knowingly at each other in between sips as the odd uncle starts to ramble.

Mothers and daughters watch SpongeBob Squarepants float by in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Fathers and sons chuckle at the Detroit Lions’ secondary and John Madden turducken references. And we all take a long, wistful look at the “Wizard of Oz” during commercials.

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Why Afghanistan Matters: It’s The Oil

The right war is what Barack Obama called Afghanistan in his 2008 campaign. He declared Iraq the wrong war, and that we should never have been there in the first place. In reality, Obama knew that America had to take care of business in Iraq before we could turn our attention elsewhere. First, it’s important to understand how America finds itself in this current situation.

Throughout the early 70s, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began nationalizing their respective oil industries. In 1968, Britain announced it would withdraw their military from Iran and the Middle East in 1971, and France was still smarting from its defeats in Indochina and Algeria. The American military was stretched to the limit and American public opinion had turned against the war in Vietnam, making further military action by the US unlikely. OPEC nations saw their opportunity.

While agreements had called for OPEC nations to receive as much as 55% of the price of a barrel of oil, no citizen of an OPEC country was allowed to be a director of any of these oil companies, nor were they allowed to see the books. Estimates are American oil companies paid these countries as little as 10%. By 1973, member countries owned as much as 60% of the oil industry in their respective nations, and they were effectively setting their own prices. A barrel of crude nearly quadrupled to over $11.

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Keep Writing Your Awful Book: A Retrospective On NaNoWriMo 2010

Across the globe, thousands of people will be finishing tentative drafts of novels as we near the end of November. This may seem pretty startling to some (which perhaps it should), but it’s all because we’re entering the home stretch of National Novel Writing Month. This event, now in its 11th year, challenges your everyday person to write a novel in just 30 days’ time.

If that sounds kind of insane, that seems to be the point. The organizers of National Novel Writing Month treat the endeavor as more of a challenge, like a hot dog eating contest, more than they do an urgent drive to create significant literature in 30 days’ time. The National Novel Writing Month website (which has been distastefully abbreviated to NaNoWriMo.com … was it made up by Michael Scott?) is supportive of using the novel-writing process as therapy. The message is, if you can finish a novel in 30 days, you can do anything. Although that’s pretty dorky, I’m okay with the sentiment of that.

However, this particular National Novel Writing Month has been fraught with controversy. The key player in this whole affair is Laura Miller, a co-founder and senior writer at Salon. She, in a manner rather typical of anyone who writes for Salon, assailed its participants as self-indulgent, naive, and generally incapable of good writing in any capacity.

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