I've been getting wiki spam about once a day for the past week or so. It could be a lot worse -- the global voices wiki gets hammered almost constantly -- but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant. It's always the same two pages -- I just restore them from the pagesrc. This time, I remembered to drop the offending host into my deny list.
Alisa and I rode bikes together this evening to the Jones Library. We've rarely managed to make time to go bike riding together, so it was fun. It's all uphill to the library (not steep, but nearly constant), but then it's all downhill all the way home. I gave Alisa a bit of a hard time when I discovered that she kept braking the whole time she was going down. Where's the fun in that?
At the library I saw 
White Like Me by Tim Wise. I was particularly attracted by seeing that Dinesh D'Souza had said Tim Wise was "the Uncle Tom of the white race." If Dinesh D'Souza hates it, it must be good. I see that Tim is going to be on campus at the end of August -- it's hard to tell if there will be a public chance to see him speak or not.
I've been finding lots of interesting books lately. I read Paul Roberts' The End of Oil and Kunstler's The Long Emergency over the past few weeks. Interesting to read them juxtaposed. Roberts is far more optimistic, believing that conservation (meaning transparent changes in how we use oil, rather than lifestyle changes) can greatly extend our current standard of living until some other form of energy is found. Kunstler sees a darker vision, in which the human trajectory is dragged inexorably back to a fundamentally solar energy buget, with an inevitable contraction in the number of people that can be supported with a world ecology without fossil fuel inputs. And then in the past week was the commentary by Daniel Yergin in the Washington Post, that basically said, "We won't have to worry for a long, long time." Kunstler really takes him apart.
I've also been reading Linguistic Imperialism. Phillipson argues that the use of English as a world language is a form of imperialism because it reinforces the existing world order by systematically devaluing contributions from and imposing an additional burden on dominated countries. The worst part is that, if you're a content generator in one of these countries, to have your work valued, you end up having to do it in English, which means it is much harder to compete (because you have to learn a second language and then work in a second language) and by competing in English, you further devalue your own native community, because you're not investing it with your creativity and great works. It sucks. The biggest part of the problem simply derives from the fundamental inequality between countries. But, had the US and other great powers decided to fix these problems, they could have. But understanding the effects of their policies they moved forward to build up English as the world language anyway. If you have an edge, make it sharper. He mentions Esperanto just once in the book -- a parenthetic statement summarizing a book by Louis-Jean Calvet (La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques) that uses Esperanto as a case-study of the pacifist illusion.
I got interested in Phillipson because I saw that he'd participated in the recent Nitobe Simpozio. He has another book that looks interesting English Only Europe, but I haven't been able to get it. Either our library doesn't have it or it wasn't on the shelf when I went to look for it.
StevenBrewer