Suchergebnisse

"From the senior White House correspondent for The New York Times comes the definitive history of the Bush and Cheney White House--a tour de force narrative of those dramatic and controversial eight years. Taking readers into the offices of the West Wing and the cabins of Air Force One, Peter Baker tells the gripping inside story of the Bush and Cheney era. Theirs was the most fascinating American partnership since Nixon and Kissinger, an untested president and his seasoned vice president confronted by one crisis after another as they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. Packed with revealing anecdotes and told with in-the-room immediacy, Days of Fire narrates two profoundly significant and conflicted terms marked by 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, jihad, nuclear proliferation, genocide, and economic collapse. George W. Bush was one of the most polarizing presidents of our time, jettisoning decades of foreign policy pragmatism to redefine America's mission as a crusade to bring freedom to the world. Yet his early dream of transforming Republicans into the party of "compassionate conservatism" and building an "ownership society" were dashed by two consuming wars and a devastating financial crash. At his side was Dick Cheney, the trusted adviser who became the most influential vice president in history only to watch as Bush drifted away, leaving the two at odds over a wide array of fundamental issues. Baker's interviews with more than two hundred players--White House aides, cabinet secretaries, generals, senators and congressmen, relatives and friends of both men--help reveal the truth of their complicated and shifting relationship. Days of Fire is the first book to capture in a truly defining way all eight years of the most consequential presidency in a generation. It is an essential history and thrilling reading"--

This article approaches the latest work of Alberto Moreiras on infrapolitics
as self-conscious acts of writing which thinks its own conditions, or its
own contingent textual inscription. In this sense, I propose that we can
read this work as being informed by a question, even a preoccupation, over
what form or style of writing is appropriate to announce or re-veal the
existential dimensions proposed by the notion of infrapolitics. In exploring
three such untimely textual inscriptions, the article approaches the stakes
of what Moreiras thematises under the name of infrapolitics through how it
informs the performativity of Moreiras?s own writing practice, exploring in
the process the relationship that infrapolitics supposes to politics and to
a certain critique of late capitalism, as well as other important concepts
such as marranismo, the second turn of deconstruction, auto-graphic writing
and demetaphorisation, among others.

First paragraph: Hegemony is a term both elusive and recurrent. It provides a theory of the social for a world in which all universalizing truth narratives have lost their fantasmatic hold over our lives and, in their withdrawal, we are forced to confront the fictions that they in fact always represented. In a certain sense, hegemony theory is the fiction of social fiction; a fiction designed to account for the groundlessness of the social imaginaries with which we construct our respective worlds. It is a term with particular currency in the field of Cultural Studies, where the emergence of the concept as part of a new methodological practice in the study of politics at the University of Essex (among scholars such as the young Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), and its reception in the Birmingham Contemporary Centre of Cultural Studies (particularly in the writings of Stuart Hall), makes it a fundamental part of what Fredric Jameson once called, not without a hint of irony, the "desire" of Cultural Studies (1993, 17). Indeed, Jon Beasley-Murray has gone as far as to say that hegemony theory should today be considered the "master trope of cultural studies" (2010, 39).

First paragraph: The Passage West (2012) by the Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao, translated from the original Passaggio a Occidente (2003), is a remarkable contribution to understanding the new global paradigm we, as both westerners and non-westerners, inhabit, elaborating on the meaning of globalization and political modernity in our times with an eye to both reinterpreting the heritage of the west and proposing possible political horizons for the future. As the title of the work already suggests, central to Marramao´s proposals is the figure of the West itself, though perhaps it is more accurate to say a certain history of the West, or even of the West as history. If this is the case, this place is not (or not only) geographical. It, rather, marks a certain before and after where the "after" will eventually become the emergence of the global age itself as the passage west. This 'west' should be understood, then, on both a conceptual and historical level. With reference to the former, we are to understand that the West is a very particular form of universality, exceptional, following Max Weber, in the course of human history, and universal in so far as it dominates by unifying, thereby realizing, the universal in its very etymology. Only one modality of the universal is known to it: that of domination. Specifically, this domination has its root in "a particular declension of rationality, which is even more central than the logic of power" (151). Its biggest armament is its particular form of rationality, and this rationality is in turn dependent upon "specific forms of 'practical-rational behaviors' that have no adequate parallels in other cultures" (Marramao, 151).

The article probes independent American 'Tea Party' politicians and their supporters for their foreign policy views. The author observes that the movement has all of its ideological foundations in domestic policy, leaving foreign policy largely undefined. The article notes that while many Tea Party candidates and supporters are universally opposed to foreign international organizations, members of the movement occupy both isolationist and interventionist ends of foreign policy. K. Cargill

Background  The aim was to evaluate the effect of the closure of a small intellectual disability hospital on the community use of those people involved. In addition, the study sought to identify those factors that might influence the community use of people with intellectual disabilities.Methods  The impact of resettlement was investigated using a mixed design in which changes in the dependent variable (The Guernsey Community Participation and Leisure Assessment, GCPLA scores) were measured within‐subjects (before and after leaving hospital) and between‐subjects (using a comparison group of people who lived in the community throughout the study). In addition, a standard multiple regression design was employed to explore the relative contribution of client and service variables to GCPLA scores.Results  Resettlement from hospital corresponded with significant increase in the range and frequency of leisure and community contacts, although community use remained low in comparison with the general population and in relation to other people with intellectual disabilities. Community and leisure use was found to be related to the place of residence, adaptive behaviour and the robustness of community goals within the service user's individual plan.

AbstractCommunity integration is now an important principle guiding service provision for people with intellectual disabilities. However, it has been argued that research has contributed little in the way of guidance and that this is mainly because of the lack of appropriate measures. The Guernsey Community Participation and Leisure Assessment (GCPLA) is described in the present paper. The GCPLA is a comprehensive assessment of community participation and the use of leisure that produces both quantitative and qualitative data. Data are presented which suggest that the instrument is potentially both valid and reliable. A study comparing use of their community by service users and a staff control group showed that the service users had a smaller range of activities, were less busy (i.e. took part in fewer frequent activities), and were more likely to access their communities in the presence of staff or carers, rather than alone or with friends. Suggestions for the use of the GCPLA are discussed including individual planning, service evaluation and training.