The effects of hair parts on the 2008 Presidential race. [pdf]
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Category Archives: Politics
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
Against Intellectual Property is a worthwhile paper summarizing IP law, some libertarian arguments for and against, and why IP can’t be justified.
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Some nice visual storytelling by the woman who fought the system in Toronto and unpaved her driveway. Lovely results one year later.
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Sunday, July 20, 2008
I stumbled on a video of Glen Velez playing a frame drum. I saw him in a workshop a while back when I was in college. Insane skills. We also did some overtone singing, but one of the coolest things I remember was him improvising a little solo with shakers, with all kinds of mind-bending […]
≡Standard Operating Procedure (review: 4/5)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote […]
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Monday, June 16, 2008
Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express […]
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Sunday, June 8, 2008
New York Times Magazine has a feature on guerrilla gardening. The Guardian has a short video of the gardening guerrillas in action before a little confrontation with the police.
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
The existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. …And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
If Charles Joseph Minard were following the Clinton/Obama superdelegate battle. Nice connection.
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Monday, May 5, 2008
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and […]
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Sunday, May 4, 2008
Comic strip instructions for anarchic overthrow of the office. [via dial m for musicology]
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Thursday, April 10, 2008
“As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.”
≡Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (review: 5/5)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we […]
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Thursday, March 20, 2008
You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, an online essay + soundtrack, “was born out of fraughtful observations of the state of our States and the repetitive, empty monotony of consumer culture and electronic music.” [via waxy]
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The U.S. terrorist watch list now has over 900,000 people on it. [via funkaoshi]
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Monday, February 25, 2008
The Story of Stuff, a big-picture overview of consumption. The animation is surprisingly good at times and there’s some clever sound, too (shaky economics and eco-paranoia aside). “You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.”
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Sunday, February 17, 2008
“The reality is that democracy is a very blunt instrument, and in today’s environment we are choosing between ways of muddling through. We may hear that the election is about different visions for America’s future, but the pitches may be more akin to selling different brands of soap.”
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Monday, February 4, 2008
Video mash-up of political candidates talking about “Change” (ugh) + David Bowie’s song, “Changes.”
≡The Braindead Megaphone (review: 4.5/5)
Thursday, January 31, 2008
There’s potential for a doctoral dissertation about The Rhetorical Use of Capital Letters in the Writing Of George Saunders. The usage comes in a couple flavors. There are the ineffable concepts, like Freedom and Humility. There’s the personalization of general categories, like Writers and the Little Guy. There’s the tongue-in-cheek categorization of human sub-groups, like, […]
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
I grow to love Ill Doctrine more with every post, like his take on the Clinton/Obama handshake controversy.
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Sunday, January 20, 2008
Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections is a new documentary about voting manipulation and the disastrous state of our polling systems. The trailer strikes a balance of citizen activism and paranoia that I usually get a kick out of.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
“There are only two kinds of reform that have any chance of actually reducing total expenditure on presidential elections. The first is to reduce the value of the presidency itself… The second is to reduce the uncertainty about who’s going to win.” I vote for the former.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
Arnold Kling on politics and cults:
I do not know Ron Paul. He may be wise. He may be decent. But to dismiss all doubts about his judgment and his character would be to succumb to a cult.
Let me hasten to add that I do not think of the Paul cult as unique. I am equally […]
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
“After Darwin, after Einstein—just as after Galileo and Copernicus—we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.” An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
A plea for more anthropology of ideology: “I’d like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I’d like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration.”
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Thursday, November 22, 2007
How clean is the electricity I use? Mine is about 64% coal, 20% nuclear, 10% natural gas, and a smattering of renewable and non-renewable sources. Yeah, that coal bad news.
≡Making Memes
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Tim Walker writes about meme entrepreneurship. I love it. Go read it. Unless I misunderstand the point, it seems like a lot of folks are already working in that vein—writers. Just glancing at my bookshelf, there’s Florida and his Creative Class, Friedman and his Flat World, Weinberger’s Miscellany, Anderson’s Long Tail.
I don’t mean that to […]
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Friday, November 2, 2007
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” …umm… [via jaquith]
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
So if the worst came to pass, Atlanta could be without water 4 months from now.
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Albert Jay Nock, Anarchist’s Progress:
The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it […]
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Monday, October 8, 2007
These Wikipedia essays are tremendous. They’re basically internal memos, where the philosophy and culture is hashed out in the same collective fashion as the primary content. A few that I really like:
Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
Coatrack
Humor
Sarcasm is really helpful
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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Waldo Jaquith illustrates the size of our nuclear arsenal. Totally excessive. But it’s great to see those numbers in a form that’s more easy grok—like the links in my sense of scale category.
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