Sunday, January 20, 2008 
« Odds and Ends #4 | Main | Odds and Ends #6 »

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001lB-1914.gif

Miscellaneous links.

  • Do you see the subliminal arrow in the negative space of the FedEx logo at right? Neither did I until I read about it at Edward Tufte's joint. Now I can't stop seeing it.

  • One more year to go until the next presidential inauguration on 2009/01/20. Who knows how much more damage Bush can pull off by then? StickerGiant.com has commemorative swag.

  • Impeachment is in the air. Watch Rep. Wexler's speech before the U.S. House of Representatives. Read about State Sen. Oemig's hearing in the Washington Legislature.

  • Three days ago, I was sent email by DraftBloomberg.com, asking me to sign a petition to draft Mike Bloomberg as an independent candidate for President. I promptly wrote back, refusing on the grounds that (a) I view Bloomberg as a Naderesque spoiler who's likely to take votes from the Democratic nominee, and (b) I find Bloomberg to be an uncompelling candidate who just happens to be rich enough to self-finance. Looking at their site a few minutes ago, I see that they've only managed to scrape up 1,522 signatures, which is pathetic.

  • Ron Paul enjoys an improbable level of support on the Internet, raising staggering amounts of money by appealing to the libertarian bloc. But there's compelling evidence that Paul is a Bircherite not a libertarian, with lucrative ties to white supremacists going back more than 20 years.

  • Harold Meyerson argues that we are entering a recession and the old remedies won't do, because the US economy is no longer fundamentally sound.

    Wages have been flat-lining for a long time now, the housing bubble isn't going to be reinflated anytime soon, and the upward pressure on oil prices is only going to mount. As in Roosevelt's time, we need a policy that boosts incomes and finds new solutions for our energy needs.

    Scholars & Rogues argue that getting out of Iraq can fund the necessary changes to get us out of a recession.

  • Although I'm generally willing to believe the worst of the Bush administration, I've never found the 9/11 conspiracy theories to be plausible. Matt Taibbi debunks 9/11 conspiracy theories to my satisfaction.

  • On a positive note, the .NET Source Code is now available. You can debug through the source of the Microsoft libraries, when you need to. Visual Studio 2008 only.

posted on Sunday, January 20, 2008 10:42:07 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00) 
#    Comments [2]
Related posts:
Proroguery
The End of Wall Street's Boom
WaMu Layoffs
The Bankruptcy of Detroit
Nader's irrelevancy
Against Gay Marriage? Don't Have One
Wednesday, January 23, 2008 5:42:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
"Although I'm generally willing to believe the worst of the Bush administration, I've never found the 9/11 conspiracy theories to be plausible. Matt Taibbi debunks 9/11 conspiracy theories to my satisfaction."

9/11 conspiracy theories did get me one of my favorite new evaluations, though. From http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=911_morons :

"For example, I believe that there is a small, reptile-like creature called Chupacabra that sucks the blood of goats in Mexico. Area 51? Hell yes. Roswell? Pass me the Kool-Aid. But "Loose Change" elevates bullshit to an artform. Watching this video is like being bukkaked with stupid."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:35:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
For what it's worth... there is a point of view that regards such products as "Loose Change" as disinformation, mixing a bit of reasonable skepticism about the official version of events with a whole boatload of nonsense--the better to distract us from whichever few inconvenient facts we're not supposed to notice, by tarring them with the brush of crankdom. Opinions vary as to whether this is proximally crafted disinformation (i.e., the people who promulgate it are themselves imbued with the intent to deceive) or whether it is, as is more usually thought, the unintentional work of "useful idiots" whose disinformative source data either originate from other, more shadowy quarters--or represents truly homegrown crankery that gets pushed into the spotlight by others.

Without endorsing any particular hypothesis or preferred societal/political prescription discussed therein (and indeed, explicitly disagreeing with some of both), I'd point you toward the following page (and the site of which it is part):

http://www.oilempire.us/map.html

Whatever one's opinion about any particular claim discussed by that page's authors, the general perspective--i.e., that consent is manufactured in part through the manufacture of inoculative mild dissent--is worth considering, and there's a great deal of other stuff worth a look.

-pr
prismatic, so prismatic
Comments are closed.