Oct 28th, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 31

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (1)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: Two retrospective looks this week: the first at the war in Libya. Milne’s Guardian article makes it abundantly clear that the war in Libya was only a victory in a political sense, but an utter defeat in a humanitarian one. And after reading way too many pieces looking at Steve Jobs as either a god or the anti-christ, Salon’s review of Isaacson’s book gives a pretty balanced perspective on the man.

* If The Libyan War Was About Saving Lives, It Was A Catastrophic Failure Seumas MilneThe Guardian

Amnesty International has now produced compendious evidence of mass abduction and detention, beating and routine torture, killings and atrocities by the rebel militias Britain, France and the US have backed for the last eight months – supposedly to stop exactly those kind of crimes being committed by the Gaddafi regime.

Throughout that time African migrants and black Libyans have been subject to a relentless racist campaign of mass detention, lynchings and atrocities on the usually unfounded basis that they have been loyalist mercenaries. Such attacks continue, says Bouckaert, who witnessed militias from Misrata this week burning homes in Tawerga so that the town’s predominantly black population – accused of backing Gaddafi – will be unable to return.

All the while, Nato leaders and cheerleading media have turned a blind eye to such horrors as they boast of a triumph of freedom and murmur about the need for restraint. But it is now absolutely clear that, if the purpose of western intervention in Libya’s civil war was to “protect civilians” and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure….What the Libyan tragedy has brutally hammered home is that foreign intervention doesn’t only strangle national freedom and self-determination – it doesn’t protect lives either.

* Steve Jobs And The Quest For Iphone Enlightenment Salon

 One of the great mysteries of Steve Jobs is the question of how a man so sincere in his commitment to Zen Buddhism and Eastern spirituality could at the same time be such a flaming asshole. If there’s one thing that comes shining through in Isaacson’s warts-and-all biography, it’s Jobs’ consistent tendency to act like a jerk; to make his friends, employees and family miserable with his insults and put-downs. His tantrums, manipulations and lies (or “reality distortions”) are the stuff of legend. But by golly, he also dedicated himself obsessively to cultivating the perfection and purity of his inner spirit. Uh, how exactly does that compute?

…The most serious flaws in Isaacson’s ultimately unsatisfying “Steve Jobs” are that the author doesn’t step back and grapple with how the world has changed as a consequence of Steve Jobs’ passage through it, and also fails to resolve the contradictions in Jobs’ character into a coherent narrative. This is disappointing, especially when one considers that the level of access Isaacson enjoyed to Jobs and his family during the last days of his life is, of course, impossible for anyone else to duplicate.



2. The Future of OWS

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Now what? The Occupy movement has taped into a deep vein of anger around the world at the plutocracy. That much is clear to almost everyone, except maybe 1%. But how will that change anything? We have four answers: the increasingly fine Salon magazine analyzes the movement’s future, NY Mag views it through the focal lens of class warfare; Ratigan’s rant shows how the perspectives of the OWS movement are entering public discourse, and the Onion makes you cry, as onions do.

* The future of Occupy: Four key questions  Salon

After a little more than a month of explosive growth, there’s a growing sense that Occupy Wall Street is at a crossroads. “The first phase of this movement has peaked. And now it gets interesting,” says Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, the magazine that issued the original call for a Sept. 17 protest on Wall Street. “The original magic of some of those general assemblies is wearing a little thin in some — though not all — places. And winter is coming. People are wondering whether they want to hang around for three hours talking about protocol.”

With its decentralized structure, it’s impossible to predict where the Occupy movement might end up. But we can at least identify the questions that will determine its future.

Can the movement move from tactic to strategy?

Can Occupy’s decentralized structure be effective in the long term?

Will the occupations survive the winter?

Can public and media interest be sustained?

* The Class War Has Begun  NY Magazine

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda. These efforts to domesticate and contain the protests are unlikely to succeed. It is not frustration that’s roiling America but anger, the anger of a full-fledged class war. Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008.

* Dylan Ratigan Loses It On Air  YouTube

In a conversation with a show panel about the country’s debt and credit downgrade, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan passionately calls both the Democratic and Republican economic plans, “reckless, irresponsible and stupid.”

* Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them  The Onion

“The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals so I can begin paying no attention to them whatsoever,” said Tulsa, OK poll respondent Kaye Petrachonis, echoing the thoughts of millions across the country. “If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I’ll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together.” 



3. The Future of US Politics

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: And how will the rise of the Occupy movement affect US politics? The poll reported by the Progressive shows that the majority agree with  the core values of the movement, and the article on Elizabeth Warren highlights a politician who is focussing on the same issues as the OWS (make sure to watch the video of her, that’s gone viral. It’s filmed by an onlooker at a meeting, so it’s not professional, but it is very powerful). Alternet argues that the OWS has changed the dialogue… but Al Jazeera looks at how money wins elections, and the Koch Brothers have the most.

* Poll Shows Americans Want to Redistribute the Wealth  The Progressive

There’s reason for hope, and reason for concern, in the latest New York Times/CBS poll. One reason for hope is the statistic that 66 percent of the American public feels that “the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed.”….The reason for concern, though, is that 89 percent distrust government to do the right thing, at a time when we desperately need government action to solve the economic problems facing us.

* Elizabeth Warren and the OWS election test  Opening Shot  Salon

More than anything, it was this video that truly brought Warren’s candidacy to life. Her basic story — a crusader against Wall Street’s excesses who’d been thwarted by the big banks and their bought-and-paid-for Senate allies — was always going to have appeal to Democrats. But watching her display such dazzling communication skills created new energy and urgency for many of them: We need her making this case against Brown. It’s impossible to quantify, but the social contract video is clearly a major reason Warren was able to marginalize her Democratic opponents so quickly.

* The victory OWS has already won  AlterNet

Occupy Wall Street has already achieved a stunning victory — a victory that is easy to overlook, but impossible to overstate. In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs — and especially jobs with decent benefits — spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families’ debt loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point.

To borrow the loosely defined terms that define the Occupy movement, these ordinary citizens have shifted the conversation away from what the “1 percent” — the corporate right and its dedicated media, network of think tanks and PR shops — want to talk about and, notably, paid good money to get us to talk about.

* The Koch Brothers   People & Power Al Jazeera  

The Kochs rarely talk to the press, and conduct their affairs behind closed doors. But at a secret meeting of conservative activists and funders the Kochs held in Vail, Colorado this past summer, someone made undercover recordings. One caught Charles Koch urging participants to dig deep into their pockets to defeat Obama. “This is the mother of all wars we’ve got in the next 18 months,” he says, “for the life or death of this country.” He called out the names of 31 people at the Vail meeting who each contributed more than $1m over the past 12 months.

In the 2010 congressional elections, the Kochs and their partners spent at least $40m, helping to swing the balance of power in the US House of Representatives towards right-wing Tea Party Republicans. It has been reported that the Kochs are planning to raise and spend more than $200m to defeat Obama in 2012. But the brothers could easily kick in more without anyone knowing due to loopholes in US law.



4. Global Warming: Case Closed

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Arguably the most important news story this week was Richard Muller. He was a climate sceptic, and has announced that the numbers have convinced him, after he ran the most complete data analysis to date. So now what? China is convinced, as they suffer increasing climate anomalies, but how about in the west? The next big push will be for “geo-engineering” attempts to physically manipulate the atmosphere to slow cooling. On the positive side, it would stop the earth from heating. On the negative side, no one has any idea what might really happen, and it could be an utter disaster. As Gimli famously said,Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”

* Global Warming Study Finds No Grounds For Climate Sceptics’ Concerns   The Guardian

The world is getting warmer, countering the doubts of climate change sceptics about the validity of some of the scientific evidence, according to the most comprehensive independent review of historical temperature records to date. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures had no meaningful effect.

The Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

* Climate Change Just Got Hotter  Truthout

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there. The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.

“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal…. “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”

In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by skeptics — and found them groundless.

* China Goes Greener The Diplomat

Allowing China’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions to reach the levels of the United States would be a ‘disaster for the world,’ the country’s minister responsible for climate policy has said. And China and Europe should ‘join hands to push the US to take action.’ The comments, reported by the BBC, were made by Xie Zhenhua, vice chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, on a trip to London to explore co-operation on green energy between China and the UK. Speaking to members of parliament, Xie reportedly said: ‘We are making efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions and our carbon intensity is decreasing…We want to reach the peak as soon as possible.’

* Big Names Behind Us Push For Geoengineering   John VidalGuardian

UK scientists last week “postponed” one of the world’s first attempts to physically manipulate the upper atmosphere to cool the planet. …The reason the British scientists gave for pulling back was that more time was needed for consultation. In retrospect, it seems bizarre that they had only talked to a few members of the public. It was only when 60 global groups wrote to the UK government and the research groups behind the project requesting cancellation that they paid any attention to critics.

Over the Atlantic, though, the geoengineers are more gung-ho. Just days after the British got cold feet, the Washington-based thinktank theBipartisan Policy Center (BPC) published a major report calling for the United States and other likeminded countries to move towards large-scale climate change experimentation. Trying to rebrand geoengineering as “climate remediation”, the BPC report is full of precautionary rhetoric, but its bottom line is that there should be presidential leadership for the nascent technologies, a “coalition of willing” countries to experiment together, large-scale testing and big government funding.



5. They Just Said, “No.”

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A curious mix here, of three who said, “No.” The Albany police (unlike Oakland) refused to break up an Occupy group; Google refused to take down videos of police abuse; a “1%er” refuses to pretend he’s outraged by income redistribution.

* NY Cops defy orders to break up OccupyAlbany demonstrations Left of the Hudson

New York State Troopers and the Albany, NY Police Department have defied an order to arrest of hundreds of demonstrators near the State Capitol this weekend. Albany’s Mayor Gerald D. Jennings, under pressure from the Cuomo Administration, made the call for the city’s curfew to be enforced on Friday, but the police have not yet complied. The State Police Civil Disturbance unit was also deployed, but has not moved forward with any arrests. 

“We were ready to make arrests if needed, but these people complied with our orders,” a State Police official said. However, he added that State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.

“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” the official said. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”

* Google Does No Evil Ars Technica

For the last two years, Google has released comprehensive reports twice a year on the frequency of takedown requests and government data requests received in countries around the world. The latest data, released on Tuesday, focuses on the first half of 2011.

…The report gives us a glimpse of how Google deals with censorious laws around the world. In the United States, Google received multiple requests from law enforcement agencies to remove videos allegedly depicting police brutality or the defamation of police officers. Google says it declined these requests.

* A Voice From the 1% Daily Kos:

The one group rarely heard from in this rancorous debate is the 1%, whose incomes and taxes are its focus.  I am one of them, and here is my perspective, which may surprise you….you can imagine my amazement this summer when I watched the Republicans in Congress push the United States to the brink of default – and the world to the brink of ruin – over whether to repeal a portion of the Bush tax cuts and raise my taxes by 3.5%.  I know a lot of people with high incomes and even the conservatives among them were confused by that sequence of events.  Here is a secret about rich people:  we wouldn’t have noticed a 3.5% tax increase.  That is not only because there isn’t a material difference between having $1 million and $965,000, which is obvious, but also because most of us don’t actually know how much money we are going to make in a given year.  Most income at that level is the result of profits rather than salary, whether it comes in the form of bonuses, stock options, partnership distributions, dividends or capital gains.  Profits are unpredictable and they tend to vary wildly.  At my own firm, the general rule of thumb is that if we are within 5% of our budget for the year, everyone is happy and no one complains.  A variation of 3.5% is merely a random blip.

That’s why I was so pleased when the Occupy Wall Street protests began.  I support them wholeheartedly, for several reasons.  First, because I fervently believe in the exercise of first amendment rights, and I have been waiting for years for the American people to wake up from the torpor of the Bush years, when they were seemingly cowed into submission to corporate authoritarianism.  Second, because I am dismayed by the thuggish tactics of the NYPD.  I would have expected as much from Michael Chertoff or Dick Cheney, but not from the Bloomberg administration.  Third, there is no question that the increasing income inequality in our society is a bad thing, in the short-term and the long-term, for both workers and for business.  It is bad in every way and for everyone, with the sole exception of Wall Street itself.  Fourth, I love the hysterical reaction it has provoked from arch-conservatives such as Eric Cantor and Glenn Beck.  As George Orwell wrote in “Homage to Catalonia” about fighting fascists, I don’t always need to know what I am fighting for when it is clear what I am fighting against.  Fifth, and most important, it changed the national media narrative and sucked almost all of the energy out of the tempest that was the Tea Party



6. Contrary to What Some Believe….

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Folk wisdom is sometimes not so wise. Here are a few comments from Guardian writers who disagree with the belief that the world is more violent, that population growth is the major problem we face, and that wi-fi is dangerous to children.

*The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven PinkerBook review The Guardian

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker’s brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence. Pinker does not deny that individual human beings are capable of the most appalling acts of savagery. But the test of our propensity for violence is how the rest of us respond. Once it would have been basic human instinct to react to violence on this scale with more violence. But where were the reprisals, the mob rampages, the demands for the torture and killing of the perpetrator? Instead, the Norwegian people responded with remarkable compassion and restraint: love-bombing instead of real bombing. What happened in Norway this summer showed just how peace-loving we have become.

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed.

* Why Population Hysteria Is More Damaging Than It Seems Vanessa Baird  The Guardian

Although low-income countries were responsible for more than 52% of population growth between 1980 and 2005, they were responsible for only 12.8% of the growth in global carbon emissions, according to David Satterthwaite, director of London’s International Institute of Environment and Development. High-income nations, meanwhile, provided only 7% of population growth but 29% of growth in emissions. The reason is simple: so unequal are global consumption levels that one European or North American may be responsible for more emissions than an entire village of Africans.

…But surely, any reduction in population growth is better for the environment than none? Population is certainly a multiplier, but that does not make it the cause of the problem. As the Australian writer Simon Butler puts it: “People are not pollution. Blaming too many people for driving climate change is like blaming too many trees for causing bushfires.”

* The Dangers Of Wi-Fi Radiation Technology Guardian

 The Guardian also has a story about the programme in today’s paper, Scientists reject Panorama’s claims on Wi-Fi radiation risks, by James Randerson. It’s a topic we’ve covered numerous times already, of course. Examples include Is Wi-Fi bad for you?Are mobile phones and Wi-Fi to blame for the world’s ills?Is there any proof that Wi-Fi networks can make you sick? and, last August, an Ask Jack query. There was also a piece from Kate Figes, A wireless warning, on the Comment is Free blog, which was discussed here under Wireless technology made me sick, claims author Kate Figes. The Health Protection Agency says a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes.



7. Online Sharing Tips

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: An increasingly common problem these days, “I have this file/ picture/ music/ video I want to share.” But maybe it’s too big to send by email, or you want to post it for people to look at later. What do you do? Here are three free solutions. Dropbox in particular is a game-changer. Minus.com is useful when you want a picture or (your own copyright-free) music online so you can link to it, and Justpaste.it is invaluable when you want to share formatted text.

* Dropbox Will Simplify Your Life David Pogue New York Times

Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.

So here goes: I love Dropbox.

It’s a free service that puts a magic folder on your computer desktop. Anything you put into it magically appears in an identical folder on all your other computers….I set up a folder called “First Drafts.” When I finished a chapter on my Mac laptop, I dropped the Word file in there. On Julie’s Windows machine in Montana, a tiny notification window appeared that said, “A new file has arrived in ‘First Drafts’”—and there it was, ready for her to open and edit. No file transfer, no e-mail, no FTP, no stuffing or zipping, no effort whatsoever on her part or mine. It was a miracle.

* Minus.com

Sharing is universal. We created Minus to make sharing pictures, documents, music, videos and files simple, instant, and free. Minus lets you drag files from your desktop and folders directly to your browser to start sharing 

* Justpaste.it

Want to share text with your friends? Paste it here and give them a link…. Paste text from other webpage or word processor. Text formatting and images will be preserved.



8. The Human Body

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: While Tikkunista loves all its postings equally, some weeks there is one that is a must read/ must watch. This week it’s Iain McGilchrist’s talk on the divided brain, which updates all of us whose knowledge of brain function ended at “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. Wise, and insightful, this is the internet at its best. The animations help visual learners, too. As well, two funny divertisements. But watch the McGilchrist!

*  The Divided Brain RSA Animate

In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA’s free public events programme. …McGilchrist is quick to point out that the old left-brain, right-brain clichés of the 1960s and 1970s were greatly oversimplified. Recent research has shown that both sides of the brain are deeply involved in functions such as reason and emotion. But the dichotomy is still useful, McGilchrist says, and should not be abandoned.

“The right hemisphere gives sustained, broad, open, vigilant alertness, whereas the left hemisphere gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail,” McGilchrist says. “People who lose their right hemispheres have a pathological narrowing of the window of attention.”  McGilchrist sees this narrowing process occurring at the societal level. The left brain, he argues, conceives of the world as a set of decontextualized, static, material, abstract things, whereas the right brain holistically embraces a world of evolving, spiritual, empathic, concrete beings.

* Does It Really Take More Muscles To Frown Than To Smile? Zidbits

Good news for assholes. According to Dr. David Song of the University of Chicago Medical Center who recently did a study on the topic, the average frown requires 11 muscles while an average smile requires 12.

* Billy Connolly on Colonoscopies

Painfully funny. No more offensive than colonoscopies, really.



9. Surreal

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Tikkunista’s computer has a built-in dictionary which helpfully defines “surreal” as “having the qualities of surrealism”. It has no definition for surrealism. In a strange meta-way, that makes sense, doesn’t it? And speaking of flaming giraffes, here is a strange and wonderful movie, some photographs, and a conspiracy theory that passes belief, without even slowing down.

*  Page 23 The Presurfer

At first sight it might look like an IKEA commercial. Instead, Page 23 is a beautiful 4 minutes short movie that describes a surreal yet real world many of us might live in. The language spoken is Dutch but it’s with English subtitles.

* Photography : marc alain

* Early Morning, Pyongyang The Guardian, Eyewitness

* The Beatles Never Existed

There were multiples of each character performing as “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. Each part of the world appears to have had its own Beatles group, And even then, there were sometimes multiple characters within….There is an ever-increasing amount of evidence and information that this “superstar” rock group was produced by recurring techniques known as Human Simulacra as well as Clones, Organic Robotoids and Synthetic Humans. Take the journey at our forum and decide for yourself. You be the judge.



10. In Deep Water

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A look at floods, other maritime disasters, and a few happy penguins.

* Thailand flooding threatens BangkokGuardian

* Bangkok Underwater  In Focus

* Too Much Water Big Picture

* Astrolabe reef, off New ZealandEyewitness, Guardian

* Danko Island, Antarctica Eyewitness, Guardian



11. Eyecandy: Halloween

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Candy of any kind and Halloween just seem to go together. Need some inspiration for next week’s decorations? Here, you’ll find pumpkins beyond belief, the world’s greatest lawn accessory, and a short epistolary story about a pre-school celebration gone terribly wrong.

* The Best Pumpkins Faces 

* Scary Halloween Carving Pumpkins  Zuza Fun

* Ray Villafane Carves the World’s Largest Pumpkin

Last week, we brought you news that the world’s largest pumpkin was going under the knife, and now we have actual photos of the carving in action! We were on the scene yesterday at the New York Botanical Garden, as carving master Ray Villafane whittled away sections of the 1,818.5 lb pumpkin to reveal an incredibly intricate three-dimensional scene of zombies and demons busting out of the orange shell. Click through our gallery to see our photos of the hair-raising sculpture, including close-ups of all the chilling details.

* Radio Controlled Crawling Zombie The Presurfer

Wouldn’t you like to have this Radio Controlled Crawling Zombie on your front lawn at Halloween?

* Day of the Dead or Halloween?  The New Yorker



12. Quote of the Week

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift,  and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” Albert Einstein




Older Posts »




Categories


Blog Roll

Al Jazeera
altmuslim
Bernard Avishai
boingboing
Broadsides: Antonia Zerbisias
China Matters
Haaretz
Informed Comment
Lawrence of Cyberia
Mondoweiss
Rabble.ca: Canadian leftish voices
Reddit
Stephen Walt Foreign Policiy
The Big Picture
The Guardian
Tikkun Daily Blog
Tikun Olam

Tags

  • 2010
  • 4chan
  • 9/11
  • acrobats. world cup
  • ADD
  • ADHD
  • Advertisements
  • advice
  • Afghanistan
  • Africa
  • ageing
  • Al Jazeera
  • Amy Chua
  • anarchism
  • animals
  • animation
  • antibiotics
  • apocalypse
  • apple
  • April Fool
  • archeology
  • Archie
  • architecture
  • Assange
  • assassins creed
  • astro-turfing
  • Aswan
  • Atwood
  • Australia
  • Australia Flood
  • Balance
  • balloons
  • Banksy
  • Bar Mitzvah
  • BDS
  • Beatles
  • birds
  • black bloc
  • Bodies
  • books
  • BP
  • BP Oil
  • brains
  • Brazil
  • Breivik
  • British election
  • Burning Man
  • busyness
  • Calgary
  • Canada
  • Canadian Election
  • cancer
  • Cancun
  • capitalism
  • Carnival
  • censorship
  • Census
  • Chernobyl
  • children
  • china
  • Chinese Parents
  • Christmas
  • circus
  • climate change
  • coal
  • coffee
  • color
  • colour
  • community
  • conspiracies
  • copyright
  • Cory Doctorow
  • Crazy
  • Creativity
  • crime
  • Crows
  • Dalai Lama
  • danger
  • Data
  • Decisions
  • Denial
  • Depression
  • Dogs
  • drones
  • Drugs
  • earthquake
  • economics
  • Education
  • Egypt
  • energy
  • english defence league
  • EU
  • Expo 2010
  • facebook
  • family
  • fashion
  • Feminism
  • festivals
  • film
  • First Nations
  • fish
  • Flotilla
  • Flowers
  • fonts
  • fracking
  • frugality
  • ftw
  • fukushima
  • G20
  • G8
  • Gaudi
  • Gay
  • gay marriage
  • Gay Pride Day
  • Gaza
  • Gaza flotilla
  • Gene Sharp
  • gene-splicing
  • gifs
  • Goldstone
  • Good News
  • Google
  • Google Art
  • grafitti
  • ground zero mosque
  • Halloween
  • Harper
  • Healing
  • Hell
  • homeopathy
  • Horses
  • Huck Finn
  • Humpback Whales
  • ice cream
  • iceland satellite
  • Immigrants
  • immigration
  • incest
  • Indonesia
  • inside job
  • instant karma
  • Iran
  • Iroquois
  • Isaiah Mustafa
  • Islamophobia
  • Israel
  • J-Street
  • Jack Layton
  • Japan
  • Jon Stewart
  • Jstreet
  • Kashmir
  • Keynes
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • language
  • Lerner
  • Lesbian
  • Libya
  • Lions
  • logic
  • London Riots
  • Loughner
  • Lunar Eclipse
  • M.C. Escher
  • madness
  • maps
  • Marxism
  • Mary Oliver
  • McChrystal
  • medicine
  • migration
  • money
  • Monsanto
  • mountain top removal
  • Music
  • Muslim Brotherhood
  • mutants
  • NDP
  • niqab
  • NiqaBitch
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Norway
  • Obama
  • Oil
  • oil sands
  • Oil spill
  • Old Spice
  • one state
  • optical illusions
  • ows
  • pain
  • Pakistan
  • Pakistani Floods
  • Palestine
  • parallel state
  • Pelicans
  • penguins
  • Philanthropy
  • photography
  • photos
  • pirates
  • placebo
  • Poetry
  • police
  • prisons
  • Prom
  • Proposition 8
  • protest
  • Psychiatry
  • psychosis
  • quantum physics
  • Quebec students
  • Quiz
  • Quizzes
  • racism
  • rainbows
  • rap
  • Reddit
  • Roma
  • Rowling
  • Rush
  • Russia
  • Russian Fires
  • Sarah Palin
  • satire
  • Scanners
  • schools
  • SCOTUS
  • sculpture
  • Security
  • Sistine Chapel
  • Snow
  • Socialism
  • sound
  • south park
  • sport hockey Python
  • Sports
  • Statistics
  • stats
  • Steve Jobs
  • strikes
  • stupid
  • subway
  • summer
  • surfing
  • surveillance
  • Syria
  • tar sands
  • tattoos
  • Tea Party
  • tectonic plates
  • TED talks
  • terrorism
  • Thailand
  • The Kinks
  • Tiger Mom
  • Tokyo
  • Toronto
  • Torture
  • trains
  • travel
  • Trees
  • TSA scanners
  • Tsunami
  • Tunisia
  • Turkey
  • TV
  • ubb
  • UK
  • UK riots
  • unicorns
  • Unions
  • United Nations
  • vaccine
  • Valentine's Day
  • video games
  • volcano
  • Wall Street Protest
  • water
  • weapons
  • weather
  • wikileaks
  • wikipedia
  • winter
  • Winter Solstice
  • Winter Sports
  • Wisconsin
  • words
  • World Cup
  • yoga