January 2012
1 post
I knew I liked a good Porter better than Gin...
“And here I cannot omit taking Notice of an unobserved, tho considerable Advantage to the Populate, arising from the late regulations to prevent the Use of Corn among the Distillers, which has answered two Ends, first, by lowering the price of the Staff of Life; and secondly, by raising the Price of Poison, for Gin is now so dear, or else so very bad, that good Porter gains the preeminence,...
October 2011
1 post
“Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called Low...”
– David Graeber, ”Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”
September 2011
1 post
404 Not Found →
August 2011
1 post
“And that’s only one risk Bank of America faces. The...”
– http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/09/bank_america?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+salon%2Fgreenwald+%28Glenn+Greenwald%29
June 2011
4 posts
“Despite the modesty of the losses incurred, many market participants and...”
– How to Make Money in Microseconds - Donald MacKenzie
“Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential...”
– Monsters You Pay to See - Sam Thompson (LRB)
“But, to be honest, it’s different kinds of urban space that appeal to me. If...”
– BLDGBLOG: Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville
“BLDGBLOG: There’s a book that came out a few years ago called The Meadowlands,...”
– BLDGBLOG: Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville
May 2011
1 post
“The main argument for releasing a photograph of the punctured scalp of our enemy...”
– News Desk: Don’t Release the Photos : The New Yorker
April 2011
2 posts
Obsidian Wings: Executive Decision →
As a personal aside, whacking a guy like Khadafi is not a bad thing, at least in theory. I felt that way about Saddam Hussein. At the time, it seemed to me, what is the downside to taking a guy like this out? Naiveté is a valid mitigating factor once. Carried on into perpetuity, it gets to be a bit much. We can’t fix every rotten bastard out there without a fundamental overhaul in how we...
March 2011
2 posts
Bloodletting
Gems from Fielding Garrison’s 1911 “The History of Bloodletting:”
“Someone has said that when prehistoric man first hit upon the expedient of picking up a stick or a stone with which to smite his fellow-man, he had already made his first step in the direction of civilization. If he drew blood on that momentous occasion, in some degree short of manslaughter, we should...
“Anyway, who in the world would name her account “mckinely777″? Somebody who...”
– Sarah Palin Also Has a Secret Twitter Account So She Can Follow Herself
February 2011
3 posts
When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.
-NYT
Dotspotting: The great map data equalizer →
Reminds me of a really interesting chapter about state practices of standardization and legibility in Scott’s Seeing Like a State last week - I think you’d like it. Can send pdf…
messianictime:
The problem
Diverse city agencies and planners continue to geographically define their areas of authority using radically different, methodologies, from sophisticated digital...
Great analogy
“The billeting of troops, a common form of fiscal punishment, is to modern forms of systematic taxation as the drawing and quartering of would-be regicides (so strikingly described by Michel Foucault at the beginning of Discipline and Punish) is to modern forms of systematic incarceration of criminals. Not that there was a great deal of choice involved. The state simply lacked both the...
January 2011
2 posts
December 2010
3 posts
“Sbaraglia was a colleague of Malpighi at Bologna University who was opposed to...”
– “Mechanistic Pathology and Therapy in the Medical Assayer of Marcello Malpighi” - Domenico Meli
“Me: “This is Starbucks, not your fantasy novel”
Tripp: “One...”
Arsenic-Eating Bacteria Force New Thinking on What... →
Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.
October 2010
8 posts
"Too Big To Fail" States →
Last week I attended a terrific symposium put on by the University of Connecticut Law Review on “Is Our Constitutional Order Broken?” The keynote address was given by a certain member of this blog….
Epitaph For An Administration →
In today’s report on the foreclosure mess, a revealing sentence:
As the foreclosure abuses have come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried…
Tech Support →
Quote of the Day →
QUOTE OF THE DAY…. As you may have heard, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly appeared on “The View” yesterday, and the discussion didn’t go well. As part of an argument over converting a closed clothing…
Constitutional Convention? If Sandy Wants it,... →
As readers of this blog know, co-blogger Sandy Levinson believes that our national political institutions are broken and the Constitution is largely to blame. According to this article in the …
Transit Economics →
The usual suspects on the comment board are, inevitably, arguing that rail transit should pay for itself. The obvious response is that road transit doesn’t; why should only public transit have to…
The Senate Must Be Reformed →
Tom Friedman argues that there will be a third party candidate in 2012 because people are sick and tired of the two-party system. His concern? a president who won a sweeping political mandate,…
Parroting Brad DeLong →
Brad DeLong references the old line about economists being nothing but parrots who squawk “supply and demand! supply and demand!”, then argues that they seem to have forgotten even that.
…
September 2010
13 posts
yo gummint so big..... →
it uses busses for rollerskates! when it stands up the sun goes out! it uses bowling balls for earrings!
Or, in the more measured words of the Republican Pledge To America:
Our plan stands on the…
Obviously, it was offensive that the World Trade...
“Tangentially, I’m reminded of the original World Trade Center towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki: as William Fox writes in his book Aereality: On the World from Above, Yamasaki came to New York immediately after working on a new terminal for the Dhahran airport in Saudi Arabia; there, he “gave the facility a long facade of pointed arches, a minaret for an air control tower, and...
“The advertisements indicate that booksellers were the most common agents through...”
– Kevin P. Siena; VENEREAL DISEASE, HOSPITALS AND THE URBAN POOR: London’s ‘Foul Wards’, 1600-1800
Inside Joke →
Physicists →
It Was Insensitive that the Twin Towers Were at... →
by Eric Martin
The fact that there was a Muslim prayer room or, if you will, a mosque in one of the twin towers was very insensitive to the victims’ families, especially the Muslims who…
Polite Conversation →
by Eric Martin
This is an utterly shocking display of anti-Semitism, especially coming from a major media figure:
But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap, most notably to Jews. And among those…
“In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected...”
– Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works - Telegraph
Torture and Littering →
Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Daniel Millis, convicted of littering because he left sealed bottles of drinking water in a desert wildlife refuge. He…
Lessons from ex-U.S. diplomats →
Today I want to call your attention to two recent speeches, each by an
experienced U.S. diplomat. Both of these men had lengthy, varied, and
distinguished careers, both served as ambassadors to…
Brother, Can You Paradigm? →
A few months back one of my original mentors in economics — someone who got his graduate training in the pre-fresh-water era — asked me whether there was anything about the current crisis that…
August 2010
4 posts
RedState Says Bigotry Is an American Tradition,... →
“A Free Society And The Muslim Conundrum: accept us or we will kill you”: Hmm, that sounds like the title of a detached, logic-based RedState post about the reality of all this mosque stuff…
Lawsuit challenges Obama's power to kill citizens... →
(update below - Update II) Three weeks ago, I wrote about a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, based on the Treasury Department’s failure to grant a “license”…
You Have Been The Victims Of A Terrible Swindle →
by Jacob Davies This letter from Berkeley professor Michael O’Hare to his students is so good I’m just going to include it in full here: Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public…
“Ironically, these problems may be especially acute in today’s...”
– Is the United States in Danger of Collapse? | Stephen M. Walt
July 2010
9 posts
Why CNN Firing Octavia Nasr for Tweeting... →
CNN has fired senior editor Octavia Nasr for tweeting that she was “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” Fadlallah…
One Two →
On Octavia Nasr, Media Double Standards and the... →
by Eric Martin
Matt Duss provides some useful background information on Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whose death over the weekend, and subsequent tweet regarding his passing from…
The Unforced Errors of the Obama Administration →
by Jacob Davies
First, some disclaimers. I think Barack Obama was clearly the best
choice of the Democratic primary candidates, and because I wasn’t
repeatedly dropped on my head as a baby, I…