When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people. (via The day the world went mad | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk)
Month: August 2012
Maybe there’s some muddled metaphor for America in that. Or maybe it’s only tempting to look for one because there’s such hunger for a hint of the way forward. Maybe it’s not a metaphor. Maybe we’re on our own. Maybe it’s just a macaque.
Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.
The Anonymous do-ocracy was already in place, but it was radically different from the other do-ocracies of the Internet era (think Wikipedia or Linux). The lack of consistent handles—anons often would drop one user name and take up another—and the absence of a revision trail meant that there was no long-term accountability. Instead, Anonymous’ chaotic style of action flowed naturally from the structure of /b/. Because there were no names and no archives, the only cultural currency was whatever you could hack or joke about or make right now, onscreen, with the rest of the hive watching.
I don’t know anyone in the ad-supported Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.
I received a rude awakening. None of the prominent environmental organizations were willing to petition City Hall to withdraw the pending ban, much less litigate against it, perhaps in part because the DOT Commissioner charged with administering the ban had been hired from their ranks. The deeper truth, though, was that cyclists were urban pariahs and bicycle transportation was too far on the fringe. In the suites as well as on the streets, we were on our own.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
“My theory is that, just as young people don’t have to buy a whole album on iTunes and can pick and choose just the songs they like, they can customize their political views — and they do,” said Kristen Soltis, a Republican pollster who is the communications adviser to Crossroads Generation, a new pro-Romney “super PAC” aimed at young voters.
Young Republicans Erase Lines on Social Issues – NYTimes.com
Then why in hell do we have to have a two party system? If I want to aline myself with particular values, do I really have to choose between the right and the left?
Whatever duties they performed, the Civil War women who valiantly served their causes distinguished themselves from men in one major way: They were all volunteers, as has been every woman who ever enrolled in military service in our nation’s history.