the nutshell paragraph

Now we finally know why FEMA didn’t show up for Katrina — they were busy warping children’s brains with this ridiculous pedagogic tool. Reason has the scoop.

Happy Canada Day. Over at Paul’s blog, some great stuff explaining why patriotism is bullshit. My favorite is G.B. Shaw’s quote: “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior because you were born in it.”

But if you’re Canadian, you probably don’t want to hear that today. So here’s the Greatest Canadian Ever explaining what it means to be Canadian. Or, well, plugging Labatt’s and Priceline, anyway. Take it away, Shatner!

Peter Schiff has some frightening things to say about the Obama administration’s fiscal  reform plan:

The underlying problem is that the excessive risk taking which brought about the crisis was not market-driven, but a direct consequence of government interference with risk-inhibiting market forces. Rather than learning from its mistakes and allowing market forces to once again control risks and efficiently allocate resources, the government is merely repeating its mistakes on a grander scale - thereby sowing the seeds for an even greater crisis in the future.

As is typical of government attempts to control economic outcomes, Obama’s plans focuses on the symptoms of the disease and not the cause. The American financial system imploded for two reasons: cheap money and moral hazard - both of which were supplied by the government. Under the proposed new regulatory structures, these toxic ingredients will be combined in ever-increasing quantities.

Joseph Stiglitz is much more diplomatic, but comes to similar conclusions:

The Obama administration has, however, introduced a new concept: too big to be financially restructured. The administration argues that all hell would break loose if we tried to play by the usual rules with these big banks. Markets would panic. So, we not only can’t touch the bondholders, we also can’t even touch the shareholders – even if most of the shares’ existing value merely reflects a bet on a government bailout.

I think this judgment is wrong. I think the Obama administration has succumbed to political pressure and scaremongering by the big banks. As a result, the administration has confused bailing out the bankers and their shareholders with bailing out the banks.

In China, online social networks are printing their own electronic currency; In Kenya, you can buy goods at a store by transferring cell phone minutes to the clerk; and in North America, a movement is afoot for Craigslist to create its own e-currency. Your government may want you to believe it has a monopoly on the means of exchange, but nothing could be further from the truth…

First, Germany banned violent video games. Now, Australia is following suit. What is going on with all the censorship these days?

Just as wind is becoming more important to our economy, it turns out there’s less and less of it…

Tough decision to make? Don’t sleep on it…

Women are happiest at twenty-eight…

Twenty percent of children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder…

Tibetan monks are gettin’ them some science…

The US’s plan to help Somalia: Forty tons of ammunition…

From AlterNet:

The supply of crude oil has risen this year to its highest level in nearly two decades, even while the demand for gasoline has dropped dramatically, having fallen this month to a 10-year low. Let’s see — supply up, demand down. That’s a classic market formula for cheaper prices at the pump. Yet our prices have steadily moved up, rising by two-thirds since the beginning of the year (and by 60 cents a gallon in the past two months alone).

What’s going on here is not the “magic of the marketplace,” but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers. What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don’t operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands — but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil

ALSO: Don’t miss Matt Taibbi’s seminal article in Rolling Stone about the role of Goldman Sachs in every economic bubble since the 1920s…

AND: Daniel Inviglio retorts to Taibbi…

From ZonaEuropa:

At around 5:30am on June 27, an unoccupied building still under construction at Lianhuanan Road in the Minxing district of Shanghai city toppled over. One worker was killed…

From my employer, Raw Story:

A Republican Indiana congressman has a new plan to protect members of Congress from a terrorist attack: enclose the Capitol gallery with a Plexiglas shield.

In a little-noticed proposed amendment to a bill last week, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) sought a study to examine the feasibility of enclosing the Capitol gallery chamber with a protective shield.

“What this bill does is it would authorize a study to look at enclosing the chamber, the gallery chamber, with Plexiglas so that somebody can’t throw a bomb down on the floor and kill a lot of us,” Burton told the Rules Committee Thursday.

This, to me, is the perfect metaphor for the United States Congress of our time. A Plexiglas shield would complete the (apparently desired) effect of separating Congress, in every way, from the rest of America and the rest of the world.

Even as seventy-two percent of Americans say they want a public health care option, Congress is caving to pressure from insurance companies and the American Medical Association, and the public health care option is pretty much off the table.

Two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq; fifty-one percent oppose the Afghanistan mission. Despite this, Congress just passed — and Barack Obama just signed — a one-hundred-and-six-billion-dollar appropriations bill to keep those wars going.

Incidentally, the cost of the latest version of health care reform being considered on the Hill is estimated by the CBO to be about one trillion dollars over ten years, or about a hundred billion a year. So that one hundred and six billion — that’s one year’s worth of near-universal health care for Americans.

So yeah — build the Plexiglas dome. It’s the perfect expression of Congress’ attitude these days.

Ivar Kreuger, or the “Match King” as he was known in the 1920s, was one of the world’s wealthiest fraudsters until the Great Depression destroyed his Ponzi scheme. He couldn’t have done it without the government’s help, and without our innate desire to believe the lie…

What Britney Spears would look like if she moved to Oklahoma. Daily Tribe has more here. You have to see the John Travolta…

From a first-hand account of a nuclear blast:

It was an awesome force. A nuclear bomb thrusts so much air away from its center that it creates a vacuum moments later that sucks wind back in until it can achieve normal air pressure. The rushing blowback can hit onlookers like a wooden bat to the stomach.

And when the blast went off, Robertson saw something that has been emblazoned forever in his memory. He says he could see through his gloves and flesh all the way to his bones. He can’t explain this brief X-ray vision, but the image shook him so deeply that he didn’t talk about it until decades later, when he heard other atomic veterans of that era report similar phenomena they attribute to radiation exposure.

Look at this beautiful face. I see this and I ask, “Michael, what the fuck did you do to yourself?”

I wonder about his legacy. Though I’ve long thought his name will someday be spoken in the same breath as Mozart or Miles Davis, I think the odds are high that he’ll rather be remembered in the same breath as Howard Hughes or William Randolph Hearst.

Certainly Neverland Ranch is destined to become a Spruce Goose or a Hearst Castle, a semi-serious monument to megalomania. But I hope that will only slightly detract from the musical legacy he leaves behind.

People of my generation — those who grew up with Thriller as the soundtrack of their childhood — will never forget the weirdness. The oxygen tanks, the monkey, the friendship with Liz Taylor, the baby-dangling incident, the pederasty… But I think there’s still a good chance that five hundred years from now, they’ll make a movie about MJ’s life, and people will come out of it saying, “Wow, I never knew that about Jackson. I thought he was one of those boring Beethoven types. What a crazy life he led.”

MY FIVE FAVORITE MICHAEL JACKSON SONGS

#5 — Give In To Me
From the Dangerous era, this is one of his most overlooked tunes.  There’s a remarkable intensity, I would even say ferocity, to his emotions in this song. And it has a sort of trance-like quality that is brilliantly counterbalanced by Slash’s wailing guitar. Jackson always made good use of great guitarists.

#4 — Thriller
Am I wrong in thinking that this song invented house music? Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but strip away the vocals and you have the earliest house track I know of. If Michael didn’t invent house, his songs certainly paved the way for the entire genre.

#3 — Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough
So today the Globe and Mail had as its instant poll the question “Which is Michael Jackson’s best album ever?” and Off The Wall (1979) wasn’t even an option. Ridiculous. Off The Wall had two number-one hits and won Grammys. Quincy Jones once told Oprah Winfrey that it’s MJ’s best album ever, and if it weren’t for the fact that Thriller blows me away every time I hear it, I would agree. In any case, this is the best track on MJ’s second-best album.

#2 — Smooth Criminal
The frenetic pace of this song is really, amazingly over the top. That MJ could weave such a compelling melody through such panicked energy is just another sign of the man’s genius. And this song, probably more than any, gives us a glimpse into MJ’s inner turmoil.

#1 — Human Nature
Okay, so you’re probably wondering “Where the hell is ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ on this list?” Both those songs are fantastic, but “Human Nature” spoke to me on an amazingly personal, emotional level when I was seven years old, and it still does today. And every time I hear it I can recapture the feeling I had when I heard it for the first time. That is the essence of MJ’s genius. The true tragedy in his death is that he will never have a chance to create a miracle like that again. RIP MJ KING OF POP

An image of “the first complete simulation of a sunspot,” via Wired.

There have been numerous claims of “mathematical proof” the Iran elections were fraudulent, but here’s one I actually believe:

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

“This week’s events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known,” says Gordon Brown. The internet era is “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution … For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their next-door neighbours. Now, uniquely, we’re having to learn to live with people who we don’t know. People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you’ve got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world. That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again…”

When Clarence Darrow agreed to take on the defense of Leopold and Loeb in 1924, the man who is arguably the world’s most famous trial lawyer caught a glimpse of the future in the media sensationalism of the trial. “I sense a strange new era,” he wrote. “Life will become cheap and tawdry, driven by a lust for sensation and mass stupidity. Man has never been a noble beast but, now, our understanding and mercy will be tested to their limits…”

These days Machu Picchu is a tourist attraction, albeit a difficult one to reach. It may have been that as well in ancient times, says Giulio Magli, who believes Machu Picchu was an ancient cross between Disneyland and Mecca, a reconstruction of a mythical landscape…

The jacket copy for Lacan at the Scene by Henry Bond claims that “apparently impenetrable events of murder and violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools,” and that the book “builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI’s standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.” CSI: Subconscious?

The world’s best Chardonnay is made in … Canada.

Germany is about to ban ALL violent video games — that’s right, no BioShock, no World of Warcraft, no Grand Theft Auto…

So far, the winner in the Great Recession appears to be Equatorial Guinea…

Is there such a thing as a gangsta gene?

“But if we started dating it would ruin our friendship where I ask you to do things and you do them…”

From a 2002 New York Times column by Paul Krugman, via Market Ticker:

The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

The uprising in Iran has displayed the power of digital communication, with Twitter as the single most powerful source of information. Are we entering a fantastic new era of citizen journalism, where the media elite are replaced by the participants in the news? Or are we entering a new era of myth, misinformation and rumor?

Michael Ignatieff

“Just visiting” may or may not be Michael Ignatieff’s status in Canada, but it certainly is a good description of any position he happens to hold.

With Stephen Harper well into his fourth year as prime minister, attention now turns to who will succeed him as leader of the Conservative Party. Ordinarily, we would have a pretty good idea by this point who the major candidates are.

So who are the candidates to replace Harper? Well, there are none. Typically, successor prime ministers come from inside cabinet, but Harper’s cabinet is a circus side-show of fools, idiots and fuck-ups. Rona Ambrose and Gordon O’Connor were running, walking, breathing jokes; nobody much likes Peter MacKay and Stockwell Day; Lisa Raitt is an embarrassment to the nation; and John Baird just shot himself in the foot when he told Toronto, quite literally, to go fuck itself.

[ADD: On second thought, maybe Baird's comments weren't so bad after all. Maybe they got us the streetcars.]

It’s really little wonder that Harper doesn’t want his cabinet ministers talking to the press, that he insists on all communiques being cleared by the PMO in advance. Just look at what happens when one of these clowns opens their mouths.

The truth is that, however we may feel about Harper as prime minister, any possible successor from within the current Conservative Party talent pool is bound to be worse. It would be like moving from George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush.

What the Conservatives need is a leader who can bring the party back to the Canadian political middle, someone who can give an intellectual edge to the Conservatives in an era when conservatism is increasingly synonymous with stupidity. And that leader just happens to be … Michael Ignatieff, the current leader of the Liberal Party.

Why? Because Ignatieff is a true modern conservative. The proof is in the thousands upon thousands of words he has expended as a TV commentator in Britain and a professor at Harvard. Time and again in his writings he has shown himself to be what is known in poli-sci classes as a “classical liberal” — or, in North American political parlance, a paleo-conservative.

First and foremost, Ignatieff came out in favor of the Iraq War. Let me pound this point home: If Ignatieff had been prime minister in 2003, Canadians would be fighting in Iraq today. This is exactly the same position Stephen Harper held.

Unlike Stephen Harper, however, Ignatieff changed his mind and decided that the Iraq war was a bad idea — but only after it became clear that his support for it hurt his electoral chances.

At least Stephen Harper has the courage of his convictions.

Ignatieff supported the Iraq war because he believes the West should interfere in regional conflicts throughout the world, with force if necessary. Granted, his reasons for supporting Western imperialism are quite “liberal” in one sense — people around the world are suffering, he says, and we have the capacity to help, so we must. But in another sense, this is just nineteenth-century jingoism all over again; we must take up the White Man’s Burden and save the darkies from themselves. Perfect paleo-conservatism if I’ve ever seen it.

But last week, Ignatieff really showed his true colors when he supported Bill C-15, the Conservatives’ attempt at bringing American-style hellfire-and-brimstone “justice” to Canada. Bill C-15, a fairly wide-ranging crime bill, provides for mandatory minimum jail sentences for, among other things, growing a single pot plant.

At a time when the United States is busy overturning its own mandatory-minimum laws because of their ineffectiveness, costliness and unjustness, Stephen Harper’s cabinet of clowns is busy repeating America’s mistakes one ill-advised policy after another. And Michael Ignatieff just went along with the worst of it.

It was likely a political calculation — you don’t win many votes by opposing sending criminals to jail. But this is the Liberal Party of Canada we’re talking about — the same party that six years ago put forward a bill to decriminalize marijuana (and then let it die on the floor of the House when it became clear George W. Bush would send the DEA to build a hundred-foot-tall wall on the Canadian border if the bill became law). For Ignatieff to support mandatory minimums for marijuana is an earth-shattering turnaround. This is not the Liberal Party we once knew (and voted into power).

Since Ignatieff put his name on Bill C-15, my interpretation of those negative ads the Conservatives have been running against him (”Michael Ignatieff — just visiting!”) has changed drastically.

I used to think the ads were stupid. How can you tear down a Canadian politician’s reputation by pointing out that he’s a professor at Harvard and a quasi-celebrity talking head on British TV? Canadians love that cosmpolitan stuff. But now I think those ads point to a deeper truth about Ignatieff. “Just visiting” may or may not be Ignatieff’s status in Canada, but it certainly is a good description of any position he happens to hold.

I find it interesting that the most articulate Liberal Party leader in decades, if ever — a man who made a career of talking in front of students and cameras at some of the highest institutions of learning in the world — expresses opinions so meekly as opposition leader. Where does Michael Ignatieff stand on the carbon tax and/or carbon credits? Where does he stand on Afghanistan? Health care? North American integration? The economy? Does anybody know? Perhaps he’s keeping quiet because he knows his ideas are considerably to the right of the Liberal voting base.

My guess is that, once people begin to understand Ignatieff’s track record, Liberal party support from the left will bleed to the NDP. Socialism isn’t the dirty word it used to be (like, six months ago), so while Ignatieff chases the right-of-center vote in a futile attempt to wrest it from Harper, he’ll face an exodus from the left end of his party to the New Democrats.

That will put Ignatieff in a tight spot. Right now, I give him considerably less than a 50-50 chance of winning a majority in the next election. But if he were to defect to the Conservatives, the whole political picture would change. As a Liberal, Ignatieff is way too far to the right; as a Conservative, he would pull the party back to the center and make them a credible alternative to the Liberals for the first time since Mulroney.

Let’s hope he really is just visiting, and quickly moves on to the Conservative party, where he belongs.

From the BBC: “The Cloud Appreciation Society says we need to recognise a new cloud type. Alongside cirrus and cumulus clouds, say hello to the asperatus.” More here and here.

From AltMuslim:

Two men, one Christian and the other Muslim, commit murder just one day apart in the United States. Both appear to have been motivated by their religious beliefs. The Christian murderer is Scott Roeder and his victim is Dr. George Tiller, a physician from Wichita, KS who performed late term abortions. The Muslim murderer is Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and his victims are Pvt. William Long and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula who were new U.S. Army recruiters.

These two murder cases expose the media’s and our legal system’s bias against Muslims. Both crimes seem to fit the definition of terrorism motivated by religious extremism. The media and the legal system, however, are treating these alleged murderers and their crimes very differently.

The Muslim murder suspect, Mr. Muhammad, is charged with terrorism along with first degree murder.  On the other hand, the Christian murder suspect, Mr. Roeder, is not being charged with terrorism.

Now for the next acid test: Will James von Brunn be charged with terrorism?

… on your one-millionth word.

Is Russia, once again, the sick man of Europe?

How can anyone lose track of nine trillion dollars?

Having a TV on — even in the background — slows a child’s language development…

Hugo Chavez hates Coke Zero…

China is getting gay-friendly…

Residents of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manhattan, etc., should know about this.

Meet Robert C. Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union, a man who not only wants Baby Be-Bop banned from the local library, he wants $120,000 for being exposed to it…

Like a James Bond villain with modest ambitions, Mitsubishi is trying to corner the tuna market…

The LA Times has an interactive feature up that lets you balance bankrupt California’s budget. It ain’t easy…

Xark’s take on the newspaper industry’s recent push to charge for content:

On the surface, paid content is the reasonable idea that people should have to pay for the professionally produced content they consume. Its core, however, is a post-rational demand that consumers abandon their habits of the past decade in favor of new behaviors intended to restore media companies to the profitability ordained to them by God Almighty.

Does it matter that this is an idea with a known, recent history of failure? Or that human beings have no intention of paying for news they’ve always received for free? Does it matter that we already  know a return to the paywall-era of the early 2000s will cost these legacy media companies money they will never recoup? No, no and no.

Meanwhile, Dave Eggers is convinced newspapers will survive. So convinced, in fact, he’s making the next issue of McSweeney’s a newspaper…