I’ve been very busy the last few days, with a combination of post-moving stuff (hey, look, we’re close to family now, and it’s the holidays), and with some important changes at work (on which I shall write a very journal-y entry shortly). Which explains why I haven’t already written about an utterly unacceptable, and miserably predictable, incident. Quite a bit’s… Read more →
Category: Political
A short comment on the US Health Care Debate
I’ve been mostly keeping my nose out of the US debate–I don’t understand the debate, since I look on a certain level of access to quality health care as a right of all me–but I do want to point out the comments of John Gary Maxwell, a 40 year veteran surgeon. You should read the whole piece, but here’s a… Read more →
Exceptional In Many Ways
What you’re looking at there are the results of the 2009 Global Peace Index. (The full ranking is available online, as are details of the methodology used.) Canada is #8, and for the third year running is “the most peaceful country in the North and Central America and Caribbean region”. That’s a kind of exceptional result, especially considering our neighbour,… Read more →
The power of lowered expectations
What you’re seeing there is the first panel from a strip in Feiffer’s Explainers. Click to read the rest of the strip. Then marvel at how exactly on point is appears to be for the current world (OK, that reference to the Soviets needs to point to China or somewhere, but setting that aside), considering that it was published in… Read more →
Aside
To add to the list of things I’m really unhappy with the Obama administration about: letting the torturers get away with blatant destruction of evidence. It’s one thing not to prosecute, it’s a completely different thing to de facto endorse the obstruction of justice, and consequently send the message that it’s OK for things to operate this way; business as usual. Gordon Hewart must be rolling in his grave.
Aside
I love effective visualizations, and the Billion Dollar gram is a very simple and effective way to help normal people understand the relative sizes of some of the ridiculously large dollar values attached to various government, corporate, and public initiatives. As someone who enjoys data visualization I appreciate it. As a human being, I can’t get past that items across the top row without feeling a combination of almost blinding rage and terrible, terrible shame.
Aside
I should note that I still quite like Feingold, even if he is doing the cutesy acronym thing.
Aside
I’m not going to get my hopes up too high yet, but if it turns out that putting Sotomayor on the court was the start of the end of corporate personhood… well, let’s just say I don’t see myself having a problem with that.
Not up to par
Like many other liberal people, I pinned a lot of hope on the dramatic change from a Bush administration to an Obama one as being the end of several policy directions that I saw as abhorrent. Unlike many people on “the left”, I was consciously being rational about my expectations. I knew that Obama intended to govern as a “centrist”For… Read more →
Aside
“The correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.” Just because Chomsky is a thinker who’s ideas are best considered at a length beyond that of a soundbite, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to throw in a finely polished and cutting bit of snark as an aside. And that article the snark is nested in–that also bears reading.
The Dismal Science vs The Invisible Hand: A Movie
One of the reasons I often find things I like in the Guardian is because where else would you find someone like Mark Weisbrot (the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and economics PhD) writing a review of something like Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Regardless of what you think of Moore and his… Read more →
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”
I was pretty pleased last week to see the British PM get around to issuing an apology for their government’s treatment of Alan Turing. Being a computer geek, and a bit of a crypto amateur, the things done at Bletchley Park generally, and by Turing specifically (and not just during the war), are things of interest to me. Being a,… Read more →
SF Authors Say Smart Things: Stross on mercy
The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy. There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years… Read more →
Visualization And Facts
Are you familiar with GapMinder? It’s a great resource for visualization of all kinds of interesting data. One particular visualization that I’ve been thinking about lately is this presentation of life expectancy, average income, and population for several countries over time. It tells a primarily positive story about what’s been happening in the world over the last couple of hundred… Read more →
Canadian Style Democracy At Work
One of my standing gags when talking foreign policy to Americans (and I by no means think this is exclusively mine–it’s the kind of joke that’s just obvious) has to do with the difference in diplomatic styles between the countries. Americans, of course, tend to us a lot of guns and a bit of butter, where as the stereotypical Canadian… Read more →
