April 2009
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
– Eric Raymond
[via Linus’s Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
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Urban Farming More Common?
[via Our Towns - Cities Consider Ordinances for Urban Livestock - NYTimes.com]
‘Ms. Morgan, whose East Rock neighborhood was once known as Goatville, took up raising hens when she lived in the Berkshires and, along with some friends, resumed it when she moved back to New Haven seven years ago. She likes the fresh eggs and the link to our vanished natural past. She’s very fond of her...
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The War On Poppies
The US government is starting a big push in Afghanistan to curtail the booming opium business, which generates 60% of the income of the country. One big issue is that it’s not just the Taliban that is getting money from the trade: it’s everyone. So, guess what: this is not the way to capture hearts and minds.
It also suggests that a military solution is increasingly remote in a...
David Brooks on Systemic Response To Crisis
David Brooks proves (if it needed proving) that just because you are a republican, you can still be wise to the way that everything is connected and that bottom-up and decentralized is the best way to respond to the myriad challenges we are confronted by.
[via Op-Ed Columnist - Globalism Goes Viral - NYTimes.com]
‘The bottom line is that the swine flu crisis is two emergent problems...
“A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.”
– Steven Wright
The Beginning Of Calls For Geithner To Step Down?
Is this piece in the NY Times a foreshadowing of a call for Geithner to step down from his Treasury post?
[via Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club - NYTimes.com]
‘Even as banks complain that the government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial assistance, a range of critics — lawmakers, economists and even former Federal Reserve colleagues —...
“The Holocaust did not start at the gas chambers.”
– Lajos Korozs, with regard to recent anti-Roma violence in Hungary, Slovakia, and Czech Republic
[via As Economic Turmoil Mounts, So Do Attacks on Hungary’s Gypsies - NYTimes.com]
None Of The Above Is Above
[via More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops - NYTimes.com]
‘The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years. Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990.’
Climate Change Will Be Hard On Asia
[via Study Says Warming Poses Peril to Asia - NYTimes.com]
‘With diminished rice harvests, seawater seeping into aquifers and islands vanishing into rising oceans, Southeast Asia will be among the regions worst affected by global warming, according to a report scheduled for release on Monday by the Asian Development Bank.
The rise in sea levels may force the sprawling archipelago of...
The Drumbeat For An Invasion Of Pakistan
The rhetoric is swirling, and behind it I hear the martial drums beating for war.
If what we are doing in Afghanistan is legitimate — and most of the mainstream press has rallied behind Obama’s inherited centrist hawk stance on the ‘war against Al Queda’ and the need to ‘defeat the Taliban’ — then we can only expect them to follow down the slippery slope...
“We would purge the land of these drones, that rob the bee of her honey.”
– Shakespeare, Pericles
“Character is fate.”
– Heroclitus
Gelernter's Lifestreams: The Second Coming
[via Edge: THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter]
No Surprise: Energy Companies Knowingly Lied About...
So it’s been uncovered: lobbying against taking any serious actions against climate change by energy companies has gone even though the companies own scientists reported that greenhouse gases role in climate change could not be denied. Big surprise.
[via Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate - NYTimes.com]
‘For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group...
Workers Moving Home In Western Europe
The Czech government is buying one-way tickets for foreign workers to go home, and the Czechs living in Dublin are returning en masse. The blending of cultures that prosperity started is being rapidly unmade by the economic downturn.
[via As Jobs Die, Europe’s Migrants Head Home - NYTimes.com]
‘But in a marked sign of how quickly the economies of Western Europe have deteriorated, workers...
Bacon Sandwiches Speed Up Hangover Recovery
bebelestrange:
Newcastle University researchers suggest that age-old remedy is rooted in how the protein provided by bacon and other meats is broken down into amino acids, which in turn replenish the nerotransmitters depleted by a long night of drinking.
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One Step Closer To War In Pakistan?
Will a few more weeks of American Generals expressing alarm at the turn of events in Pakistan will lead to Obama sending in troops? After all, Al Queda and Ossama Bin Lauden (remember him?) are hiding somewhere in Pakistan, now.
[via Taliban Shift Forces, but Hold Pakistan Valley - NYTimes.com]
‘The chief of Pakistan’s Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, on Friday defended his army’s...
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C Clarke
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Democrats Finally Starting To Wonder About...
Seems like the democrats are finally windering about the roller-coaster ride to war in Pakistan that Obama seems to be on, and are asking obvious questions.
[via Democrats Have Qualms Over War in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com by Carl Hulse]
‘Congressional Democrats are voicing increased concern about the Obama administration’s plans to escalate military involvement in Afghanistan and to try...
“Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To...”
– Phillippe Petit
[via ripple]
Sun Won't Be Saving Our Bacon
Recent reports (see BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Quiet Sun’ baffling astronomers) of decreased solar activity do not indicate that the Sun is entering a period of decreased activity that could offset global warming.
“To go fast, slow down.”
– John Brunner
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Accelerated Decline
I think this story is illustrative of the sort of out-of-the-box approach to responding to the econolypse. Instead of waiting for urban decline, accelerate it, and deconstruct parts of a city quickly, rather than letting things slowly crumble.
[via An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It - NYTimes.com]
‘Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s...
Deflation = Start Of Real Depression
The most obvious limit of US financial policy on the economy is that we can only influence areas where our policies reach. And they don’t reach very deeply into the economies of other countries, aside from their financial sectors.
Europe is going through real trouble, as a side effect of having a unified currency in the Eurozone — those countries that have dropped national currencies...
“If you find something I’ve written to be particularly annoying and feel...”
– Nick Carr
Colorado Water Wars
The drought conditions of the Colorado Front Range are leading to some very strange plans, like moving 80 billion gallons of water from the Green River Basin, 560 miles away.
This is just compounding the problems of the region, where occupants are being brought to court if they divert rainwater to their vegetable gardens, since the rainfall is already allocated to others.
As the Times...
Back-Door Nationalization
Back door, front door, I don’t care, so long as we don’t wind up pouring money away without getting somethign for it. But with real nationalization, we’d wipe out the creditors, which would be better all round.
[via U.S. May Convert Bank Bailouts to Common Stock - NYTimes.com]
‘President Obama’s top economic advisers have determined that they can shore up the nation’s...
Ill From Food? Investigations Vary by State...
[via NYTimes.com]
‘One-quarter of the nation’s population is sickened every year by contaminated food, 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die, and decades of steady improvements in the safety of the nation’s food supply have ended in recent years.’
Obama and The Justice Department's War On The...
Appears that president Obama is too busy to direct the Justice department to drop a bunch of cases Bush was pushing.
[Editorial - Three Environmental Cases - Time to Get on the Same Page - NYTimes.com]
‘The Obama administration inherited more than just a bunch of bad environmental regulations from the Bush administration, some of which still need fixing. It also inherited a strange...
“This is not a cycle; it’s a reset.”
– Jeff Imelt
“This is not a cycle; it’s a reset.”
– Jeff Imelt
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Water Infrastructure
Complex systems fail based on the weakest links, and the water system in the US relies on buried pipes — many laid down hundreds of years ago — to transport water. And as they age, they are failing.
[via Aging of Water Mains Is Becoming Hard to Ignore - NYTimes.com]
‘The dangers of the nation’s aging plumbing are everywhere.
This year water main breaks have stranded drivers...
“Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“Any single ordering of categories is going to express cultural and political...”
– David Weinberger
[via Ideas and Trends - Crowd Forms Against an Algorithm - NYTimes.com] 