Actual Headline: "Intelligence Probe Would Be Risky for Bush". Take from that what you will [FARK]

Rules for living. This is a great collection of aphorisms by which you would be well-served if you were to build your life around them.

Yeah, I know Sid Vicious wore a lock on a chain around his neck just like that. But the first time you try and pogo with that thing on it's gonna chip a tooth, Road Warrior.

Now that you've climbed up there, it's a lot higher than it looks, isn't it? Dumbass.

The Renaissance Faire may not be the source of all your problems, but it sure as shit isn't helping any.

You're probably doing something that bugs the next guy twice as much. Clam up and get on with your life.

Link (via AccordionGuy) [Boing Boing Blog]

Why Are We Ruled by These Fools?: Part CCCVIII. The MinuteMan notes that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, and that the chocolate ration has been raised again: JustOneMinute: Rumsfeld Completes The Slow Flip-Flop: After months of "we don't need a bigger army", we are told that we do need a bigger army. Temporarily. People who worry about the planning process in Washington (or the connection with reality) will worry about this. I'll stop calling this administration "Orwellian" when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual.... [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]

Nice to read about this 20 years after 1984 was supposed to happen. So Orwell got the dates a little wrong. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Calvin & Hobbes [The Daily Irrelevant]

This is your brain in love. In a fascinating new book, evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher examines the chemistry responsible for the giddiness, fixations and overarching lunacy associated with romantic love. [Salon.com]

Starbucks and Ikea not considered harmful. Here's an inspired rant in favor of Ikea ("If your life is mediocre, I promise you, Ingvar Kamprad didn't make it that way. You did.") and Starbucks:

I am also old enough to remember the swill that Americans drank and were pleased to call "coffee" before Howard Schultz swept down out of his damp PNW redoubt and clusterbombed us with franchises. It tasted like soggy cardboard, it was served in chipped diner porcelain that itself generally tasted of soap, and most importantly, with a very few exceptions, it was all you could get anywhere.

Link (via Kottke) [Boing Boing Blog]

Stunning political advocacy Flash.. This is one of the most effective pieces of political advocacy I've ever seen. Ben Cohen, the Ben of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, narrates a short Flash movie for TrueMajority.org, in which he explains -- using Oreo cookies -- the way that the federal budget is currently apportioned, and how little rearrangement would be necessary to renew all of America's social programs. The examples are vivid and charming, and the logic is compelling.

The only thing I'd change is adding a fast-forward, pause and rewind button. I wanted to refer back to specific sections of the movie, and the "play all the way through" interface really frustrated me (just taking this screenshot was really hard). Link (via Vertical Hold)
[Boing Boing Blog]

What kind of people are companies?. Here's a good Kottke post about The Corporation, a Sundance-winning flick (with accompanying book) that considers the implications of treating companies as legal persons.

...the feature documentary employes a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Get Your State of the Union On. Get Your Warn On tackles the State of the Union speech. Link (via Electrolite)
[Boing Boing Blog]

In this year’s State of the Union, Bush actually structured some passages as arguments, or responses to criticism. James Fallows analyzes the per... [Arts & Letters Daily]

The 1968 generation loved its music and drugs and hated the Vietnam war. Its memories are shaped by the peppery taste of tear gas... [Arts & Letters Daily]

America As A One-Party State.

America As A One-Party State

Amazing piece by Robert Kuttner. Do read. Thanks to Doc for the link.

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.
In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars.

Keep Reading --->

[Halley's Comment]

Doritos, that counts as a cheese, right?. The food pyramid has been updated again, apparently. According to Frito-Lay, your major food groups now consist of fruits, vegetables, protein, dairy, and Doritos. (via Calpundit) [MetaFilter]

Beauty on Your Desktop. Bored at work and need something to waste time? Need a quick diversion to avoid a stress headache?These cams operated by the Federal Government are just the thing. Originally intended... [CampinGuy.Com]

Everyone is already looking at Very Important Things, aren't they? Thought so.
[Outwardly Normal 2]

'Sleeping on it' really can solve problems [New Scientist]

Isn't it funny (maybe not) how the roles of Republicans and Democrats have shifted over the past 30 years.   The aspects of the Republican party that attracted me to them years ago are gone, and they have subsumed by the Dems.  For example:

• Fiscal responsibility.
• A non-interventionist foreign policy.
• Personal rights.

Republicans have failed on all of these counts.  They are profligate spenders, able to send troops to all corners of the world on a whim, and ready to turn us into a police state.  There is nothing left of the Republican party. [John Robb's Weblog]

Richard Feynman. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." [Quotes of the Day]

C.G. Jung Page. News comes this morning about an archetypal effort in web communication... the CG Jung page. I went straight for the Diane Arbus article. Congratulations to Don Williams for this wonderful publication.... [Sandhill Trek]

The state of Dubya's union.. It's bad and getting worse, says Molly Ivins. And to help us keep focused during the prez's State of the Union address tonight, Ivins reminds us to follow the money. My fellow Americans, the state of the union's finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In its most recent projection, the Congressional Budget Office says it expects $1.4 trillion in total deficits from 2004 to 2013. Bush's new future spending proposals -- including everything from the... [BloggerStorm: Blog for America]

Why can't I have an M16?.

The latest White House script for reporters. Howard Dean is so angry! He has no credibility on foreign policy! He wants to take away your grenade launcher! [Salon.com]

UNACCEPTABLE QUESTIONS: # Anything about single-payer healthcare, rampant war profiteering by Bush corporate cronies in Iraq, Enron, WMD in Iraq, dead soldiers in Iraq, nonexistent nuclear program in Iraq, corporate malfeasance, funding for "No Child Left Behind," Afghanistan, quid pro quo anti-environmental legislation for "Pioneer Level" Corporate Donors, and the Bush ban on the government from making best deal with pharmaceutical companies for prescription drugs.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

The Corporation.

The Corporation. Several people have mentioned the new documentary "The Corporation". It was screened at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival. It is premiering in a few theatres in Candada around now. Read the review, it is very cool.

A lot of documentaries get a rise out of their audience. Some even invoke social change, or at the least some serious reflection upon our place in the world. But I can safely say I've never seen an audience so moved, en masse, to explore actual social activism on a grand scale as the audience who watched this three hour masterwork. The first standing ovation I've seen delivered at the Vancouver Film Festival was not only deserved, but also very long, and what followed the screening overshadowed even that outpouring of emotion.

The Corporation could never have been made in the USA. It took a Canadian team to put this work together, and it'll take far more than legal threats and intimidation to kill it. An almost three hour look at the past, present and future of corporations as a business entity, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes and giving the thing a miss if you only had a loose synopsis to go on.

But where this documentary matters is in the details - the nasty, disgusting, gory details of what the corporation has done to this world, what it's doing today, and what we can expect it to do tomorrow if we don't get our freaking act together.

The extreme right 'love it or leave it' crowd are no doubt already starting to yell "Lefty propaganda," but this isn't an Anti-Bush attack on all things capitalist. This isn't hippy rhetoric or new age spin or a call to the communes. It isn't hoity toity technospeak or boring talking-head PBS filler. What The Corporation is, is a healthy dose of well-researched, deeply explored, stunning information that can not possibly leave you, as an audience member, in any condition but stunned, dismayed, and outraged.

Maybe you know it all already. If you're like me, you read the papers, you know who's buying who and that the unstoppable bulldozer of globalization is hurting a lot of people. If you're like me, you're disgusted that TV news has become a wrestling match to decide which party has the best 'spin', and you might have even learned enough about global politics to be sick to death of what you're seeing in the world today.

But The Corporation will teach you things you never dreamed of. it will change you. It will ruin your day, but give you reason to get up in the morning - determined to make change.

I can't wait to see it, and I hope it somehow manages to get wide distribution, even in the U.S. I have no doubt it will play in the theatres here in France. Even Noam Chomsky shows in regular theatres here.

And for the record, I think corporations should be banned ASAP. Not business, not free enterprise, not groups of people doing things together, but the corporation as an artificial legal person. [Ming the Mechanic]

I'm with Fleming on this. Corporations should not have the legal status of people. They especially shouldn't have the protections without the responsibilities. If a corporations conscience is it's shareholders then, as we have learned, we are all in big trouble.

After watching a number of long mass market pics over the last few years I have made a pact with myself not to go watch over long films (i.e. longer than about 1hr40m). I broke it to go see LOTR III and heartily regreted it. So few films are worth the discomfort and fewer yet justify 3 hours of my time. But I think i'd go see this.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Nation building: candidate Bush was against it, President Bush rather likes the idea. Can the U.S. teach people how to govern themselves? Francis ... [Arts & Letters Daily]

Get Your Mars On. The amazing Get Your War on toon-strip goes to Mars. Link (via Vertical Hold)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Take your pick. I suggested a while ago that politicians ought to be more willing to change their views in the face of new evidence, and should be more frank about having done so. A reader comments with an aphorism I wish I'd... [Mark A. R. Kleiman]

A great aphorism. Stupid, dishonest or insane. What do we get when they are all three? [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

296 different accents. This page contains links to audio-files exemplifying English as spoken in accents from 296 different countries. Link (Thanks, Derek!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Angelic leaders of the world. Free Press International has compiled "just a few of the many photographs mainstream media has been deliberately releasing to the public showing our world leaders with halos." The devil is indeed in the details. Link (Thanks Vann, my multi-talented friend currently seeking gainful employment!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Answer the &$%#* Question!.

Answer the &$%#* Question!

Ever Wonder Why They Won’t? They’ve Been Media-Trained. And the Public Is the Loser.

ed: I find this to be a must read.

[The Agonist]

Department of good news
Slashdot already has this link, but some information bears as wide distribution as possible! CNN reports on a study that says avid Net users watch less TV but aren't geeky hermits at all:

The typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added. "Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project.

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Leave every child behind
There's been a remarkable flow of emperor's-new-clothes-type snapshots of the Bush administration from Ron Suskind's book based on former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's White House recollections. Of all of them, one strikes me as especially outrageous -- more so than the charge that Bush entered office intending to oust Saddam (we pretty much knew that already, didn't we?): Dick Cheney's dismissal of O'Neill's concern over his administration's surplus-squandering, budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, generation-betraying tax cuts.

When O'Neill raised the issue after the 2002 elections, the book says, Cheney told him, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due."

Reagan proved deficits don't matter. Matter how, exactly? Reagan proved that you can win re-election despite running up huge deficits -- and I suppose what Cheney is saying here is that that is all that matters to him. We can run a huge deficit and still win re-election, so who cares?

That makes a certain hardball sense. But a little voice in the back of our heads nags us with other pieces of history: like the fact that Reagan eventually came to see that bankrupting the government was not a good idea, and both he and his successor -- our current president's father -- agreed to tax increases that laid the foundation for the booming, job-creating, surplus-endowing economy of the '90s.

And then there is the little matter of the impact of deficits beyond the election. I suppose I should not be surprised that our most boardroom-brained, most corporate presidential administration should specialize in the sort of short-term thinking that has plagued so many American businesses. But sooner or later the national debt will come home to roost, engulfing us in runaway inflation, painful tax increases, decimation of services or some miserable combination of these calamities. If the late '90s was an era of ostrich-like wishful thinking on the part of stock-market speculators who couldn't imagine the good times ever ending, Bush, Cheney and company are recapitulating the same mentality today -- except, instead of playing fast and loose with investors' money, they're doing it with the entire U.S. economy.

Deficits don't matter. Up to a point, sure. But by any measure, we are way past that point. "We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations," Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. But his economic policy could fairly be called "leave every child behind."

That's the awful, eerie poignance of "Child's Play," the winning entrant in MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest. May every American voter watch it, and weep. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

To a young generation of Americans, Jon Stewart may as well be Walter Cronkite [FARK]

Ditto.

Snopes Gets RSS Feed

"Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed!

Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it's a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it's a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you'll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there's little that's more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank Barbara and David Mikkelson (FAQ link substantiating the names) for providing such a fine resource to the Internet.

And it's darn fun stuff, too.

Pass it along." [iRi]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Seven Deadly Sentiments. Seven Deadly Sentiments - Psychology Today explores seven "guilt-provoking, squirm-inducing, I'm-such-a-lousy-person thoughts... At worst, they remind us that we're not quite as nice as we'd like to believe we are. And at best, they may be able to help us understand the deeper reasons behind our wicked thoughts--and forgive ourselves our own trespasses." A long, but interesting read. [MetaFilter]

What's your law?. John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about "some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you", like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results. The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding... (with comments) [kottke.org]

Irregular Verb Watch.

This New York Times Report about a fight in a firehouse defines a new irregular verb in its first three sentences. The conjugation appears to be “I tease playfully; You make abusive taunts; He is asking for a broken nose.” (Via En Banc.)

[Crooked Timber]

Don't Believe a Word! © 2004, John H. Farr Friends, you simply must ... not ... believe ... a SINGLE WORD uttered by the charlatan-led government we currently endure. Every aspect of administration, every statistic, every pronouncement, is altered or falsified for maximum political effect. Take the latest job growth estimates, for instance. The reported tiny 1,000 job increase is bad enough, considering the projections (whose, I wonder?) were for 130,000 - 150,000 new jobs to be created by the debt-fueled "boom." But not too many people noticed the effect of the fact that the job growth figures for October and November were revised downwards by tens of thousands. As Atrios points out, if the fall numbers had not been revised, December would have shown something like a 50,000 job loss ... The implication is clear: the estimates for December were looking so bad, someone realized they'd better restate the estimates for the preceding two months in order to show a statistical gain for December, no matter how embarrassingly small. But never mind all that, we're going to Mars! (Do you have your ticket yet?) [FarrFeed]

Stone Skipping the Scientific Way. National Geographic has a bit on the scientific analysis of stone skipping. Using a machine launching aluminum disks Lyderic Bocquet, a physics professor at the University of Lyon, and his colleagues discovered the ‘magic angle’ of 20 degrees as that required to maximize skipping. [AlterSlash]

Cool site for wallpaper. http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/index.php# [Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog]

Amazon's not-really-sekrit 800 number. In "Cool Tools," Kevin Kelly writes:

On average I've ordered from Amazon once a week for the last four years or so. Not just books, but power tools, toys, kitchen stuff, the whole lot. Given the volume of my orders I think their customer service is super great; it sets the gold standard for other companies. No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can't deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com's almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won't find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Love me, I'm a liberal
The "liberal" label has been on a long journey from its Victorian-era origins -- the root is from the Latin for "free," of course, and the original liberals were proponents of free trade (which means that today's anti-globalism liberals have now come a full 180 degrees).

Jeff Jarvis has been posting recently about the meaning of the term "liberal" today. Jarvis's ardent pro-war positions have placed him at odds with a lot of people who think of themselves as liberals, but he's determined not to give up the label.

Good for him: Liberalism should be a big tent, and surely, just as there were "Cold War liberals" who shared some positions, but not all, with their dovish liberal coevals, there has to be room for "terror war liberals" today -- even if their conversations with their antiwar brethren escalate into shouting matches.

This discussion prompted Jarvis to offer extensive quotes from a 1960 John F. Kennedy speech defining liberalism. What's fascinating to me about Kennedy's rhetoric is not to try to parse how it relates to today's war debate (I don't think it much does at all) but rather to notice the one gigantic thing it's missing: It's entirely secular. No mention of God. No dutiful punching of the religious-belief card. All the beliefs are specifically and proudly humanist:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith.

Human dignity -- not divine dignity -- as the source of national purpose. Faith in our fellow citizens -- not faith in a deity or a scripture. For Kennedy, as a Catholic trying to become the first president of his faith, keeping God out of his politics made perfect political sense, but it also made moral sense. It still does.

Kennedy's speech reminds us that one of the key freedoms liberals hold dear is freedom from state religion. By keeping government out of religion, we keep religion free for each individual. And one of the things that unites liberals today is a deep anger at our present administration's deliberate efforts to mix up religion with government. There's a constituency for that, to be sure. But don't underestimate the liberal constituency. I've still got some "faith in my fellow citizens as individuals."

[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Mind = camera? No: we cannot be passive, impartial observers. Every perception is shaped by us, whether we realize it or not. Oliver Sacks explai... [Arts & Letters Daily]

City on Fire. City on Fire - a fairly long article on the effects of a large (300 kt) nuclear detonation. Gives new insight into the potential dangers of nuclear proliferation. [MetaFilter]

MALCOLM GLADWELL ON SUV'S AND THE DANGER OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.

Malcolm does it again. My favourite New Yorker writer this week (it's not in the online edition, alas) psychoanalyzes America's passion with the SUV and provides some frightening conclusions on automobile safety and driver psychology, and then wryly hints at, but leaves unsaid, some deeper truths that might naturally follow. The first part of the article basically says that Americans love SUV's because they make the driver feel safe, powerful, in control, under any driving conditions. They love them so much in fact that one Ford SUV plant in Michigan grossed 11 billion dollars last year (almost as much as McDonalds nationwide). And the automakers love them because SUVs are not subject to the same regulations as cars and minivans, and as a result are much cheaper and easier to build. Gladwell then shows, by means of a visit with Consumer Reports and a review of accident statistics, that the feelings of invincibility and control in an SUV are sheer myth. Bottom line is that the benefits of an SUV's size and weight in an accident are more than offset, much more than offset, by the higher risk of getting into an accident in the first place due to less precise and responsive handling, longer braking speed (AWD notwithstanding), and fewer signals to the driver of poor road conditions. And that's despite the marginal advantage of visibility due to the height of SUVs, itself offset by a higher risk of rollover. Ultimately the problem is all in the driver's mind. If drivers realized that they are no safer (in fact somewhat less safe) in an SUV than in a subcompact, their concentration and driving behaviour would compensate, SUV accidents would fall, and millions of ruined lives would be spared the consequences of this unwitting recklessness. Unfortunately, as long as SUVs convey the illusion of control and safety, that's not likely to happen. And the answer isn't to make SUVs and trucks subject to the same regulations as cars (though such regulations would vastly improve SUV product quality and gas mileage, which would be a good thing). That would increase the price but wouldn't change the pyschology. It's like when young hockey players were required to wear helmets, face guards and neck braces: Injury rates actually rose, because players suddenly felt safer taking more risks, and became careless, even aggressive, with elbows and sticks, feeling like they and their adversaries were immune to harm with all the padding. Gladwell ascribes the insatiable passion for control and safety and invincibility to a syndrome called Learned Helplessness. The syndrome reinforces the exaggerated feeling of lack of control, of enormous danger, of inability to respond to danger, by repeated exposure to actual or apparent threats: "Learned Helplessness is now thought to play a role in such phenomena as depression and the failure of battered women to leave their husbands, but one could easily apply it more widely. We live in an age, after all, that is strangely fixated on the idea of helplessness: we're fascinated by hurricanes and terrorist acts and epidemics like SARS -- situations in which we feel powerless to affect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posed to life and limb by forces outside our control are dwarfed by the factors we can control. Our fixation with helplessness distorts our perceptions of risk." Two years ago, millions of cows were slaughtered to contain a 'mad cow' breakout in Britain, and recent events in North America have whipped up the hysteria again, on the offchance that a small number of people could catch a rare form of CJD from infected cows. This week in China tens of thousands of wild civets are being slaughtered because someone thinks they might be connected with one new SARS case there. And as Gladwell reports, three years ago the greatest auto industry scandal in decades brought Firestone to its knees due to 271 tire failures in 630 billion tire miles, possibly contributing to a mere 0.00005% of auto accidents in the US that year. Gladwell leaves it at that, but the reader's mind cannot. The reality is that this delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone -- British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein -- must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only bottled water, to wear masks, to introduce five levels of increasingly hysterical 'threat' to everyone's safety. It is irrational, neurotic, panic-stricken behaviour, a wild over-reaction to a tiny uncontrollable risk while we recklessly disregard risks we could control and which kill and destroy lives in large numbers everyday -- air and water pollution, tainted food from corrupt and underregulated  meat packers, drugs in sport and airplane cockpits, drunk drivers, kids with guns, corporate frauds, a prison system that incarcerates the mentally ill and encourages criminal recidivism -- and on and on and on. Unfortunately, it is also in the best interest of the media and governments to focus on the uncontrollable risks, and to pander to public fear and fascination with them. They're more sensational, more visceral. And since there's really nothing that can be done about them, you can do anything, or nothing, in response to them, and not be held accountable, or responsible. The risks we could control, on the other hand, are mundane, day-to-day, hard and expensive but not impossible to remedy, would if remedied save thousands of lives, and is the responsibility of all of us. Viewers, voters, and consumers don't like to think about such things. Messy. Complicated. Nagging. Costly. And the media, and politicians, are glad to oblige. P.S.: The reason you never see photos of the esteemed Mr. Gladwell, he of the Tipping Point, is that he is only 39, and looks younger. His credibility demands we think of him as older. Besides which, he's (shhh -- don't tell anyone) a Canadian. Also, this week's New Yorker also has a great article that is, at least for now, online: James Surowiecki's summary of war profiteering in Iraq and the insanity and cost of outsourcing 'non-core' competency military activities to Bush's buddies (oops, I mean, to the private sector).

[How to Save the World]

Bruce Sterling interviews. Two exciting and thought-provoking Bruce Sterling interviews are online today: an hour-long MP3 of an interview with Massive Change on the University of Toronto's CIUT radio and a long interview on the future of everything with Mike "Godwin's Law" Godwin in the libertarian mag, "Reason."

reason: Blogging seems to have taken a place in the culture that used to be occupied by fanzines, and maybe by the science fiction magazines.

Sterling: It had its apotheosis in people like Cory Doctorow [author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and other writers who really aren’t that interested in the old paper world. Cory actually publishes stuff electronically, and blogging is his Weird Tales. He is of a generation sufficiently divorced from the old pulps that he’s the dolphin among mesosaurs here.

5.9MB MP3 Link, Reason Link (via Futurismic) [Boing Boing Blog]

Humanities profs say you know and uh 4.85 times per minute, natural science profs say them only 1.39 times. So where ’ s the eloquence ?... [Arts & Letters Daily]

When did skeptic become a dirty word?. Did belief in extraterrestrials pave the way for today?s general belief in global warming? Is the blending of public policy with science creating junk science? Michael Crichton drew out an intriguing connection in this lecture at Caltech. Via Arts & Letters Daily. [MetaFilter]

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies. A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, September, 2003. By Sam Smith. [MetaFilter]

Gross National Happiness.

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Worldchanging