In online discussions with Europeans, occasionally the topic turns to "you Americans" and some observation or complaint– ranging anywhere from polite and benign to angry and confrontational– about our character (or lack thereof), etc etc.

I always find this amusing coming from Europeans, because, what is an American, really? "You Americans" certainly doesn’t mean actual, genetic Native Americans, who barely remain anywhere north of the Rio Grande; their numbers have been decimated by a genocide perpetrated wholly by– Europeans.

Because copyright infrigement is still your best entertainment value:

Doesn't Rush Limbaugh remind you of one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him?

(Oh, there's a lot more. follow below...)

Great article in Der Spiegel which outlines the precarious condition the world economy-- especially the U.S. economy-- has found itself in, and how it's been ignored by the Cheney Administration.

The United States is an economic giant on steroids -- doped so its decline in performance doesn't become too apparent.

Like many others here, I've been puzzled by how the Cheney Administration and the right-wingers in general combine fearmongering and wanton risk-taking gambling.

You'd normally expect people who are so frightened to be really risk-averse-- "conservative" in the true sense of the word.

The "pseudocertainty effect" from psychology seems to explain a lot of this.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Reagan's wet dream, the line-item veto, PASSED CONGRESS TODAY!??

http://www.congress.org/...

So that's what all this crap about gay bashing and flag burning is all about... a distraction from the real agenda: the abolishment of Congress, and a Dictatorship!

I'm tired of hearing anti-public-transportation people complain about how "expensive" public transportation is, and how they don't want "my tax dollars" subsidizing it.

Does anyone really consider how expensive it is to maintain roads? Or how quickly roads deteriorate if they're not maintained? I have pictoral evidence below the fold.

Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. I think it was Frank Zappa that said, nah, it's not religion, but sports that is the opiate of the masses.

I look at stuff like the Net Neutrality Tally and I wonder, why don't the media cover this like sports scores? Like the NFL draft? Why aren't people checking this stuff like box scores? Why couldn't some blogger reformat this data into such a look-and-feel?

Can someone come up with a glitzy web interface like ESPN's to make this easy to follow, or even entertaining?

They are spineless peices of corprorate-owned shit:

        Yeas    Nays    PRES    NV
Republican    215    8         8
Democratic    106    92         3
Independent         1          
TOTALS    321    101         11

http://clerk.house.gov/...

I'm an idiot. It took me until today to figure out the purpose of lawn signs, and buttons, and bumper stickers, and how indispensible they are.

They're vital for small, off-year races or primary races where 99% of the voters have no idea who these people on the ballot actually are, or what they stand for, or if they're any good.

I didn't put any up this time around, and I'm kicking myself for it.

A fellow member of a private mailing list posted there an outstanding layman's explanation of the Cambridge Capital Controversy. Through his analysis, the concept of "cost of capital" and indeed the whole "market theory" of value falls apart. I found this fascinating. With his permission, I've posted it here. Those who are very wonky on topics economic-- or who enjoy the kind of surprising analysis that completely shatters conventional wisdom-- will really enjoy this.

What jolted me most was this graf:

But we've just shown that the market theory of value is just
as intellectually bankrupt in our case---it can't tell us the
relative price of iron and tin, so we don't know the prevailing
wage or interest rate---and the profit pixie is also rumored to
look out for her own class interest, so we can't "just let it
all work itself out" without reifying some historical power
structure, wrapping it in a market fiction that may be
self-consistent but in no way determined (nor even maintained)
by the economics.  It's all politics.

Just returned from my first day "crashing the gate" in Sacramento for AB 583, the Clean Money bill.

About halfway through the day, walking around various Senator's offices, and meeting with them in their actual lobbies, I thought, "Wow, I'm a lobbyist!". But did I feel "dirty" about it? No way. This is what lobbying should be: ordinary private citizens buttonholing our representatives-- our employees!--, telling them what we want, and finding out what we have to do to get it.

Since we had neither million-dollar campaign-donation checkbooks, nor free skybox tickets, nor schwanky dinner reservations, nor junkets to exotic resorts to get our State Senators' attention, we had to stage an old-fashioned sit-in instead. Here's how it went down.

How far from the urban center do you need to go, before you find productive farmland?

Try Roma, Italia.

Now try San Francisco, California.

This is a fun little comparative study in land-use. Scroll around Italy, and look at the pattern of small towns surrounded by actively-farmed, productive land.

Now scroll around the Bay Area. Uh-oh.

I'm getting really irritated by outdoor advertising behemouths like Lamar, Clear Channel, and their ilk refusing Democratic and Progressive adversiting:

http://www.democrats.org/...

The businessman in me sees the hundreds of thousands of dollars-- perhaps even millions-- in advertising revenue that these right-wing corporations have refused to accept, and I smell opportunity.

I think I could make a business case for a Liberal (or at least non-censoring) Outdoor corporation.

Found this outstanding little documentary, called Spin.

The BitTorrent link (recommended) is here.

A straight web-download (lower quality?) is here.

Just discovered a great site with extensive, exhaustively-researched but very punchy, readable, and hard-hitting reporting on environmental corruption:

The Environmental Working Group

I think Kunstler nails it:

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/...

I'd like to quote the whole thing, but go read it if you want more.

I stumbled upon the most amazing peice of what is very likely some brilliant sci-fi performance art.

http://www.johntitor.com/...
http://www.johntitor.com/...
http://www.johntitor.com/...
http://www.johntitor.com/...

It is written by a man claiming to have been born in 1998 and time-travelling from the year 2036. I don't really much care for sci-fi, but he writes an amazing, provocative, thought-provoking, and in many ways plausible story about life in the USA after the Second American Civil War and World War III.

It's taken me a long time, but I finally figured out why such a large percentage of people in this country consider the media to be "liberal", no matter how much the media has become almost a complete right-wing mouthpeice.

It's because they're confusing "liberal" with "permissive", and they're thinking of things like the relentless increase in the amount of sex, violence, foul language, idiocy, and general depravity in the media over the last 40 years. By that standard, sure, the media sure as hell ain't "conservative", by any stretch.

We'll never be able to win against that frame. We're speaking two different languages.