Mark Newman, from the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan has posted the yummy cartograms of the 2008 US Presidential Election results. I could bore you with discussions, but instead, I suggest you go check out his work.

It’s awfully nice, as a Texan, not to have Travis County as a remote little island of blue in a sea of red. This time around the central counties of our major metropolitan areas all went blue, too. So here’s to you, Harris, Dallas, Bexar, El Paso and Jefferson counties. And three cheers for all you folks in the Valley and out West, too. Especially my dear friends in Maverick County!

Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who pay them — in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good, and there’s nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more, who should be paying less. For us to say that makes you a socialist, I think, is an unfortunate characterization that isn’t accurate.

source: CNN

White House: Bush concerned about food shortages
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush is very concerned about global food shortages and has asked senior aides to look into how the United States can help alleviate the problem, the White House said on Monday.

• By engaging in a war of choice against the hungriest countries so that, after countless civilian deaths, there winds up being a surplus of food?
• By blatantly denying the science of counting so that there appears to be a surplus of food?
• By appointing some talentless crony to oversee the issue so that enough people die of starvation that there winds up being a surplus of food?

Hmmm. Comedy that makes you cry. I might be on to something here.

Extra! Funny guy Kareem (of improv fame) had the following punch lines to add:

By changing the definition of the word “starving” to mean “playing dance dance revolution”, so when foreign media reports that “millions of children are starving”, Americans think they’re having a big party.

By engaging in an ad campaign that claims all foreign food is actually poisonous, and the US has taken steps to make sure there is less of the poison food in the world. The starving people of the world have greeted us as liberators.

By having a press conference in which President Bush shrugs and chuckles, refers to a reporter by a in-jokey pet-name, and organizes a touch-football game in the Whitehouse Rose Garden.

Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 1

Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 2

Good reads, both. Especially if you want the ground-level view from someone who lives there to use against people who speak loudly about it even though they don’t have first hand knowledge of it.

The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room,” the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay — or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

From: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884/chalmers_johnson_how_to_sink_america

We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.

At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.

Open your ears a little wider.

The Library of Congress has started posting pictures from their archives to Flickr. That is seriously cool. And in case you missed it, NPR covered it this morning on Morning Edition.

And it’s that coverage that lead to this post. Specifically, I got ragingly ticked when I heard the smarmy woman from Flickr prattle on about how having these photos mixed in with snapshots of the new baby or your drunk friends “breaks down that idea that museums are something special, and authoritative and, you know, important, you know?”

No, I don’t know. Museums are special, authoritative and important. That’s part of their magic.

I’m all the fuck for celebrating the majesty of the “common man.” Let’s come together as a people and a world. Let’s do away with aristocracies and classes and all that shit. Or, to quote Oklahoma:

I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!

But let’s not try to insist that a blurry picture of my fat ass on vacation is the moral, artistic or any equivalent of the fucking Mona Lisa. Or any other stuff that hangs in a museum.

Technology, and the whole web2.0 thing (blogs, flickr, etc.) especially, should never be thought of as a way to bring {newspapers/museums/politics/whatthefuckever} down to the level of the “common man.” Instead, these things should be thought of as a way of elevating the experiences of the “common man” to the level of {significance/art/cultural impact/whatthefuckever} as the things covered by those institutions.

It’s a subtle difference, I admit. But the main point is, humanity should always strive to move upward towards greatness rather than to deny greatness and drag it through the gutter. Egalitarianism should be about raising, not lowering. All men were created equal not by stripping everyone of rights but by ensuring that those rights were applied to everyone, even the “common man.”

In the end, it’s all well and good to speak of “leveling the playing field” - let’s just not insist on making everyone equally ugly when we can focus instead on making everyone beautiful.

I think I might have been less galled if today weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.