currently reading: on the road

Shamefully, I have never read this before.

Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted…

more on the grapes of wrath

I came across this amazing photo of a dust storm hitting a town in Texas during the Dust Bowl, the cataclysmic climate event which caused a huge migration of people out of farming areas of the U.S. and Canada in…

Яolcats, a fusion of felines, 20th century russian history and hilarity

“Commissar Markov has long been a loyal party member, but I fear his growing influence in state policy. Perhaps it is time to cash in a favor from my friends at the Kremlin.”

More Яolcats here.…

currently reading: the grapes of wrath

Rather ponderously paced, but an interesting insight into the drastic effect the corporatisation of farming had in the U.S. The theme of vast, anonymous commercial organisations arbitrarily destroying productive industries and lives certainly resonates in 2009.

they’ve told him about the aliens

Obama’s been in office all of five minutes and his hair has already started going grey.

Clinton and Bush had the same experience (scroll down here).

Possible causes:

• no longer has to

…

look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

The Long Now Foundation (http://www.longnow.org/) seems like an interesting project: it’s intention is to promote long-term thinking in the context of the next 10,000 years. To that end it has various projects underway – my favourite is a…

bye bye bush

I love it:

cat-related news roundup

Thanks to Sam, our roving feline news correspondent and long-suffering cat owner/victim:

1. Bush family cat dies (possibly of shame); Bush’s nickname for cat is “Kitty”.
2. Cats commence takeover of worldwide news media with German putsch; weatherman demonstrates excellent comprehension

…

it’s the biggest scandal since watergate-gate

No matter how often I read this statistic, I still find it somewhat startling:

A vast majority of the nation, 73 percent of the country, disapproves of the job President George W. Bush is doing. No president has

…

fukuyama on the decline of the American brand

I found this article by Francis Fukuyama to be a very worthwhile read on the subject of the current financial crisis and it’s implications for US politics at home and abroad.

It’s written with a clear-eyed understanding of modern…

least reassuring statement ever

FYI:

[W]e have no current plans to accumulate massive armaments on our neighbours’ borders.

- regards, Russian Foreign Ministry.

Thanks for letting us know.  Is it perchance time to stop devoting 100% of our resources to chasing criminally…

abnormal is the new normal

This is an excellent piece by Barry Jones in The Australian in which he highlights the extraordinarily dangerous attitude currently being promoted as the “new normal” by politicians and their lackeys in the western world, in which objectivity, rationality and…

germany: crazy cults are verboten

German officials have allegedly refused to grant the makers of a new film starring T. Cruise, Crazy Cult Member, access to historic military locations for the purposes of filming. The film is about a plot to assassinate Hitler, and the…

how to undo 61 years of progress

This is a heartwarming little story – the process put in place to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lacks some of the essential elements of fairness that were afforded even to the senior Nazis tried at Nuremberg. That is according…

god presents: dinosaurs with saddles

You have probably heard about this by now: evangelical Christians will today open a “Creation Museum” (or, ‘moron magnet’, as this blog eloquently puts it) in the USA. Rather than being designed along the lines of a giant…