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 at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, [...]

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 the 1930s:

Poor farming practices, drought and wind combined to strip the land of its topsoil [...]

“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. This is why the internet was invented (ok, maybe not, but it should be why the internet was [...]

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.

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 dye hair in order to look younger than John McCain
following Bush Administration’s introduction of everyday use of ‘signing statements‘ to alter reality, now simply orders all [...]

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 project to build a monument-sized clock on a mountaintop in Nevada which is designed to be [...]

I love it:

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

Bush family cat dies (possibly of shame); Bush’s nickname for cat is “Kitty”.
Cats commence takeover of worldwide news media with German putsch; weatherman demonstrates excellent comprehension of cat psychology.
Nick Cave outed as fan of cat-related artwork; meanwhile artist’s cat gives him schizophrenia and causes [...]

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 ever had a higher disapproval rating, not even President Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate.
In other words, [...]

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 US history, and in particular highlights the twin sources of damage to the American ‘brand’ abroad represented [...]

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 insane Arabic men around in the deserts of the world and start paying attention to Russia’s increasingly aggressive militarism and [...]

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 informed debate are completely subsumed by “faith”, expedience and knee-jerk reactivity:
We live in an era [...]

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 German military is concerned about the portrayal of important historical figures by a [...]

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 to Henry King Jnr, who was chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, where a number of [...]

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 roach motel, as one might naturally assume, the ‘museum’ is actually dedicated to teaching people about [...]