I’ve been getting surprisingly decent feedback on these posts. Some of my colleagues at work (who know more about democracy and elections than I do) have said that they felt that they were not entirely wrong or embarrassing so I’ve decided to stick with it until it’s...
Sorry I've been out of the loop for a month or so -- I volunteered to lead a search committee for the head of a local organization and I'm just now catching my breath. (Note to self: Volunteering is...
I finally saw Men Who Stare at Goats this weekend. A significant number of reviews from last year when it came out reference the epigram to the film, "More of this stuff is true than you think."...
Recently, while discussing the war in Afghanistan with a conflict studies program in the mid-west, I had a rather odd debate with a leftist professor who was devil's advocating what he claimed was a...
"I wasn't raped until I was almost ten which is pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say .... I couldn't tell how many hands he had and people from earth only had two ... You get asked if anything happened and you say well yes he put his hand here and he rubbed me ...and he scared me ...you say the almost-ten-year-old version of f*ck you something happened alright the f*ck he put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over ...and they say, just so long as nothing happened" (Andrea Dworkin, Mercy, p.11)My first feminist mentors were in the...
I'm fascinated by the narratives of the financial crisis that basically cast it as a mass deception. Clearly we need to develop a scale of deceptive practices and think about how this all relates to the social construction(s) of reality(ies). At the simple end there are the flat-out lies, for example those told by the peddlers of certain types of mortgages, but things quickly get more complicated. There are the accounting tricks used by big banks to understate their risk exposure (for example, a Wall Street Journal headline on April 9, "Big Banks Mask Risk Levels", tells much of that story)....
The World Bank Institute last month launched an online game, Evoke. It lasts for ten weeks, with Missions each week that include such global issues as solving water scarcity or thinking about the future of money. I haven't signed up or played yet, but it raises interesting questions about social innovation. Is global crowd-sourcing likely to lead to new solutions to existing problems? How likely is it that innovations would be implemented? Interestingly, the alternatives presented in the game often depend on innovating around existing institutions, i.e. create new currencies that work even...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Noah Brier links to some incredible pictures at Sociological Images that show the "efforts to camouflage the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant during WWII. The plant was essentially covered in netting made to appear, from the air, like a residential neighborhood. The aim was to keep it from being found by pilots and bombed."Before:After:The post includes some close ups as well as some views from underneath the netting. Very interesting.
It was announced last week that Judge Bathazar Garzon will be investigated for over stepping his authority for knowingly taking on a case that was outside of his jurisdiction. Garzon is, of course, famous for indicting Chile’s General Pinochet for crimes against humanity in the 1990s which lead to his arrest in London (although he eventually was let go on medical ground – and died).Since 2008, Garzon had apparently been turning to domestic figures, looking to open an investigation and prosecution against those Spanish officials which allegedly were involved in acts during the Franco...
SupraMap is an on-line tool that traces the mutation and spread of virues around the world. Fascinating.
Since we in the US are thinking of taxes today....A tax on currency transactions was proposed in 1972 by economist James Tobin (hence, it is often referred to as a Tobin tax). Wait, don't roll your eyes at a post on tax and finance! This gets better. Tobin argued that imposing this tax would slow down the speed of financial flows, discourage speculators, and cushion small bankers, which would help them adjust. After multiple financial crises, the idea has been revived--along with a popular campaign featuring a much more catchy label and a YouTube video with Bill Nighy that you really must...