Categories

Earning the new puppy

Birth of a meme?

“I think American Airlines did not earn the new puppy today.”

“Thanks for buying all that beer and cheese! You have really earned the new puppy!”

This will be the exact opposite of not getting any ice cream.

A Possible Future

This extremely thorough spoof of the New York Times was distributed today to over 1.2m people. It’s an elaborate exercise in creating an alternate reality – by getting people to think of these things, of the possibility of an end to the war in Iraq, free health care, etc. it makes them more conceivable, […]

President Obama

President Obama on the cover of the Daily News

Huge crowds are celebrating in Union Square, in New York. Someone picked up copies of the first edition of the Daily News announcing the Obama victory, and they were paraded around to great acclamation. I have never seen such sheer unadulterated joy in New York […]

New York Votes and Volunteers

Up at 6:00am this morning, voted at 6:15am. Things were very busy at my polling station, a real sense of occasion. The lady next to me was congratulating a first-time voter, about voting in *this* particular election. I actually teared up a bit.

Billboard in the East Village

Here is a picture of my […]

Campaigning for Barack Obama on Main Street

I spent the weekend volunteering for the Obama campaign, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This town is in the heart of Bucks County, one of the “must-win” counties in the coming election, according to politico.com. Main Street here is as close as you can get to the typical small-town “Main Street” that the candidates love to […]

Warren Buffett on Class Warfare

Warren Buffett strongly supports increasing taxes on the wealthy. In this interview in the NY Times, he has this memorable quote:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

I’d say that this is literally true: the current surge in military spending is disproportionately benefiting […]

The elephant in the room: violence in (and out) of the U.S.A.

I have been following the elections very closely, and am struck that there is a series of related issues that have not become part of the political debate, mostly related to the U.S.A. and violence. It is striking, since this is an area where the U.S.A. is an outlier, an anomaly among developed countries. I […]

Obama's tax cuts

Very interesting chart from the Chartjunk blog showing the impact of Barack Obama’s tax plan, compared to McCain’s. It’s based on the same data as the Washington Post chart, but scaled to more accurately reflect the impact on real numbers of tax payers. Make sure to read the article to understand how the chart was […]

Who's the patriot?

“In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy‘s challenge to, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.”

This may come as a surprise: Factor military duty into […]

American favela

The BBC has a short piece on improvised shantytowns in Los Angeles, set up by people who have lost their homes in the subprime mortgage collapse.

These people aren’t junkies or mental patients: these were homeowners a few months ago! If you listen to the piece, a lot of them lost their homes, not specifically […]