Ramblings & ephemera
From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, history, politics | No Comments »
From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):
We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, politics, science | No Comments »
According to Mickey Kaus’ Why write about the Edwards scandal? (Slate: 4 August 2008), these are the 6 stages of any political scandal:
… the natural progression in cases like this: 1) Too horrible and shocking; it can’t possibly be true; 2) It’s not true; 3) You can’t prove it’s true; 4) Why are [...]
Posted on September 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:
Thought y’all would find this interesting - from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:
“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, politics | No Comments »
From George Pendle’s “New Foundlands” (Cabinet: Summer 2005):
Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect. The Republic of Counani, Furstentum Castellania, Palmyra, the Hutt River Province, and the Empire of [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, law, politics, weird | No Comments »
From Charles C. Mann’s “The Coming Death Shortage” (The Atlantic: 1 May 2005):
The twentieth-century jump in life expectancy transformed society. Fifty years ago senior citizens were not a force in electoral politics. Now the AARP is widely said to be the most powerful organization in Washington. Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer’s, snowbird economies, the population [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Non-Fiction, history, politics | No Comments »
From Tim Wu’s “That Other Drug Legalization Movement” (Slate: 14 October 2007):
As the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports, rich people tend to abuse prescription drugs, while poorer Americans tend to self-medicate with old-fashioned illegal drugs or just get drunk.
The big picture reveals a nation that, let’s face it, likes [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: politics | No Comments »
From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006):
Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. …
Electronic voting is not transparent - it is not even translucent. There is no way [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Timothy Noah’s “Bush’s Fart-Joke Legacy” (Slate: 2 October 2006):
Legend has it that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, once farted in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I, whereupon he went into exile for seven years. On his return, the queen reputedly greeted, “My lord, we had quite forgot the fart.”
Related posts
Ulysses Grant [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history, politics | Comments Off
From D. Ghirlandaio’s “Comment to Stephen Griffin’s ‘Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb’” (10 October 2006):
The Syrians had a technique for the ticking bomb scenario. Give the man who knows where the bomb is a cell phone. “Call your mother.” At the mother’s house, a man picks up the phone.
Related posts
Why the US toppled Iran’s [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Mary A. Dempsey’s “Fordlandia” (Michigan History: July/August 1994):
Screens were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros (rubber gatherers) by distributing [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business, history, politics | Comments Off
From Alan Bellows’s “The Ruins of Fordlândia” (Damn Interesting: 3 August 2006):
On Villares’ advice, [Henry] Ford purchased a 25,000 square kilometer tract of land along the Amazon river, and immediately began to develop the area. …
Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community sprung up [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business, history, politics, weird | Comments Off
From Louis Menard’s “From the Ashes: A new history of Europe since 1945″ (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 168):
[Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945] notes that France, a country with a population of some forty million, was administered by fifteen hundred Nazis, plus six thousand Germen policemen. A skeleton [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 112):
The [British] army was given responsibility for domestic intelligence, which became MI5; the Navy was put in charge of a new foreign espionage service, which became MI6.
Related posts
NSA spying: Project Shamrock & Echelon
Colonialism at its [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Laura Miller’s “Rent-a-coup” (Salon: 17 August 2006):
In March 2004, a group of men with a hired army of about 70 mercenary soldiers set out to topple the government of the tiny West African nation of Equatorial Guinea and install a new one. Ostensibly led by a political opposition leader but actually controlled by the [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics | Comments Off
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
Kissinger, then secretary of state, was certain he detected the odor of communism in the election of Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency of Chile. …
Chile was one of the most stable countries in South America, with a high literacy rate, [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
At roughly the same time Secretary of State Dulles was destroying democracy in Iran, he was also busy destroying democracy in Central America, and once again it was on behalf of a renegade industry: United Fruit Co. …
“Few private companies have [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
In 1953 the brutal, venal shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was pushed into exile by Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister. …
Iranians loved Mossadegh. He made clear that his two ambitions were to set up a lasting democracy and [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics | Comments Off
From Robert Sherrill’s “100 (Plus) Years of Regime Change” (The Texas Observer: 14 July 2006):
[Stephen Kinzer's] Overthrow is an infuriating recitation of our government’s military bullying over the past 110 years - a century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governments - in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):
It seems to me axiomatic that most primary actors on the global stage are disturbed people, because an obsessive lust for power is itself a pathology, and in a competition among thousands or millions of power seekers, only the most pathological are likely to win. …
I think [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off