Awesomest Graph

This graph shows the occupational breakdown of US citizens in the last 150 years. Really cool.

Epimetheus Lives

PETA has a new blog and guess what it's called: The PETA Files. Now, if you haven't gotten it yet, say it three times fast. Dang, they did not think about that one.

Links For Thought

new piece by the great noam chomsky on "the push to militarize latin america"

some good ol' krugman on glen beck and the US. this one is good if you have recently found yourself wondering, as i definitely have, how beck has gotten so powerful.

an interesting piece from mother jones on the potential problems that are going to arise as tasers become more and more widely used, specifically by school security guards.

and, for all you tolkien lovers, but really just for myself, a site with tons of sketches that tolkien made of his imagined realm of middle earth.

let's be human beings

in these times of trouble, we must all remember that the qualities, i.e. race, religion, and politics, which appear to separate us from one another are merely on the surface of our shared existences. it truly can be hard to see this. to see, that is, that we are all the same on the inside.

our internal logic tells us that we are set apart from one another by the things that we have each experienced, and by the unique understanding of, and perspective on, the world that each of our sets of experiences gives us, but this simply is not true. yes, we have all experienced different things and yes, this does mean that we each see things in a different light but the distance between each one of us is minute compared to the gulf that i think we each imagine ourselves to be surrounded by.

for me, the proof that we are actually much closer than we think is that, while we do experience different things, we each experience those different things using nearly the same brains and sensory systems. in other words, we are all using the same operating systems to compute the data that we take in. i think that this means that two people can experience like things in different circumstances and each come out of it with like understandings of their experiences. i might even go so far as to say that that is what happens. that we each draw the like conclusions, merely coated by specific cultural circumstances, when we experience like things.

from here, you can make a leap and begin to wonder whether or not there is a finite set of conclusions that the range of things a human is capable of experiencing can yield. what would that mean? hmm, that's a bit of a thinker, probably best not to make that leap in the middle of all this. back to the main course.

ahh, yes, we all draw like conclusions off of like experiences. it must be noted of that there are differences in intellect, specific brain chemistry, and culture, which do set us apart to a point. i just don't think that we are as far apart as it seems or, more importantly, as we often want to think.

i mean how much easier is it to not care about someone's well being if you can think that they are nothing like you and would not understand where you are coming from? the answer is much, much easier. that right there is where so many of today's problems stem from. we seem incapable of accepting, or maybe even understanding, that the opinions' of our rivals might have merit to them, i.e. that they might be worth listening to and coming to comprehend.

there are efforts in many of today's most contested battles to build stronger bridges towards mutual understandings but this current economic situation is augmenting many of the divides, which already define these battles, and making the great distances that these bridges must cross even greater. now, more than ever in recent history, we need to take a collective step back and assess the true nature of our problems. i say this because i think that many of our arguments right now are being driven more by fear and anxiety about the future than by any specific parts of the arguments, i.e. people are more afraid about growing government control in a time when the government seems like a bit of a lurching giant than they actually are about health care.

we are all scared for what is coming. therein lies the crux; we are all scared. we are all scared that the lives we have worked for are going to get pulled out from under us and that we are going to be left alone and helpless in this new cold reality. well, firstly, that is exactly what is going to happen if we all continue to act so selfishly but, secondly, it is exactly in this moment of terror that we find the opportunity to come together and build a stronger, more united, future.

now, i do know that these idealistic words of mine have been spoken many times before and will be spoken many times again in the future but i also know that i am right. i know that this country is reaching a boiling point and that something is going to happen. whether that something is the republican party splitting into two groups, one group based on religion and yellow journalism and one group based on sound but conservative economic and social ideals, or obama giving in to dropping the public option and passing another weak health care reform bill or obama asserting the democratic majority in each house and passing whatever bill he really wants to or something else entirely, i do not know but i know that the next three, hopefully seven, years are going to bring change to this country.

so, here we sit on a precipice, three years from now, maybe seven years from now, we are going to be a different country. what is that country going to look like? it could be much more united than it currently is or it could continue on this divisive path towards a future that i fear holds in it the airing of some of America's oldest and dirtiest laundry. chances are that we will find ourselves somewhere in the middle of these two options. all i hope for is that we come to recognize the magnitude of the opportunity that we find in front of us before it is too late and that smallest of windows for positive change, which we see open only once every few decades, has closed again.

considering the dire magnitude of some of the ideas i just put out there, i should probably end this piece with a few words of encouragement. so, here they are: let's not be the cold, heartless, passive aggressive robots, which we have become. let's just be the warm, understanding, forthright creatures that we are meant to be. let's be human beings.

that may not sound like much but, really, it is all that we need to bring us out of this darkness and towards a brighter future

The man who saved a billion lives has just died

Norman Borlaug, "father of the green revolution", just died. His obit is ridiculously interesting. He worked tirelessly to find ways to increase crop production, specifically wheat, at a time when there were serious concerns that the world's population would outstrip it's food supply. It can be said without equivocation that his work saved hundreds of millions of lives. Though, he was not one to ever acknowledge the importance of his impact. Check it out.

Also, if you've got 10 minutes to kill, here's a penn and teller vid about Norman. If you've never watched a 'serious' penn and teller vid, you should because they are pretty politically conservative and they are pretty smart, too. In other words, they are an important perspective to hear from every now and then.

One more, a piece that I haven't gotten to read yet but that looks pretty cool. It's on the racial divisions that this recession is creating/bringing back into mainstream America. Read it.

real cool explanation of some old sayings

so, im not entirely sure that these are real but, if they're not, they're at least really creative. check them out

hurricanes make big waves

interesting piece on an upcoming supreme court battle

onion brilliance

funny this onion video is called "is using a minotaur to gore detainees torture?"

the little "next story" blurb at the end of the vid said "powerful coal lobby adds coal to food pyramid" ha.

krugman on his game

nice article by paul krugman about the health care plan which was nearly passed during richard nixon's presidency. interesting how times have changed. i especially like the last paragraph. deep.