Brilliant.

dodgethewater:

tothebarricades:

Jeff Bridges, everybody.

Even I am mildly uncomfortable with this picture.

I worked for ten years in political communications, and this satirical op-ed in The Onion by “Senator Gronk” parodies what I did every day absolutely perfectly: ”Raaaah! Gronk hate H.R. 3712, the Income And Property Tax Reassessment Act! Senator Gronk crush middle-class tax hike!”

Comparing airline routes to internet traffic:

Comparing maps of communication past and present reveals parallel patterns. The upper image shows the movement of passengers on airplanes across the United States; the lower one, the flow of bits across the Internet. “It is the largest thing we have ever built,” says Whitesides, “and we have assembled it from transistors—the smallest things we know how to make. It is a chrysalis we are forming around the planet…a table where we sit to gossip, a suq where we buy and sell; a shadowy corner for planning mischief; a library holding the entire world’s information; a friend, a game, a matchmaker, a psychiatrist, an erotic dream, a babysitter, a teacher, a spy….The best and worst and most ordinary of us reflected—and perhaps distorted—in a silvery fog of bits.”

Sunglasses over sunglasses. Brilliant. Gotta love CSI Miami.

British courts have just equated deeply held beliefs about the environment to deeply held religious beliefs. Is this progress towards enlarging region’s role in the public sphere? From The Economist:

“A BELIEF in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperatives is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.” Those were the words of an English High Court judge, Mr Justice Burton, on November 3rd as he ruled that green beliefs deserve the same protection in the workplace as religious convictions.
…
At an earlier hearing on October 7th, Mr Justice Burton had asserted that “if a person can establish that he holds a philosophical belief which is based on science as opposed, for example, to religion, then there is no reason to disqualify it from protection”. He provided a five-pronged test to shore up the ruling: the belief must be genuinely held; it must be held for a long period of time; it must relate to something of grave importance to humanity; it must reach a certain level of cogency and seriousness; and it must not trample on existing ideas of human rights. By way of example, he said belief in the supremacy of the Jedi knights of “Star Wars” fame would be excluded, but he conceded that allegiance to the doctrines of Marxism or communism might not.

What’s with the British hatin’ on the Jedi?

This really, really bothers me. From The Economist:

A quarter of America’s total income is earned by the top 1%

AMERICA is the wealthiest country in the world and its rich keep earning more. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, the top 1% increased their share of the country’s income to 23.5%, according to analysis of tax returns by a pair of economists, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. The concentration of income earned by this top percentile now stands at its highest since 1928 [right before the great depression -JKB]. Two-thirds of the country’s total gains in the five years to 2007 accrued to the top 1%, whereas the bottom 90th percentile saw only 12% of the extra income.

C’est tres bien! Oui oui! Sometimes, it’s just better when it’s French.

(via @loic)