via Alan Wiig -- worth a post.

via Pruned

via @bruces and @leebillings

Or, they can stay the course – and keep on partying like it’s 1999 – until an angry mob bursts through the front door, drags them down to the town square, and lops their wealth off.

via GGW.

via faslanyc

via @nicolatwilley

What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.

This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. Once, Venice and Bruges formed an axis that spurred commercial expansion across Eurasia. Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate "free zones" across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world.
via @bruces

Bryan Finoki (subtopes)

via delicious/bldgblog

Chepstow-Lusty's solution is massive reintroduction of native tree varieties, such as the alder, to trap moisture blowing over from the Peruvian Amazon to the east. He also recommends repair of the now derelict Incan canals and terraces so they can once again support agriculture.

exact same reaction i've been having to the book.

alsenborn: exactly the right team to take from the bottom back to the top.

To call Reagan a hypocrite is to miss the point. The Reagan Revolution was never about fiscal responsibility or small government. Far more accurately than Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: they wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.