via Brett

I think these do a fantastic job of articulating one of the underlying reasons i find both political parties so (a) pathetic and (b) frustrating. Neither party articulates a vision for what an America that provides "middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion" to the working class would look like under current global economic and technological conditions. (I think that's a big part of the explanation that Democrats need to hear, by the way, for why lower-income/working-class "red staters" consistently vote in a manner that Democrats perceive to be contrary to that class's inherent economic interests -- a Democratic party which is essentially neo-liberal and under the sway of professionalism cannot articulate a convincing alternative to a Republican vision whose appeal is primarily "let's make things the way they were", even if that Republican vision doesn't articulate an accurate causation for the disappearance of those conditions.)

Notes that the reason not to erect trade barriers is that globalization raises the overall wealth of society -- but doesn't continue to the next obvious point, which is that the overall wealth of a society can rise while the majority of the members of that society suffer financially, if the increase is distributed unequally enough (for instance: sufficiently concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest members of society). This, as it happens, is exactly what we have seen happen.

Republicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.<br />
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A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”<br />
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In a column in The Washington Post on Friday, Bill Gross, who runs the giant bond-trading firm Pimco, lashed out at Republicans and “co-opted Democrats” for setting aside widely accepted economic theory.<br />
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“An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking,” he wrote. “Washington hassles over debt ceilings instead of job creation in the mistaken belief that a balanced budget will produce a balanced economy. It will not.”

f you don't believe the war on terror is migrating into your backyard, this case is confirmation. If you don't think the state-secrets doctrine will be trotted out to protect the government's abuse of innocent Americans as well as foreign prisoners, this case proves it. If you worry that "turning the page" means always finding more of the same, this case makes that plain. A country in which nobody is ever really responsible is a country in which nobody is ever truly safe.

For Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. For Dan Savage, we are what we enduringly desire.<br />
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As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Parkitecture occupies an interesting liminal space in the parks; it both informs and restricts your movement, trying to blend in with the natural surroundings while being obviously official. It also requires an investment in apparently outdated trades–we saw trail maintenance in Zion being performed by a team of masons with chisels and hammers, chipping the red sandstone into appropriately rustic blocks. The curation and preservation of these trade skills seem just as important to me as the park itself.<br />
via @bldgblog

When you have agencies that treat everything like a secret then, well, nothing is a secret, right?

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them.<br />
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Lop their wealths off.

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.