The world's most pathetic superhero?

Captain Euro

The Klingon threat

Klingons invade Vulcan! (Ontario)

Intended and unintended consequences

From Mickey Edwards, The Atlantic:

Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations. Party activists control access to the ballot through closed party primaries and conventions; partisan leaders design congressional districts. Once elected to Congress, our representatives are divided into warring camps. Partisans decide what bills to take up, what witnesses to hear, what amendments to allow.

Many Americans assume that’s just how democracy works, that this is how it’s always been, that it’s the system the Founders created. But what we have today is a far cry from what the Founders intended.

Worth a read. Good analysis, thoughtful suggestions for change.

Rare honesty

Michael Hudson has a lauditory (and rare) skill: he's an economist who tells the unvarnished truth.

From Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry | Michael Hudson:

[Interviewer] "Michael, I read the in the newspapers that the great recession, so-called, has long since ended, but unemployment remains stubbornly high with only a measly 18,000 jobs created in June. I believe the term that was coined some time ago is a jobless recovery. What is a jobless recovery?

[Hudson] We call that a depression – in this case, caused mainly by debt deflation. Just because the stock market is being inflated by the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that the economy itself is growing. It’s shrinking – from a combination of families and businesses having to pay off debts rather than spend their income on goods and services, and the government’s shift of taxes off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry."

There's a lot more where that came from.

Famine and carry-out

From 20 July Nightwatch:

North Korea: The Telegraph reported, in paraphrase, that six million North Koreans might be starving, but the children of the elite can order take-out from McDonalds in China, using Air Koryo -- the national airlines -- to make the deliveries to their homes.

McDonald's has no franchises in North Korea, but has 850 in China. North Korea has no banking relationship, such as credit cards, with the United States. American dollars buy junk food in China for the families of the senior party members and have it delivered.

According to The Telegraph report, Kim Chong-il indulges this and other extravagances as bribes in return for support for his third son as the next leader of North Korea. Some North Koreans consider Chinese-made McDonald's hamburgers to be delicacies.

This could be funny if it wasn't so evil.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence

Revealing Harry Potter Ad Placement

The failure of the establishment

Walter Russell Mead does it again (from his blog on The American Interest):

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement. We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite breakdown than popular stupidity.

***

That is not what the elite thinks, by and large. To listen to many bien pensant American intellectuals and above-the-salt journalists, America faces a shocking problem today: the cluelessness, greed, arrogance and bigotry of the American public. American elites are genuinely and sincerely convinced that the American masses don’t understand the world, don’t realize that American exceptionalism is a mental disease, want infinite government benefits while paying zero tax, and cling to their Bibles and their guns despite all the peer reviewed social science literature that demonstrates the danger and the worthlessness of both.

***

[In reality] The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before. Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history. No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism. The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed.

It's worth a full read.

I really hope this works

From The Guardian

Iceland is crowdsourcing its new constitution.

In creating the new document, the council has been posting draft clauses on its website every week since the project launched in April. The public can comment underneath or join a discussion on the council's Facebook page.

The council also has a Twitter account, a YouTube page where interviews with its members are regularly posted, and a Flickr account containing pictures of the 25 members at work, all intended to maximise interaction with citizens.

Meetings of the council are open to the public and streamed live on to the website and Facebook page. The latter has more than 1,300 likes in a country of 320,000 people.

The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people.

Comment: Randomly-selected councils. Meetings open to the public. All the usual social media sites. This could prove to be very interesting.

Have you wondered what America's real space program looks like?

Gallery: America’s Secret Space Arsenal | Danger Room | Wired.com

I'm especially interested in the video of NOSS in orbit. It explains a lot of anomalous "UFO" sightings and it illustrates our natural tendency to "fill in the blanks" when we don't have much data.

The party's over