nobody but the baby

american incarceration

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Interested yet?

Check out an article from today's NYT here.

Also, more than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their twenties, 1 in every 8 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.

For resources on that, check out the Sentencing Project's Racial Disparity site.

brooks on obama

so sad. but i can't help but agree a bit.

so now we know definitely that obama is not the messiah. nonetheless, we gotta have him. he's the best out there. also, he can start talking back to the persnickety fools who keep dogging him about dumb stuff and then scaring him into playing the game.

david brooks on how obama fell to earth

stock exchange of visions

lots here.

http://www.stockexchangeofvisions.org/

the incomplete manifesto

Bruce Mau is a designer and a culture visionary. He is also Canadian, which is a major plus (cf. Sacvan Bercovitch, Feist, Blue Rodeo, Propagandhi, David and Charmaine Hicks, Frank Curry, etc.)

Ten years ago, he wrote something called the Incomplete Manifesto. It is series of proposals and challenges for creative thinkers and innovators. Some of it could be mistaken for positive-thinking liberal cant, but most of his ideas are really, really helpful and provocative.

Check it out here.

information vs. knowledge in the black swan

a snip from rod dreher's beliefnet blogpost on the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb:

Taleb identifies an interesting Information Age paradox: the more information an individual takes in, the less he knows. To be precise, the less he knows about what he needs to know. That is, he doesn't appreciate the difference between information and knowledge. Information thus becomes "toxic," in Taleb's view, because it causes us to make poor choices based on a false picture of the world, a picture informed by "noise" -- that is, information that has not been properly processed, weighed, measured, and placed in context. Taleb:

"The more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit."

(read more from taleb himself here)

on the wright controversy

Newsweek has an interview with my friend SDSU history prof Ed Blum on what Rev. Jeremiah Wright was doing in his now famously incendiary rhetoric at Trinity UCC. check it out here.

also, there's an interesting piece with a decidedly different point of view from julie lyon here.

update on farming

recall the post of march 2nd, 2008 on genX competitive austerity, and all the talk about neomonasticism in the remote parts of the land (namely the hood and the prairie).

here's another angle from the nytimes on hipster farming in upstate new york.

¡cien anos!

this is really funny. and scary.

and can it be? a frog!

this is so great. so so great.the BBC is on a massive roll with the finding of animals.

anyone starting to think that these things may be made up?

poisonous waving golden frogs.

children sold on craigslist.

who doesn't love craigslist? it is the best for finding a bike, a job, a roommate....i think craigslist rocks.

i also love the philosophy of craigslist....decentralize the mechanisms of connection and facilitate natural community interaction.

but, there's a problem. alas, upbeat hopeful philosophy comes crashing into human reality.

children are being trafficked via the craigslist website. ask craigslist to take a stand on this issue.

click here to find out what you can do.

<from the love146.org website:>
Craigslist's dirty little secret: Children are sold on website

With its free postings and relative anonymity for its users, Craigslist's "Erotic Services" site has become a  vehicle for the trafficking of children. The Craigslist campaign urges Craigslist as a multi-million dollar company to take responsibility for the role its site is playing in facilitating child slavery and exploitation.