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Hamilton, S.: Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy.
Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.
The Fog of Numbers - Clusterfuck Nation
The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government.
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ity to really care about the place they called home.
It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore. This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark. Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings. A quadrillion is just off the charts, out of this world, not really subject to reality-based interpretation. You might as well say "infinity." We have flown up our own collective numeric bung-hole. -
While extremely allergic to paranoid memes and conspiracy theories, I begin to wonder about the impressive volume of World Wide Web chatter about an upcoming bank holiday -- meaning that the US government might find itself constrained to shut down the banking system for a period of time to deal with a rapidly developing emergency that might prompt the public to make a run on reserves. God knows, there are enough black swans crowding the skies these days to blot out the sun. I hesitate to suggest that readers who are able to should consider stealthily withdrawing a month's worth of walking-around money from their accounts.
The week past, some so-called "conservative" political action groups (read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests) trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at "town meetings" around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. It's one thing to yell at a congressman over "single payer" abstractions. It'll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First National Bank of Chiggerville.
Open Left:: The Political Broadcast Spectrum
If people are content to have a politics based on image and identity, without giving a rats ass about actual policies, then yes, indeed, we are living in a center-right nation. If people are primarily concerned with broad platitudes and abstract principles, then welcome to Barack Obama's center-dominated bipartisan world. But if people actually want something done, well, then, welcome to progressive America, because that's what people want when it comes down to brass tacks.
The Valve - A Literary Organ | “Toward a History of the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel,‘“ by Mark Greif
Mark Greif’s piece on the “big, ambitious novel” is a great article—ambitious, inventive, and important. Greif begins:
Criticism works by criteria it is willing to name and others it disowns. The “big, ambitious novel” is one of those categories used by nearly everyone to sift and sort new work. Yet it is not respectable. It is more common to conversation than to professional discourse…
Our Cherished Paradoxes | The American Prospect
Orlando Patetrson reviews - A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy
Shelby Steele -- Affirmative Action Doesn't Solve the Real Problem
Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its inception, no one even bothered to measure its effectiveness in minority progress. Advocates of racial preferences tried to prove that these policies actually helped minorities only after 1996, when California's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences in all state institutions, scaring supporters across the country.
Joe Bageant: America's White Underclass
Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need.
The Immanent Frame » This song is old. But is it true?
In perfect harmony, God and American democracy call us to continue a long and difficult tradition imagined as a journey “up the path” of progress.
This song is old. But is it true?
Rest Stops, R.I.P. | GOOD
State governments are shutting down interstate rest-stops because of money woes and competition from KwikMats and McDonalds.
Techno Triumphalism, Twittering Towards the Singularity | The Agonist
The combined impact of these disasters on the American psyche has left us adrift. The failure of Clinton's dot.com economy to pull us out of our desperate need for petroleum has been well documented by Stirling and others. Web 2.0 is a kind of "sure we don't get paid money for any of this work, but we sure are communicating!" response.
The cult of the singularity is an attempt to get beyond all that. To have something we can believe in again, a vision for the future. Regardless of its truth or falsity, human beings must have a vision to aspire toward.
America 3.0 & The Interregnum « Jon Taplin’s Blog
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So I’d like to close by saying that I think the key to getting out of this terrible crisis is a very powerful investment by the government in both ET–energy technology, and IT–information technology. and I think it’s really incumbent on the universities to be at the center of this revolution. Because if we don’t recognize the seriousness of this moment and start investing on the scale I have discussed, we could limp along like Japan for ten years; in a flat economy and the social strife that would result from that would be disastrous. I am aware that getting the political will to do this is hard, but perhaps it takes a crisis to move this country of ours.
Why trains run slower now than they did in the 1920s. - By Tom Vanderbilt - Slate Magazine
Hullabaloo - Tough Love
I have been wondering why I'm so out of step on this... But the way they are deployed most often is simply to give a jolt of horrible, mind bending pain so that people will instantly turn docile and cooperative --- at the sole discretion of the authority who wields it. Where does this eager subservience on the part of allegedly freedom loving Americans come from, that the population so willingly accepts that the police have right to make any of them feel "a hard punch in the stomach with the added trauma of electricity running through your body" whenever they feel the need? I can't wrap my mind around that.
America's Tough Love Habit | Mother Jones
For decades, Americans have tolerated "tough love" treatment not just for terrorists, but for vulnerable youth.
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