Category: Uncategorised

WaPo stats on healthcare voting in the US. Show (by eyeballing, anyway, & as pointed out by James of England) no correlation between voting patterns and either health industry donations or number of uninsured constituents.

This strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe an excuse to load the data into pandas and play round with it.

The EU parliament are something like the House of Lords — you don’t tend to pay them much attention, or really trust them, but every now and again they come through and Do The Right Thing when the rest of the Powers That Be are in thrall to some ridiculous lobbyist-enhanced monstrosity.

Last week is one of those cases: the European Parliament has passed a resolution thoroughly condemning the secrecy of the ACTA negotiation process, in terms that are, compared to the normal EU bureacratese, pretty fierce:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA

negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned

that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that

parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

Rolling Stone still has an incredible collection of writers:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier.

Pasting this over from a friend’s facebook status — because I don’t have a good answer, but I’m sure that, collectively, you do:

why are there so many love/death/life is tragic/my puppy is cuter than yours songs, but no song about the human relationship to books? or two books getting really well together? or the awkward feeling before you start writing?

What songs have we forgotten about?

Certain small post-Soviet states have a tendency to be hooked into all the latest fads among global policy wonks. It’s an outgrowth of their size and history: ambitious young people who left for Western Europe or the US in the 90s, have now returned and found themselves wealthy, skilled, and ready to govern. Georgia and Estonia, in particular, have been quick to dive into every technnical/governmental trend, from twitter to linux to…e-voting.

As regards the latter, Estonia is forging ahead. 14% of votes in the European elections were cast online. 44% in the municipal elections in Talinn — which, to judge by the percentage of Berlin’s technorati vanishing there for mysterious projects, must be turning into something of an electronic mecca.

ooh, my turn to be a squeeing fanboy!

“

Grant Morrison

and [Paul McGuigan, whoever that is] are working on, I wouldn’t call it a secret project, but a project with

Stephen Fry

and it’s a thriller set in Scotland” [via warren ellis]

[somehow I appear not to have written about Morrison on LJ, and I’m not quite in the state of messianic frenzy I’d need to explain what

The Invisibles

has meant to me. But, er, this is very, very exciting]

Berlin is currently thawing. That is to say, we’re rediscovering strata of litter that have been buried under ice for weeks or even months. Particularly, a lot of used fireworks that have been there since New Year’s Eve. Everything’s not just filthy, but chronologically confused:)

Thanks so much for the comments on the last post. You’ve collectively reminded me that there are almost as many things to be inspired by as there are to be angry about.

One of k-punks many, many worth activities is his full-frontal assault on the rhetoric of modernisation:

it’s necesary to reclaim the public sphere and public services as achievements of modernity (much as they was celebrated by the GPO Film Unit), and, therefore, to re-narrativize their dismantling as acts of barbaric anti-modernisation. Think about it for a second: what is “modern” about the standard neoliberal package of outsourcing, a poorly motivated and casualised workforce delivering a poorer quality service, and exorbitantly overpaid executives? Wasn’t the postal service more modern when you could post a letter in the morning and quite often have it delivered by a well motivated worker the same day?

those of us who are reaching adulthood in the 21st century are in many ways more conventional than our parents….orthodox, driven, a little boring, and with a deep desire to save the precarious world that we are about to inherit.

With a few notable exceptions, my peers are driven not to create, nor to rebel, but to stabilise. We want jobs, a foot on the housing ladder, and to protect the planet….My generation may not be turning up at a church, temple or synagogue every weekend, but nor are we running through the streets strewing flowers and reinventing rock music. On the contrary: the millennial generation is replacing the cultural and spiritual orthodoxy of its parents and grandparents with orthodoxies of its own.

— Laurie Penny in CiF