In the Highlands of New Guinea, rival clans have often fought wars lasting decades, in which each killing provokes another.

I haven't read it, but given the author and the subject I'm sure it is interesting.

[ Very interesting. Dovetails into the Matt Ridley book I just finished - The Origins of Virtue. If this sort of thing interests you, I recommend it... talks a great deal about the genetic and social imperatives behind cooperation or non-cooperation and the evolution (and optimization, less convincingly) of powerful, cooperating social groups.

Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Last week, federal, state, and local police in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas conducted a massive sweep dubbed "Operation Sudden Impact."

The operation included raids of businesses, homes, and boats; traffic roadblocks; and personal searches. They say they were looking for "terrorists." If they found any, they haven't announced it yet. They did arrest 332 people, 142 of whom they describe as "fugitives." They also issued about 1,300 traffic tickets, and according to one media account, seized "hundreds" of dollars.

...

The FBI along with hundreds of officers said they are looking for anything out of the ordinary. Agents take computers and paperwork from businesses.

What a damn atrocity. This is such bullshit. Way to go, America! Let's all freak out in exactly the way those psychotic fuckers want us to. Good plan.

Also,

"What we have found traditionally is that terrorists are involved in a number of lesser known type crimes," said Mark Luttrell, Shelby County sheriff.

makes me fucking laugh. I'm sure the Shelby County sheriff's got *loads* of counter-terrorism experience. And by "counter-terrorism" i mean "counter-marajuana-dealer". Not that this horseshit would be justifiable even if he has, mind you.

Tennessee Terrorism Sweep nets traffic violators

FedEx blows. Independent contracting is the biggest load of bull. The rest of the article is about how they fired her after she asked for a leave of absence for her third recurrence of cancer.

Yeah, I have my own, entirely customer service related reasons to hate fedex, but this doesn't help me like them any more.

It does make me less surprised that a driver once delivered, without requesting a signature as required, a parcel containing a signed and numbered art print with a 3 inch puncture (v shaped, like the corner of a heavy box would leave) straight through both sides of the large cardboard envelope, the two layers of protective corrugated cardboard within, and, of course, the print sandwiched in the middle of all that.

That is only one of a series of egregious failures. I have sworn to never willingly use FedEx, either actively or by dealing with companies who ship exclusively via FedEx. My only exception is, and will probably remain, Apple Computer, who I can't give up on the basis of my FedEx hatred alone.

Say what you will about the U.S.P.S., I've had excellent luck with them on everything from overnight to parcels.

Fuck FedEx.

Working Life (High and Low) - New York Times

Six Authors. Six Stories. Six Weeks.

Super cool. 21 Steps is freaking rad... a story told via google maps, like the Indiana Jones travelling sequences, but with text bubbles. Very neat.

We Tell Stories

Typography from the 1980s.

[ Oh this video is the awesome. I've been playing it every couple days for about a month or so now. So damn cool. -k]

DVNO by JUSTICE

Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems

Gold Star. I was a few pages in before I realized it was written in 1996. How shamefully little has changed in 12 years.

Why Americans Hate the Media

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like?

... flailing, and furtive, and disingenuous ...

Precisely. She plays dirty and I can't stand how many supposedly progressive democrats support her on the basis that we need a "fighter" to counter the dirty shit the republicans will throw at us.

So much for fucking ideals.

Carl Bernstein’s View: A Hillary Clinton presidency

Stefanie wrote:
I think you're right about that. I don't think charging peak-hour tolls is feasible, and Anthony Downs further explains why in a related article:

Anthony Downs wrote:
Transportation economists have long been proponents of this tactic, but most Americans reject this solution politically for two reasons. Tolls would favor wealthier or subsidized drivers and harm poor ones, so most Americans would resent them, partly because they believe they would be at a disadvantage.

Well, that's a reasonable argument, but also one that was addressed in the original article. To wit, some percentage (about 1/3 based on a few samples), of the collections would be redirected into subsidies for low-income drivers who would otherwise be harmed by the opportunity cost of driving into the cordon. There are a number of compaints I can imagine in response to this, not least of which is the administrative overhead, but I think all are tractable.

Anthony Downs wrote:
The second drawback is that people think these tolls would be just another tax, forcing them to pay for something they have already paid for through gasoline taxes. For both these reasons, few politicians in our democracy—and so far, anywhere else in the world—advocate this tactic. Limited road-pricing schemes that have been adopted in Singapore, Norway, and London only affect congestion in crowded downtowns, which is not the kind of congestion on major arteries that most Americans experience.

The author is also cognizant that educating the public about the difference between taxation and paying for something is one of the main hurdles to such schemes. Again, the economic argument is that driving is currently cheaper than it's *real* cost, becuase harm to the environment, business development, etc., are undervalued. Americans will probably largely reject this argument on reflex, but I think it has a great deal of merit. Still, merit doesn't make things happen, necessarily.

...I disagree with Downs when he claims that we can't make the situation at least a little better. He states that "living with congestion... is the sole viable option," and discounts the options of "greatly expanding road capacity" and "greatly expanding public transit capacity." While I agree that constantly expanding road capacity is impractical, I think he has given up on public transportation (in the form of rail systems) too easily. If trains were available in more areas (connecting neighboring cities, and connecting downtown areas to the suburbs), I think many commuters would use them. No, I don't expect it to eliminate all congestion, but I do think trains (above or below ground) ... [ Read More (1.0k in body) ]

RE: America’s Traffic Congestion Problem: Toward a Framework for Nationwide Reform

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

I think there is some reasonable debate here about whether people have no expectation of privacy in regard to things that are only visible from above. At the time the Constitution was written, certainly, a hedge afforded some privacy.

[That movie Enemy of the State just gets more and more precient every day. -k]

Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in US

possibly noteworthy wrote:
In January, I recommended a short piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg that touches on this:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

I remember reading that (I read damn near everything I see on the topic of transit), though I'm not 100% sure how it applies. Frankly, I'm not particularly optimistic about the automotive era coming to an end soon. Americans are too tied to them in too many ways.

Like everything, it's complicated by a variety of issues, not least of which is politics, in which subsidy and concessions to lobbyists obscure the true cost of a *lot* of habits that are harmful to our culture or our health. Add in the view so many Americans have of taxation (i.e. a fundamental evil) in the first place, and you find it extremely hard to pay for *anything* that takes longer than an election cycle to build.

For transit and modern urban development, it's complicated by the fact that land is cheap : artificially cheap, in my opinion, as I think undeveloped land has intrinsic value for environmental (air quality, temperature, bio-diversity) and aesthetic reasons... reasons that are not, or are barely, factored into land costs.

I encourage Atlantans who haven't been to Athens in a few years to make that drive (irony!) sometime soon. I did so recently after maybe 4 or 5 years and it's astonishing how much that route has changed, and for the worse. I recall a relatively sleepy divided highway, with trees along both sides, an occasional country-looking road, and a gas station or diner here and there. Now, you can count dozens of *distinct* signs for new developments, offering housing from $100,000 to $200,000... huge tracts of land converted into cheaply built, unnecessarily large homes, with minimal tree cover (and scrubby, post-construction plantings too, many of the type that will never, and can never, grow beyond a certain height). There are new strip malls offering what the american suburbanite wants -- Applebees and Chilis, plenty of parking and no night-life. Nothing -- and I mean nothing : not the war in Iraq, not climate change, not nuclear-en... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: America’s Traffic Congestion Problem: Toward a Framework for Nationwide Reform