Some of Nothing

Lieberman Concern Trolls at the Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Holy Joe starts his rationally-challenged article with a question:

How did the Democratic Party get here?

I actually thought this was a good beginning. I've often wondered how the Democratic Party could have ever included Joe Lieberman, let alone put him up as a VP candidate. But apparently, that wasn't where he was going:

How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

I agree. How did we, the Democrats, ever let the fear mongers push us into a stupid war with no real moral foundation or path to success? Oh wait. That wasn't where he was going either:

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

Well, there was that whole Bay of Pigs incident. Not to mention the Vietnam War, which Kennedy has some right to claim a part of. And I guess the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were straightforwardly principled actions according to Lieberman. But that was such a long time ago, and blowing up entire cities of innocent civilians is an easily forgettable event. I'm sure the few families of those people that remain don't even remember their names anymore. So, it's all good. I digress:

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

Hmmmm....being "proudly pro-American" means judging the world beyond our borders while completely forgetting to judge ourselves? I think there's another term for that: hypocrite. And when we talk about "freedom fighters" are we talking Iraqi insurgents? Cuz I think our US soldiers in Iraq may have a problem with us standing united with those freedom fighters. Just a guess....

Long story short, Lieberman's concern troll article is lengthy and not worth all the words he used to write it, let alone all the words required to make fun of it. I just wish the Democratic Party wouldn't put up with his imperialist recklessness anymore.

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Nothing New byslag at 9:52 AM 2 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)  

What are you reading?
Monday, December 10, 2007

Well, the US National Endowment for the Arts is wasting American tax payer dollars again by telling us how much we don't read. Or rather, how much less we read today than we read yesterday. The gist:

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

• Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
• On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

• Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
• 2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.
• Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

Who cares?

The declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications – Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages. Deficient readers run higher risks of failure in all three areas.

• Nearly two-thirds of employers ranked reading comprehension "very important" for high school graduates. Yet 38 percent consider most high school graduates deficient in this basic skill.
• American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.
• Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.

While the preface of the report takes pains to stress that causality is--as always--not proven, it doesn't shy away from suggesting the importance of reading in our society:

Strictly understood, the data in this report do not necessarily show cause and effect. �The statistics merely indicate correlations. �The habit of daily reading, for instance, overwhelmingly correlates with better reading skills and higher academic achievement. On the other hand, poor reading skills correlate with lower levels of financial and job success. At the risk of being criticized by social scientists, I suggest that since all the data demonstrate consistent and mostly linear relationships between reading and these positive results—and between poor reading and negative results—reading has played a decisive factor.

It's hard for me to imagine trying to convince people who don't seem to mind torture, war, and environmental destruction that this decline in reading is a bad thing. Sadly, it seems to me that all the self-proclaimed culture warriors are actually on the wrong side of the war. But it breaks my brain to think that, in 2002, over 40% of American adults never picked up a book if they didn't have to--let alone the over 50% who didn't pick up a work of literature (novel, short story, play, or poem). So, while recognizing the fact that convincing certain groups of people of reading's importance (let alone the importance of the NEA) is nigh impossible, I thought I'd throw together some images for the cause.

Back when I rode public transportation (as opposed to using pedal transportation, which is my current favorite), I got this question all the time:


but never from William Blake:


And yet, my response was always the same:

It's no wonder people don't talk to me anymore.

What I want most to know now is how to avoid having these look like a cheesy literacy campaign. Tough one.

Oh yeah...and this NEA study is yet another example of why organizations such as 826 are so very important.

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Nothing New byslag at 3:07 PM 5 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)  

Halloween Seriousness
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Great column from Krugman:

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.

The only thing we have to fear: my pathetic drawing "ability". Will work on this one more later.

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Nothing New byslag at 11:56 AM 0 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)  

Time for a Change in Strategery
Friday, October 5, 2007

Here's the deal. For the past few weeks I've been getting about 4 hours of sleep per night (and in some cases, per morning). And since I'm not Martha Stewart, this change in sleep schedule has taken its toll. So much so that this morning, I didn't get up until 8:30, and even then, it was most reluctantly (for you late-risers, 8:30 is practically noon--or at least, late morning--for someone like me). Hence, before I start trading insider stock secrets and lying to the feds about it, I figure that it's time for a change in strategery.

You may not realize it, but you three readers out there have been getting a lot for your money (the secret to every great empire's success: make sure customers feel they're paying a lot for what little they get). I'm pretty new at all this, and between creating graphics, content, and a website; doing empire-related administration (aka plotting to take over the world); volunteering at 826; and being continually infuriated by the state of the nation, I'm worn out. And to top it off, I have a confession to make: the blog doesn't receive the full weight of my genius (hard to tell, I know). Several of my (what I perceive to be more hack-ish) designs have bypassed the blog and gone straight to the store. And my smaller revisions, based on your comments as well as my own, rarely make it here at all-- unless they're timely or highly relevant to a message. This brings me to said strategery shift.

As you see here, I'm posting a moderately revised version of a recent image--the one that hit the press. That's strategery shift #1--there will be more of this. Number two is that my posts will probably be shorter. This is for your benefit as well as my own. I need to tighten things up a bit, and a self-imposed word limit may help. And along with being shorter, I'm going to try to simplify them and round them out a bit. Finally, there will probably be slightly fewer of them since I need to re-focus some attention to my website for a while. I'm going to shoot for 5/week instead of my original goal (7).

All this boils down to one thing: I'm going to try to improve quality by reducing quantity. And when quality improves, I'll try to bring quantity back up. Sound fair?

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Nothing New byslag at 9:20 AM 2 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)  

Rush Limbaugh + Army of Dude + Newton's Cradle = Cynicism
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Well, here it is: your moment of cynicism. But first some stream-of-consciousness rambling.

A couple of days ago, I met an amazing blog called Army of Dude. As I've gotten older, I've realized that don't go in for America's militaristic culture, so, at first, I was skeptical. No offense intended to His Dudeness (or Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing), it's just that, as the dude seems to understand, this type of culture tends to lead to a "might makes right" attitude, which doesn't always jive. Nonetheless, my curiosity overcame my skepticism when I read the following passage in one of the dude's posts:

When I was a kid I watched Rush with my dad every morning when he was still on TV and always found him pretty funny and clever. Over the years I didn't have a very concrete opinion about him, I just knew him as the kooky conservative radio host who defended Bush at every turn (and hey, so did I). What did Rush and I have to lose when the war in Iraq started in 2003? I didn't have any family in the military, and all my friends were too young to even enlist. Why not go kick the shit out of a country, as long as someone else was doing it?

This was the last time Rush and I would agree on the war, so here's my opinion of you, Rush: you're as smart, selfless and courageous as I was as a 17 year old high school senior.

This captivated me for the simple fact that the dude and I had the exact same childhood experience. I was the dude; the dude was me. OK, technically, my situation involved my mother listening to Rush on the radio in the car, but the experience was the same. And while, at 17, I was "too cool for politics" and only vaguely interested, I distinctly remember getting that funny discordant feeling that one gets (and often suppresses) when hearing something that seems wrong or somehow incomplete but is unclear as to why. And instead of questioning it (everyone at age 17 knows you can't lie on the radio; plus, he seemed so SURE of himself), I just chalked it up to the notion that Rush, and my parents, knew something that I didn't. So: Why not invade Iraq (Bush Sr.)?!? I hear they have great stuff we might want!

Well, the interesting aspect of this is (yes, there is actually an interesting aspect): I ended up in college and the dude ended up in the army, but we both came to the same place in our thinking--Rush Limbaugh is an elephant's ass. Apparently, either the commi-pinko academics that brainwashed me also served some time in Iraq with the dude (Professors Without Borders?) or there's something more significant at work here. And in spite of the fact that the dude has expressed it with much more eloquence and skill than I ever could (that's $50,000 in tuition costs I'll never get back), I decided to create this basic instructional image, derivative of work from another person much more skilled and eloquent than me (our good friend, Sir Isaac Newton), to try to add something to the discussion.

[UPDATE (to help Republicans get it):]
People like Rush Limbaugh want us to be categorized and want us to think that those categories dictate our belief systems. According to this mindset, the Dude's experiences should make him a dittohead. But the Dude is a free-thinker who refuses to conform to any prescribed ideology. He does not get pushed around by a particular party or group. He is not a tool. [/UPDATE]

This image is one of those in which the subject matter--the pendulum of politics--is so well-trodden that it simply must have been done before. Nonetheless, a half-hearted google search on it proved fruitless, so here we are. The basic concept: one party swings which makes the other party swing in the opposite direction, and those in the middle get blithely jostled around. Of course, things are more complicated than this graphic conveys, but work with me, I'm going for succinct here. Clearly, this image has a first-draft quality to it, so it should probably get some stylizing (does the word "hackneyed" cover it?). Any suggestions on that front would be most helpful! Secondly, I'm not sure how I feel about its aura of cynicism. I hate giving people an excuse to opt out of important national and international discussions, and I'm concerned that representations such as this one do just that. With that said, it feels so accurate to me. Conflicted and tired, I present; you decide.

PS If you have read this post and are at all wondering (as I am) why the last few paragraphs are all scrunched up: blockquote. I don't get it, but it seems to be the problem.

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Nothing New byslag at 9:40 AM 7 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)  

Miscellaneous Happens
Friday, September 14, 2007

Here's an information architecture joke that I don't think works very well yet. Kind of boring. Kind of esoteric. But I haven't decided how to fix it right now. Will think on it. The concept is funny in my head--just not in production. For peeps interested in information architecture, check out Boxes and Arrows (among others).

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Nothing New byslag at 3:47 PM 1 dispenses karmic justice! (or just comments here)  

One Web--support net neutrality
Saturday, September 8, 2007

As promised, here's a net neutrality graphic. Inspired by today's DOJ filing on the issue. The image feels very 80s to me (maybe that's ok because the DOJ seems to be stuck in the Reagan era also). This one is definitely not my favorite, but I can't imagine re-thinking it right now.

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Nothing New byslag at 12:44 AM 1 dispenses karmic justice! (or just comments here)  

Quiet Please--I'm forming neural pathways
Thursday, September 6, 2007

OK-Here's where it becomes obvious (even to me) that I'm a freak. This one came to me as I was walking down the street. It has two possible origins that I can think of: 1. friend had a stroke and we've been talking about how she had to re-learn stuff that she used to know (walking, guitar playing, etc); 2. met a guy who oversees the engineering of a device(?) that will supposedly help speed up the process of building new neural pathways for people who have had brain damage (eg, stroke victims). Small world.

Clearly, this design is also vectors but much simpler than rocket science. All circles and spirals. (FYI-my vector-based images are all created in Fireworks, while my bitmap manipulations are either Fireworks or the Gimp.) All in all, I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I dig the concept (don't know why, exactly), but the execution seems a little hackneyed. I'm going to sleep on it, and in the meantime, you can tell me what you think.

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Nothing New byslag at 8:31 PM 3 dispense karmic justice! (or just comment here)