Browsing PBH By Articles

Why Is New Digg Still Unusable?

Two months after the release of Digg v4, the website remains largely unusable, especially for (former) heavy users like myself. Instead of writing up all the difficulties, I thought a photo gallery of the multitude of errors I encountered during one hour of surfing Digg would best illustrate why using new Digg is largely an exercise in futility.

It all started when I went to the Digg homepage and found myself logged out, though I had been logged in 20 minutes earlier:

Well, better try to login again:
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Best Candidate For Political Office Ever

Meet Jimmy McMillian, a candidate for governor for New York for the… wait for it… Rent Is Too Damn High party. Not only is his website a blast from the Geocities past, but his awesome facial hair is complemented by some awesome policies: He recently held a conference for a ‘press release’ on the corner of Nostrand and Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn calling for the resignation of New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

Check out his incredible performance at last nights New York Gubernatorial Debate, where he announced in his support for gay marriage, he also supports people marrying shoes:

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Scales Of Terror: The Post 9/11 World

The Article: Global Executioner: Scales of Terror by Neil Smith, published by the Social Science Research Council.

The Text: The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre argued that insofar as human beings were constantly tempted to evil by their deepest passions, the maintenance of a peaceful social order ultimately depended on a single person, the executioner. It was much the same with nation states, according to Maistre, which “are born and die like individuals” and have a singular soul, a singular “race.” Reason was insufficient to combat passion, he believed, and the hiatus between them was inevitably colonized by power, whether between individuals or nations. The state takes on the role of executioner.

This conflation of scales – the assumption of a homology between individual and nation, a seamless continuity between individual and national behavior – Maistre shares with many Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thinkers alike, and it is foundational to the nation building project that accompanied the emergence of nation states in the eighteenth century. For want of a more sophisticated geography of global affairs, this ideological scale conflation retains a resonant appeal today in self-understandings of US foreign policy, whose justificatory discourse is full of recourse to nations as schoolyard bullies or “rogues.” It registers too in the defensive identification of individuals with government during times of conflict (“we should bomb Iraq”) in a country and a national culture that prides itself as anti-government.

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To An Athlete Dying Old – Chipper Jones

Maybe it is because he’s lean, mean, and lets his weapon do the talking. Or maybe it is because TBS used to play all the Western movies on repeat. But whatever it is, I’ve always thought of Chipper Jones as the Clint Eastwood of baseball.

Clint Eastwood said goodbye to the West in the Oscar-winning “Unforgiven”. His skin is leathered over after years under the searing Western sun. His morals shot after decades of gunfights. The Man With No Name is just another weathered cowboy. “I’m just a fella now,” he reflects. “I ain’t no different than anyone else no more.”
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Too Fast, Too Furious – 2010 Midterm Edition

Think of the American economy as a car, President Obama starts. Republicans were behind the wheel for eight years before they drove it into a ditch. So Democrats got the keys. Now they’re in the ditch. And it’s hot. It’s muddy. There are bugs everywhere. But they got their boots on. And they’re pushing, they’re clawing, they’re doing everything they can to get the car out of the ditch. They look up and see Republicans just standing there, saying: You’re doing it wrong. So Obama asks them to come down and help, but they go: No, no, we’re good, and keep “sipping on a Slurpee”. While you’re reading this article, you might be interested in vehicles. You might also be interested in this great spare saver offer, so check this out!

So Democrats keep slipping and sliding and finally they shove it out of the ditch. The car’s not pretty. It looks-. Well, it looks like a car that was stuck in a ditch for two years. It looked like it has a car stereo but not used in a long period of time, it has cracks in it but can be replaceable. It desperately needs a tune-up, could use a carwash, “but it’s moving.” Obama wipes his brow, opens the door when he gets a tap on his shoulder. It’s the Republicans. They want the keys back. No, Obama tells them, you can’t have them. You’re a terrible driver. You’ll just put the car in reverse and drive it back into the ditch.

Now Obama pauses at the podium. He smiles before his favorite part of the car analogy: “There’s a reason why, when you want to go forward, you put it into ‘D,’ and when you go backward, it goes into ‘R’. It’s not a coincidence.”

Obama and his 29 year old speechwriter/“mind reader” wunderkind Jon Favreau have been driving the Car Speech across the Midwest all summer. They kind of have to. The 2010 Midterm Elections are five weeks away, and Democrats are in trouble.

Think of the America political psyche as a pendulum. At rest, it’s tilted a tad right of center, but it swings left and right with the political times. It oscillates right during times of war and urges for Less Government. And it swings left in lieu of economic hardship, social issues, and Bush presidencies. The pendulum almost broke swerving left after the last one. So far so that the Incredibly Shrinking Republican Party was deemed white, nestled in the foothills of Appalachia, and an endangered species. It really only had two talking points: tax cuts and “drill baby drill!” MSNBC cheered the possible demise of the entire Republican party. They were wrong.

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