flickering pictures

Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?
With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, […]

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This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.
Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in […]

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Population of Washington, D.C.: 572,059
Number of people attending Obama’s inauguration: 2,000,000+
Wow.
Update: The Toronto Star created a word cloud from Obama’s acceptance speech, and it turns out he didn’t use the word “evildoer” a single time.
Image via New York Times.

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The quote of the day comes from Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan, who’s leading the GOP’s charge into social media:

“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.”

Is it just me, or does the phrase “do it in the Facebook” sound just ever […]

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Once again, the folks at FlowingData have taken reams and reams of inane-seeming data, compared it to scads and scads of other inane-seeming data, and turned the whole reamy scaddy mess into something fascinating. Check out these maps of cotton-picking intensity in 1860 and presidential voting today in America’s South — see anything interesting?

And […]

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Not that it’s any of my business, since I’m not American, but on behalf of the rest of the world, congratulations on choosing the best person for the job. We — and 52% of America — could be wrong about him, and we’ll have four years to find out, but in terms at least […]

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Peter Hitchens, an excellent — if fiercely conservative — writer and columnist at Britain’s right-leaning Daily Mail, is covering America’s pre-election mood from Moscow, Idaho, which is incidentally named after a town in Pennsylvania, not Russia. Though I don’t agree with his politics, his latest editorial piece is a thing of beauty — as […]

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“Boo hoo,” replied Obama.*
With Obama regaining his lead in the polls, McCain is starting to get existential about his presidential bid.
From the Boston Globe:

Asked why Obama has been rising as the Wall Street crisis has dominated attention, McCain said with a chuckle on Fox News Channel: “Because life isn’t fair.”
“He certainly did nothing for the […]

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Google In Quotes is still in beta, but it’s an excellent tool for finding out where the candidates stand on specific issues like abortion, oil, Iraq, human rights, etc. The app also compares quotes from Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, and the usual cast of six-o’clock-news types in the American […]

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Not to be a jerk or anything, but it kind of seems like a stupid question: should we find new ways to feed and maintain our addiction to oil, or decrease our reliance on the fossil fuels that are empoverishing our people and altering our fragile climate?
These folks think they have the answer:

I work in […]

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