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Great article from Vanity Fair Magazine.

America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else.

Read a really great piece from the Op-Ed page of the New York Times before it goes behind the paywall.

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

or…

Why you should think before you Tweet.

It’s kind of amazing how uncertainty and instability brings out the worst in some people, but the best in others.  It’s nice, for once, to the examples of the best getting some attention.  A few days ago, I put up this story on on this blog about Muslims surrounding a Christian shrine during Christmas services to provide a “human shield” for those inside worshipping.  A quote from a local muslim artist was simple, yet profound:

“We either live together, or we die together.”

- Mohamed El-Sawy

Yesterday, journalist Maryam Ishani, of the blog foreignpolicy.com, gave an account of the chaos that is still going on in Egypt, particularly in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  The blog The Islamic Workplace picked it up and posted the story, but with a strikingly different image.  The image used above the story was of Egyptian Christians forming a circle around Muslims during an outdoor prayer session.

My battered faith in humanity just got a much-needed shot in the arm.  We might actually figure out how to live on this planet without exterminating each other.

The other thing I think this brings into glaring clarity is the role of blogs.  There are times when I think that having a blog is kind of like the internet equivalent of littering.  I mean, seriously, how many of these things does the world really need?  But when stories like this come around where one blog reports it, another blog picks it up and then another and then another, one of the roles… scrtach that last word, let’s say responsibilities… that blogs have is to perpetuate and spread the good information and not perpetuate the bad, or refute the bad, or call out the bad.  Good information can mean good as in uplifting, but also good as in factual.  This is one of those examples of blogs fufilling both definitions of good in one shot.

More for the “context is everything” crowd…

“The only democracy that has emerged when you see uprising like this, is in Iraq. Name me one other example. I can’t think of one in history.”

I thought the whole O’Reilly “explain the tides” thing was the dumbest thing I was going to read for quite some time, but then this little gem just falls out of the sky and says “I am stupid.  Hear me roar.”  Where do I begin with what is wrong with his question?

First, we’ll start with the list of countries that became democracies after violent revolutions:

1. The first and most obvious choice… the United States, which Hannity would have known if he had just looked to his faux-patriotic lapel for help.
2. India (just because the Indians… some of them anyway… were non-violent doesn’t mean the British were.)
3. The Czech Republic
4. Poland
5. France

Second, let’s examine what Hannity calls the Iraqi “uprising.”  If I remember correctly, democracy was imposed from the top down in Iraq, not from the bottom up.  The graphic below illustrates this quite nicely.

Third, anything Hannity (or any other FOX News talking head) bloviates about should be taken with a truckload of salt, as the chances of it being factually accurate are minimal at best.

We could learn a lot from these people.

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

Bill:

“Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.”

Silverman looked stunned. “Tide goes in, tide goes out?” he stuttered. O’Reilly pressed on. “The water, the tide—it comes in and it goes out. It always goes in, then it goes out. … You can’t explain that. You can’t explain it.”

Me:  ”Oh, really?”

The tides explained.

I work in the database world.  The software I work with is pretty cool at doing data visualization, that is, taking lots of records chock full of lots of data and displaying it in such a way as to make it meaningful to someone attempting to analyze it.  Sometimes all it takes is a grid.  Sometimes pictures speak louder than words.  Here is an excellent example given by Dr. Hans Rosling from the BBC program The Joy of Stats that everybody can relate to using not only a ton of data, but a ton of data collected over a very long period of time.  I remember my college statistics experience being very painful.  Good visualization methodology properly used makes all that pain go away.

Situation: Amazon (like Barnes and Noble and other online book retailers) offers a vehicle to publish your own e-books.  Amazon doesn’t censor what authors put up for sale, probably because of the staff it would require to read thousands of submissions.

Problem: Someone clearly supportive of pedophiles posts a ‘how-to’ manual on how to molest children as a downloadable e-book.

Question: Should Amazon be penalized for this?  This will no doubt be a precedent setting situation for the entire industry.