Duck lanes painted on canal paths – Boing Boing.

Awwww.

“Son of China’s richest man thinks two gold Apple Watches is enough for his dog”

This is why I’m not worried about Piketty’s inherited wealth imbalance. One or two generations on, the spoiled kids’ll redistribute it all back to the economy.

The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble – Julian Gough’s website.

Gotta find this guy at my library.

If you don’t think it’s OK to deny service to gay people, it’s not OK to jail a woman for spontaneous but unplanned termination of her pregnancy, and you’re suffering from a lack of medical care and a small outbreak of HIV because your government has systematically been closing Planned Parenthood clinics, perhaps it’s time to leave. It looks like gerrymandering has rendered your state legislature immune to majority rule.  And after all, the Pilgrims left the Old World for the New because of lack of religious tolerance, I am told.

Yup.

War Is the New Normal: Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

A few years ago we were thinking about a consumer product that encapsulated all the stuff you had to think about when making a purchase: is it ethically made, does it harm the planet, does it contain peanuts or seafood, were there any endangered species involved, does it contain a carcinogen, will it make me fat, … It’d be driven by multiple sources of reliable data about what goes into all the products that are on the shelves.

Now, someone has made significant progress to the back end machinery, by making it possible for business to integrate this sort of analysis into their supply chain. Nice.

Terrific, just great. From The Guardian, Jan 23:

With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

Free speech vs. hate speech: Why is it legal to insult Muslims but not Jews?.

Good points. Either speech is free, or anti-Muslim speech (including derogatory cartoons) should be illegal in the same way that anti-Jewish, anti-gay, anti-anything speech is.

Isn’t it our position that the correct response to expression of a hateful opinion is the airing of contrary opinion? “More speech”, not censorship and prosecution?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/congresss-first-act-was-to-declare-war-on-math.html

And am impressed with his relevance. How familiar does this sound, in his intro to Part Two about the Industrial Revolution:

“Nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in the understanding of the problem of change. Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement, whatever they might be. The elementary truths of political science and statecraft were first discredited then forgotten. It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community. Such household truths of traditional statesmanship, often merely reflecting the teachings of a social philosophy inherited from the ancients, were in the nineteenth century erased from the thoughts of the educated by the corrosive of a crude utilitarianism combined with an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth.”