Left Behinds: Weekend reading

Friday, October 06, 2006

Weekend reading

For our two or three readers (and Solomon) who like super-wonky New York State policy analysis, Larry Littlefield's new series "What I Would Do About [Stuff]" is well worth reading. You'll almost certainly find plenty to disagree with, but it's careful, thought-provoking work.

The MTA
Medicaid, Part I
Medicaid, Part II
State education funding

Best of Left Behinds

Ten Worst Americans Our group effort at coming up with the ten worst Americans of all time is our most heavily trafficked page. It's linked on many other sites as an example of "extreme leftist propaganda", but I (Solomon) am just happy to be getting the word out about number two on the list.

George Pataki, You Will Never Be President, So Stop Pataki's latest bout of pandering to the national right wing provokes AO to assess Pataki's viability as a presidential candidate. Sample: "In summary, you are dumb, uncharismatic, middlingly competent at best, not politically savvy, and somewhere between homely and plain."

Conversations I, An Atheist Jew, Had With God About How Jesus Was Crazy and a Big Jerk You may have thought the Sermon on the Mount was the "cool" part of the Bible, but AO looks closely and discovers that it is, in fact, batshit crazy.

Frank Gehry to Brooklyn: Drop Dead SG reviews Gehry's design for the Atlantic Yards project, concluding that "It's like some giant grey Transformer clomped its foot down on Park Slope. And imagine when in a few years all those pristine white beams get coated in soot from the neverending traffic jams that are projected as a direct result of this development (have you ever tried to drive through Flatbush or Atlantic during rush hour or on a weekend?). It'll be a Transformer's giant grey dirty foot."

Androphilia is the New Gay Didn't we learn anything from the pointless "queer" debates of the early 90s? SG gets all bitchy discussing butchness and some blogger's anti-gay gay neologism.

Why It Matters To Be Rational Part I and Part II In two excellent posts drawing on research from his day job, AO argues that the US is allocating our collective resources irrationally because of badly misjudged relative risks. "Terrorism is for the most part extremely unlikely ... Global warming, on the other hand, is 100% likely (it is already underway), and if left unchecked its damage will almost certainly dwarf September 11." Yet "the same people who believe in ghosts and ESP believe terrorists are gonna bomb their mini-mall. People cannot distinguish between real threats and fantasy."

The Most Annoying Person in New York Another of our very popular contests, this time for that person who just irks you. As AO writes, "'Most Annoying' is not the same as 'most evil' or 'worst.' We're looking for people who set your teeth on edge for no good reason, not Bruce Ratner."

The Science of Cuteness Think about a kitten staring up at you and cocking its little head as it blinks its big sleepy eyes. If you didn't just barf a little bit in your mouth, you're not trying hard enough to contradict the results of this study.

NYC Police Surveillance In this dispatch from the front lines (subsequently used by the Gotham Gazette), a Brooklyn activist discusses how years of police surveillance and harrassment almost succeeded in demoralizing her. Almost.

The War on Empiricism In a prelude to the risk posts above, AO argues that more people believe in haunted houses than in the scientific method. Somewhere in this post there must be some Dick Cheney jokes.

Why I am a Liberal, or, Napkins are a Stupid Place to Make Government Policy AO and the Congressional Budget Office force small-government conservatives to "defend low taxation on its merits: either taxes and government are evil and immoral in themselves (the idea the right-wing noise machine has been trying to cram down our throats for 25 years or so), or in utilitarian terms less government and lower taxes benefits everyone more than high taxes and more government."

Anya Kamenetz Says ... My Choice Is Yogurt SG gets his semiotics on while ridiculing the latest crackpot scheme of his Most Annoying Person in New York designee.

Connecting the Dots: The Transit Strike and the Ratner Land Giveaway SG inventories MTA misdeeds and the public and media backlash against striking transit workers and finds himself in "a Bizarro alternate universe where no one can make the simplest connections between events."

Left Behinds Gets Spanked Our greatest honor of 2005 was a takedown in the very popular MILBlogging.com, where the man behind the milblogs (a man who SG had called "unnecessary and annoying" in a previous post) noted graciously that LB "looks like some third-grade school project written by some Marilyn Manson-looking blogger named Solomon Grundy, a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan, and a few other contributors." And that was just in his first paragraph. But by the end of the bashing we were not just friends, we were lovers.

Left Behinds

Friday, October 06, 2006

Weekend reading

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