Great website

I love these illustrations http://poolga.com/

Art monday

This is strangely mesmerising.

TROIKA_SHOAL from Troika on Vimeo.

Poor old Rove

I despair at the future of the Republican party if it decides to turn on all of its star performers. There is something in this that reminds me of the whole "revolutions eat their children" phenomenon, where Rove's brilliance in organising grass-roots support for the Republicans leading up to the 2000 elections is ultimately what undoes him. It's a shame, because, for all his supposed Manichean traits, Rove does know what he's doing and he's very good at it. By becoming apostate, he could in turn become a much more powerful enemy of the Tea Partiers than the Dems ever will be. Ok, I'm overloading the analogies here. Still, this whole thing has a terrible quality of purges on a holier-than-thou basis going on in the GOP and te Tea Party believing its own hype. What is especially troubling is that this means that the moderate bastions of the Democrats will have to be counted as the the only right-wingers in the house, because the Tea Party GOP, for all its talk, seems skewed to the left. Or I don't know if it's left, but it's a strange hybrid of left-and-nutty-right, where the state is built up and maintained, but taxes are lowered. It's a paradox of such colossal proportions that I wonder how any serious person could in turn take it seriously. I realise that it's the prerogative of the party not in power to present contrary positions to the one governing rather than workable alternatives, but there is a limit.
The whole problem is of Rove's own making - he made the GOP run as a machine where everyone was always on-message, the Dems have had more heterogeny and therefore seem the healthier party, despite the outcome of the November elections. Once, you make a party truly cadre-fied you have to either lead the masses or you will be led by them because they will want loyalty above all.
The scary thing is that the phoenix that rises from this mess is Sarah Palin, the leader of a movement at the height of its anger. It's a scary world we live in.

Song 19

Mnhherr.

Dancing Pigeons - Ritalin from Blink on Vimeo.

Song 18

I like fighting.



There is no greater point. Aside from the fact that it just goes to show though that people really have weird hobbies.

Song 17

I know, two posts in one day. It must be the summer.

Song 16

So freakin hot right now.

A politician I could get behind

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/world/europe/26iceland.html?src=tptw

I just wish coalitions would be formed on whether their members had seen all five seasons of 'The Wire'. I would also want the Prime Minister to prove he had a Bunkenian philosophy.

Paul McCartney - C-Moon

Brilliant song.
Almost makes me like Paul McCartney.

McChrystal

I've been especially interested in the blow-out from the McChrystal/Rolling Stone brouhaha and I am especially interested to see how much quality analysis as well as sober navel-gazing it has generated from the press. This particular David Brooks article is a great case in point, but there have been many others that I shared through my reader feed (another is the great Ezra Klein collumn on the greatness of the military as an institution).

My take on the whole situation is that it was a mistake by McChrystal, and added to his past transgressions (London speech et al), Obama had no other choice, and I thought handled it very well. His closing sentiments were again testament to his wonderful oratory and Petraeus was an inspired choice.

However, it highlights one thing in modern political discourse (or in discourse in general) - this monumental fuck-up generated some of the most sensible, moderate, balanced analysis of anything on the modern world. Even people who I would have thought usually would have taken the opportunity to score political points, rallied around the issue and produced some thoughtful contributions to the collection of modern thought.

I don't want us to be hippies and all get along, but it makes for quality reading when hyperbole isn't a default option.