[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
This song is from the new Muse album. I like the album so far because it makes me feel like I’m standing up to an overwhelming authority.I am a fan of some of MUSE but this is so completely unexpected and makes me want to buy the new album NOW.
Inset from a killer wedding invitation (click through to see the whole thing) that’s making the rounds on Twitter and Tumblr, for obvious reasons. The Matt in question is Matt Dorfman who does amazing design at Metalmother. (via gesteves and caterina)
Venn Diagram - Happiness in Business (on budcaddell’s flickr, via mikearauz : zehnuhr: brocatus)
Poster for Dag van de Architectuur Groningen (via -MAKI- on flickr via karenh)
This is a great concept: the cover of issue 8 of Opium Magazine has a nine-word story printed to become visible one word at a time over the next thousand years:
The cover of issue 8 is printed in a double layer of black ink. The overlayer is screened back for the nine words making the letters fractionally more vulnerable to ultraviolet light. The quantity of ink for each word is different, so the words will appear one at a time, when exposed to sunlight, over the next thousand years.
(via dailymeh)
PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.
BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you need.
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
PURE ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.
LIBERTARIAN/ANARCHO-CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
(via myownprivate)
May 10, 2009, 1:38pm
Going Dutch - How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State
“I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?
A short stroll from my apartment suggests the outlines of an answer. In about six minutes you reach the Dam, the wide plaza that is the Times Square of Amsterdam… The Dam is therefore a reminder not only of the country’s past but also of its ceaseless battle with water. And that battle turns out to be the key to understanding the Netherlands’ blend of free market and social welfare. The Low Countries never developed a fully feudal system of aristocratic landowners and serfs. Rather, sailors, merchants and farmers bought shares in trading ships and in cooperatives to protect the land from the sea, a development that led to the creation of one of the world’s first stock markets and helped fuel the Dutch golden age. Today the country remains among the most free-market-oriented in Europe.
At the same time, water also played a part in the development of the welfare system. To get an authoritative primer on the Dutch social-welfare state, I sat down with Geert Mak, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent author, to whose books the Dutch themselves turn to understand their history. The Dutch call their collectivist mentality and way of politics-by-consensus the “polder model,” after the areas of low land systematically reclaimed from the sea. “People think of the polder model as a romantic idea” and assume its origins are more myth than fact, Mak told me. “But if you look at records of the Middle Ages, you see it was a real thing. Everyone had to deal with water. With a polder, the big problem is pumping the water. But in most cases your land lies in the middle of the country, so where are you going to pump it? To someone else’s land. And then they have to do the same thing, and their neighbor does, too. So what you see in the records are these extraordinarily complicated deals. All of this had to be done together.”
…The nation today embodies a centuries-old inclination toward collectivism, which one writer characterized as “the democracy of dry feet.””
(Russell Shorto for the NYT Magazine, 20090429)
If you’ve ever wanted your own sound board for the “vocal” part of Daft Punk’s “Hard, Better, Faster, Stronger”, look no further. (via cubicle17)
Rock on, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spanish Prime Minister, for appointing Carme Chacón, seven months pregnant, as Defense Minister, and for
Via Time.
- passing a sweeping law against domestic violence
- legalizing gay marriage
- easing divorce laws
- requiring political parties to practice gender parity
- appointing equal numbers of men and women to cabinet positions
- naming a woman as your deputy prime minister
