The Heroine's Journey

This is interesting!

Obama compared with Reagan

By those flaming liberals at Forbes.

A history of fast food

Salon has a pretty neat history of fast food in America - with a rather misleading title, but you can't have everything.

The best democracy money can buy!

Just marking the date.

Operant conditioning explains so much...

People respond better to the rewards of operating conditioning when they are dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized, which to me essentially explains everything I see in America today. This is actually a pretty fascinating article. And it references a book (Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards (1993)) that I should probably read.

Anyway, when people are doing intrinsically rewarding things, they don't need (and tend to ignore) rewards handed out by authorities. Which totally makes sense.

Very illuminating.

Der Spiegel: Zombie capitalism

Interesting article in the English-language Spiegel Online, highlighting several people intimately involved with the financial system who are pointing out that it can't go on like this.