Tag Archives: politics

More maps

The New York times has a neat interactive campaign finance map. The candidates would do well to study the following informative maps too.

Maps of War has mostly silly FOX “news” style infographics, but History of Religion and Imperial History are both great.

You can map all sorts of indicators of globalization at Gapminder.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has a map of the arctic isotherm and treeline. Watch this real estate — it’ll be booming unless the next president (see first map) ratifies Kyoto and turns our ship of state around.

And CIO has a purty map of who owns the internet.

Maps & tubes, tunnels & movies

This Transit Map of the World’s Transit System, a promotional poster for Transit Maps of the World (amazon) by Mark Ovenden, discovered over at my new favorite blog, Strange Maps, cleverly shows all of the cities in the world with rail transit systems connected in the style, and the layout, of the London Tube.

Strange Maps has great stuff, most of which I’ve seen before. The classic Newyorkistan, pretty The Colourful Side of the Moon, The Blonde Map of Europe for those gentlemen who allege a preference, the disturbing Europe, If the Nazis Had Won, Chris Yates’ A Diagram of the Eisenhower Interstate System, C. Etzel Pearcy’s The Thirty-eight States of America, and XKCD’s Online Communities Map.

They should link to my Seeing stars post about the historical designs of Moscow transit maps. And they don’t yet have The Great Bear, the Rude Map, or the Convenience Map.

I also stumbled across a reference to The Tunnel, a 1935 science-fiction film about the construction of a tunnel from New York to London. The Tunnel joins Cargo 200/Груз 200 and the short film Microgravity on my list of films not available on Netflix.

So there you have it. The internet’s not done yet. There are still some things not organized, categorized, or digitized.

Pot, meet kettle

“In terms of whether or not it’s possible to reprogram the kind of basic Russian DNA, which is a centralized authority, that’s hard to do. We’ve worked hard to make it appear in their interests – we made it clear to them that it is in their interests to have good relations with the West. And the best way to have good long-term relations with the West is to recognize that checks and balances in government are important, or recognize there are certain freedoms that are inviolate.”

—George W. Bush, October 18, 2007

This from the President who, along with White House Counsel David Addington, is trying to circumvent the checks & balances in our own constitution by asserting that the executive branch has intrinsically more power and autonomy than the judicial or legislative branches?

No problem, John

John Ukec Lueth Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador to Washington, has threatened to take away the United States’ access to Coca-Cola in response to sanctions against Khartoum. Nevermind that you’re complicit in the genocide in Darfour, and apparently an idiot too. And nevermind that Sudan’s supplies of gum arabic can’t be as critical to the soft-drink industry as you claim, since your own government predicts the sanctions will have little effect on your economy. Mr. Ukec, if this is what it takes to get your government to cease its mass murder campaign, I’ll stop drinking Coca-Cola.

Ask Coca-Cola what they are going to do about this here.

Shame on you

The Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy is to tell the American press how hard our troops are working to train Iraqis and how everything is set for the Iraqi government to take over.

Nevermind that there’s absolutely no hard evidence being offered to demonstrate that things actually are getting better. No evidence of a drop in casualties or violence. No evidence of improvements in security, no increases in successfully trained Iraqi police, no economic development, no increases in foreign investment. And there is no functioning Iraqi parliament that’s actually capable of passing laws and making policy decisions.

This is the same old Bush administration strategy; repeat anything enough and people will start to believe it. What’s coming next is scarier.

Six months or a year down the line, when the Iraqi government is still failing to provide security, services, or make policy decisions, the Bush administration is going to throw up its hands and say “Too bad, we tried, but those pesky Iraqis just couldn’t pull it together.” And then they’ll pull out the troops. If you believe what the administration has been saying, it will sound like the screaming failure of this occupation wasn’t their fault. Can you say “cut-and-run,” Mr. Bush? They don’t care about trying to fix the mess they’ve made, or taking responsibility for an ill-concieved invasion; no, they care about saving face and getting out. And the Iraqi people whose lives are actually affected by the fiasco? They aren’t the voters who will elect the next president, so the adminstration doesn’t care.

Probably this will happen sometime before next November, clearing the way for Romney, Giuliani, Gingrich, or McCain to try wash the stain of the war off of the Republican party. What’s coming next, though, is the scariest.

Enough Democrats have just rolled over to pass a war funding bill without a deadline. That’s right, some of the same Democrats who were elected en masse in an election that was a referendum on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy are now following the policy of that same administration. An administration with an approval rating of less than 30%. Shame on you for defecting. And shame on the Democratic leadership for not preventing these defections. Shame, shame, shame.