“How do racists, anti-Semites and all-purpose hate-mongers view the possibility of America’s first black president? Not necessarily the way you think they would.” (Esquire)

Kevin Kelly : “So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.” (The Technium)

“An obsessive-compulsive collector shares his fascination with vintage Halloween photographs, using Flickr to impart these haunting images.

‘My theme is ‘Halloween in the Time of Cholera,” collector Steven Martin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. ‘The idea being that people back then were probably on a more intimate level with death — and that would have affected the way they celebrated Halloween.'”

‘We’ve seen lawyers’ careers go up in smoke before, but never quite so literally. “Jack” is a Washington, D.C., lawyer who hopes someday to be to the legal profession what Siddhartha was to Buddhism — one remembered for giving up a life of luxury to pursue the path of simplicity. Unlike Buddha, Jack has a blog, “Adventures in Voluntary Simplicity,” where he anonymously chronicles his self-charted conversion from highly paid lawyer to pilgrim of simple happiness. It all started last June, when Jack took a vow: “stop living a life of excess, materialism, and unnecessary stress in order to gain something much more valuable: unencumbered, simple happiness.” Out would go his job at a large law firm. Out would go his $300,000-plus annual salary. Out would go his newly renovated, four-level townhouse. Out would go his mix of expensive antique and modern furniture. At least that was the plan, yet to be executed.

“But one vestige of his yet-to-be-past self nagged at him — his Harvard Law School diploma. It stood, a symbolic barrier, between him and freedom. “Sometimes,” he decided, “you just need to say goodbye to your past in order to move forward.” So goodbye he said, in much the same way that a spurned spouse says goodbye to memories of a former lover. He set it on fire.

Not only did he incinerate his Harvard degree, but he captured the conflagration on video, describing it on his blog and posting it to YouTube. “In the end,” he writes, “it was just a piece of paper. Nothing more. I would rather live my life on my own terms than be a person that needs a piece of paper to justify their own worth.” I suspect a few folks in Harvard’s alumni-development office will be hot under the collar when they see Jack’s video. But one lesson every Harvard Law grad can learn from watching Jack’s act of career-defiance is that these things are not all that easy to burn.’ (Legal Blog Watch)

We now face Keynesian conditions and need truly Keynesian solutions: “…Two weeks ago, I invoked the ghost of Keynes and there has recently been a flood of references to him, most especially from the Chancellor.

This has raised a hornets’ nest of controversy, with people holding forth with much sound and fury – and often signifying nothing. So I want to ask what, if anything, the teaching of this long-dead economist has to offer us today.

John Maynard Keynes, born in 1883, died in 1946; present at the Versailles negotiations in 1919; Britain’s representative at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944; father of the two key institutions of the post–war monetary order, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; and, most importantly, the origin of the adjective “Keynesian”.

This is a word which has all but lost its original meaning. Like fascist, or feminist, it began describing a set of beliefs, but it has become a term of abuse or approbation, wielded by those who have, for the most part, not the faintest idea of what it actually means. So I want to give my version of “Everything you wanted to know about Keynes and were afraid to ask.” I think I can reduce Keynes’ view to seven essential propositions…” (Telegraph.UK<)

“The emergency continues, a little less desperate than before. A remedy that works – direct government investment in threatened institutions in exchange for equity – seems to have been settled on in most industrial democracies.

A number of mysteries remain.” (Economic Principals)

“America’s smaller banks are claiming they could be vulnerable to government-funded predatory takeovers as their larger rivals enjoy huge cash injections from a $250bn Treasury bail-out.” (Guardian.UK)