Some people have expressed surprise that the Great Recession hasn’t proven to be a boon to left-wing political movement. I think the expectation that something like that would be the result of a financial collapse is based on an over-generalization of FDR and the New Deal. If you look at the 1930s in a global context, the predominant trend was the rise of far-right nationalist parties, not just in Germany and Japan but across a huge swathe of Europe. And today’s lesser recession is prompting a small version of the same thing:

The surge for the True Finns is the latest in a series of breakthroughs by populist and far-right parties in Europe, fuelled by economic discontent and concern about immigration. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party suffered a drubbing in regional polls last month amid a strong showing by the far-right National Front. Nationalist parties have also made gains in Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium over the past year.

US politics has a different dynamic, but there’s been a definite increase in the influence of the faction of the Republican Party that’s decided retroactively that George W Bush was insufficiently rightwing.

Good news, it seems to me:

“We have arrived at the conclusion that it is advisable to limit the fundamental political and state offices to a maximum period of two consecutive periods of five years,” Mr. Castro said in a speech opening the Sixth Communist Party Congress, the first such gathering since 1997. He said his generation had failed to prepare a new crop of younger leaders, and called for a “systematic rejuvenation of the whole chain of party and administrative posts.” [...]

[Castro] praised the expanded opportunities already extended to entrepreneurs; the government has granted 180,000 licenses for small businesses like coffee vendors, fast-food stands and house rentals, with tens of thousands more expected to be issued in the coming months. Yet he appeared to reject as “contrary to socialism” the loosening of rules on buying and selling homes, a change some analysts had speculated was coming.

This sounds like an effort on both the political and economic front to move in a more Chinese direction, away from personal dictatorship and toward greater economic freedom. Should be good news for the Cuban people.

Spencer Ackerman asks “is there a punk or hardcore band that writes more about riding buses than Rancid?”

Probably not. But I would note that Rancid is multi-modal. To be sure, they take the 60 Bus out of downtown Campbell (headed to San Jose, perhaps) but I was also quite tickled during the one trip I ever took to the Bay Area to find myself “at the stations / Daly City train” just as the song says. If only they’d gone into greater detail about how they got from 6th street up to the corner of 52nd and Broadway. Walk up to 8th street NR stop and take the train to 49th and 7th seems most probable.

I read James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood on my Kindle ap for iPad so consequently working my way through it I had no intuitive sense of when I was approaching the end of the main narrative and the beginning of the footnotes. When I reached the end, I was surprised and saddened. That five percent reflects the fact that the execution of the conclusion is a bit off and 95 percent reflects the fact that it’s a great book I was disappointed to see end. The basic aim, fully achieved, is to situate the miraculous PC revolution of the past thirty years to a longer series of ongoing revolutions in the sphere of “information” dating back to the telephone, the telegraph, and beyond. Sporadic narrative tendrils bring you to ancient times and pre-colonization Africa, but the core focus is on the post-Morse development of modern means of storing and transmitting information and how it is we came to understand that there is such a thing.

As a bad speller, I can’t help but like this glimpse at the good old days before the standardization of English spelling:

In fact, few had any concept of “spelling”—the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet. Others spelled it differently. And for that matter Cawdrey himself, on the title page of his book for “teaching the true writing,” wrote wordes in one sentence and words in the next.

For a critical and overly literal assessment, see Geoffrey Nunberg in The New York Times. If you like good books on technical and historical subjects, read the book.

Paul R. Epstein, et. al., “Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal”

Each stage in the life cycle of coal—extraction, transport, processing, and combustion—generates a waste stream and carries multiple hazards for health and the environment. These costs are external to the coal industry and are thus often considered “externalities.” We estimate that the life cycle effects of coal and the waste stream generated are costing the U.S. public a third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually. Many of these so-called externalities are, moreover, cumulative. Accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of nonfossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive. We focus on Appalachia, though coal is mined in other regions of the United States and is burned throughout the world.

Coal-fired electricity is cheap for roughly the same reason that pulling a dine and dash at a fancy restaurant is a cheap way to get a nice dinner.