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As this article from Webdesigner Depot aptly puts it, "Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information." Infographics take advantage of the adage, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and the can give broader appeal to a message by tapping into the appetites of visually-oriented consumers.\n\nI find infographics particularly useful to help explain difficult or complex topics, and frequently make use of graphics applications like "mindmaps" in my own work. In fact, I wish my primary field would embrace more creative ways of conveying information to consumers and students. The legal world might be surprised to discover how much more interesting and informative the information would be.\n\nThis article contains infographics aimed primarily at web designers and those with a fairly advanced knowledge of technology. However, there are a number of infographics, such as no. 14, which I think do an excellent job of explaining how different social media outlets can be used by a business to attain different marketing goals. It takes no particular technical skill to understand the information displayed in no. 14, which is what makes it a good infographic for anyone.\n\nIf you are interested in this topic professionally, or you just want to look at some interesting graphics that convey information, check out the article. It's worth a look.

What makes the Anthony Weiner story somewhat unique and thus worth discussing for a moment is that, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out, the pretense of substantive relevance (which, lame though it was in prior scandals, was at least maintained) has been more or less brazenly dispensed with here.  This isn't a case of illegal sex activity or gross hypocrisy (i.e., David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley (who built their careers on Family Values) or Eliot Spitzer (who viciously prosecuted trivial prostitution cases)).  There's no lying under oath (Clinton) or allegedly illegal payments (Ensign, Edwards).  From what is known, none of the women claim harassment and Weiner didn't even have actual sex with any of them.  This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation.  And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance. 

Apologists for rising inequality often argue that since most Americans' income has risen despite rising inequality, there's no reason to complain about inequality other than envy. So it's worth remembering that we used to expect economic growth to deliver large increases in real income, not just a bit of a rise that's accomplished in large part through longer working hours; and that a major reason so many have seen such small gains is that a large part of growth has been siphoned off to the very high end.

As soon as the news was reported that Gen. David Petraeus is succeeding soon-to-be-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the media narrative was set in stone: the super-general who won the war in Iraq with the so-called surge can now work his magic in another theater. It's hard to stop a locomotive meme-which is what the surge story has become. But the success of the surge in Iraq remains debatable to this day. Still, try injecting that point into media discussions of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet with Petraeus taking over the Afghanistan war, it's worth noting the other side of the surge tale. So as a public service, here are a few analyses that question the surge hype.

"You have to be asleep to believe it." A short excerpt from the video "Life Is Worth Losing" (2005).

Sometimes inequality is bad for almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. More equality is a good thing and it's an idea that's worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit.

With the November elections quickly approaching, the majority of  Americans will be thinking one thing: "Who cares?" This apathy isn't due  to ignorance, as some accuse. Rather, working people's disinterest in  the two party system implies intelligence: millions of people understand  that both the Democrats and Republicans will not represent their  interests in Congress.  This begs the question: Whom does the two party system work for? The  answer was recently given by the mainstream The New York Times, who  gave the nation an insiders peek on how corporations "lobby" (buy)  congressmen. The article explains how giant corporations - from  Wall-mart to weapons manufacturers - are planning on shifting their  hiring practices for lobbyists, from Democratic to Republican  ex-congressmen in preparation for the Republicans gaining seats in the  upcoming November elections: "Lobbyists, political consultants and recruiters all say that the  going rate for Republicans - particularly current and former House staff  members - has risen significantly in just the last few weeks, with  salaries beginning at $300,000 and going as high as $1million for  private sector [corporate lobbyist] positions." (September 9, 2010) Congressmen who have recently retired make the perfect lobbyists:  they still have good friends in Congress, with many of these friends  owing them political favors; they have connections to foreign Presidents  and Kings; and they also have celebrity status that gives good PR to  the corporations. Often, these congressmen have done favors for the corporation that  is now hiring them, meaning, that the corporations are rewarding the  congressmen for services rendered while in office, offering them million  dollar lobbyist jobs (or seats on the corporate board of directors)  that requires little to no work.  The same New York Times article revealed that the pay for 13,000  lobbyists currently bribing Congress is a combined $3.5 bil

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"  Who among us has not wanted to open their window and shout that at the top of their lungs?  Seriously, who?  Because we're looking for those people. We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.  Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we'd like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 -- a date of no significance whatsoever -- at the Daily Show's "Rally to Restore Sanity." Ours is a rally for the people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs (or are looking for jobs) -- not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority. If we had to sum up the political view of our participants in a single sentence... we couldn't. That's sort of the point.  Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we'll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila. Join us in the shadow of the Washington Monument. And bring your indoor voice. Or don't. If you'd rather stay home, go to work, or drive your kids to soccer practice... Actually, please come anyway. Ask the sitter if she can stay a few extra hours, just this once. We'll make it worth your while.

Analysis of the relationship between journalism and politics, and the way the Internet has changed things. Worth reading all the way through

It turns out that "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" is a passionate defense of our nation's public schools, a national treasure that Ms. Ravitch believes is "intimately connected to our concepts of citizenship and democracy and to the promise of American life." She issues a warning against handing over educational policy decisions to private interests, and criticizes misguided government policies that have done more harm than good. Ideas such as choice, utilizing a "business model" structure, accountability based on standardized tests and others, some favored by the left, others by the right are deemed as less, often much less, than advertised. Ms. Ravitch doesn't oppose charters, but rather feels that the structure itself doesn't mandate success. As in conventional schools, there will be good ones and bad ones. But charters must not be allowed to cream off the best students, or avoid taking the most troubled, as has been alleged here in New York City. Here main point, however, is broader. "It is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing educational policy to be directed, or one might say, captured by private foundations," Ms. Ravitch notes. She suggests that there is "something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public educational policy to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people." However well intended the effort, the results, in her telling, have not been impressive, in some cases doing more harm than good.

According to this CONSERVATIVE and BUSH Assistant Secretary of Education, "No Child Left Behind" is destroying one of the great social "glues" of America - its public school system. Of course, not only Bush and the Republicans are to blame, Democrats went along with NCLB on the "promise" of extra federal funding for implementing it AND supporting American public schools. That was funding that never materialized due to our other great national priority - making corporate cronies rich via the war in Iraq (and hoping to make the oil companies richer there as well, but apparently failing miserably to do so ... so far). NCLB could have been suspended when that happened, but strangely (NOT!) Bush and the Republican controlled Congress conveniently forgot their promise (perhaps because NCLB unfunded was more like no teachers union left un-destroyed!?). More from http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/entertainment/la-ca-diane-ravitch28-2010feb28 on this book - Diane Ravitch, probably this nation's most respected historian of education and long one of our most thoughtful educational conservatives, has changed her mind -- and changed it big time. Ravitch's critical guns are still firing, but now they're aimed at the forces of testing, accountability and educational markets, forces for which she was once a leading proponent and strategist. As President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, embrace charter schools and testing, picking up just where, in her opinion, the George W. Bush administration left off, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" may yet inspire a lot of high-level rethinking. The book, titled to echo Jane Jacobs' 1961 demolition of grandiose urban planning schemes, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," has similarly dark warnings and equally grand ambitions. Ravitch -- the author of "Left Back" and other critiques of liberal school reforms, an assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration and a

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

Throughout this year I've devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified.  To understand why I've done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influenced by it to destroying that organization, it's well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year:  the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

Right about now in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, dozens of pregnant female polar bears are preparing to give birth in dens they dug into the snowdrifts last month, unaware that the fate of their home, and possibly their species, hinges on the price of gasoline. The Obama administration can and should change that.

Critics of President Obama never tire of blaming him for today's high deficits. But if blame belongs with one president, it belongs with Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. The chart above, which the New York Times created based upon figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, illustrates this point very clearly. But it's worth reviewing the history here, because while it's familiar to most of us who follow politics it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the political debate.

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here - from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

The Boston Globe ran a chart last Sunday that I'd buy billboard space to reproduce in every decent-size city in America, if I were running the Democratic National Committee. The premise of it was very simple: It showed how many trillions each president since Ronald Reagan has added to the nation's debt. The debt was about $1 trillion when Reagan took office, and then: Reagan, $1.9 trillion; George H.W. Bush, $1.5 trillion (in just four years); Bill Clinton, $1.4 trillion; Obama, $2.4 trillion.Oh, wait. I skipped someone. George W. Bush ran up $6.4 trillion. That's nearly half-44.7 percent-of the $14.3 trillion total. We all know what did it-two massive tax cuts geared toward the rich (along with other similar measures, like slashing the capital gains and inheritance taxes), the off-the-books wars, the unfunded Medicare expansion, and so on. But the number is staggering and worth dwelling on. In a history covering 30 years, nearly half the debt was run up in eight. Even the allegedly socialist Obama at his most allegedly wanton doesn't compare to Dubya; and Obama's debt numbers, if he's reelected, will surely not double or even come close as we gambol down Austerity Lane.

We've studied a century's worth of social unrest and the data suggests austerity measures can lead to riots.

I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone's bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

Rep. David Schweikert (Ariz.) and two other House Republicans - including supercommittee co-chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) - introduced legislation last week aimed at retiring the paper dollar.... According to the proponents the retirement of the US One Dollar Bill could save save billions of dollars over the next few decades by transitioning to a one dollar coin in four years, or as soon as $600 million worth of dollar coins are in circulation. Rep. Schweikert said, "Metal coins would last longer and therefore save money. But two Massachusetts Lawmakers, Scott Brown and John Kerry oppose the suggestion on ground it costs too much too produce the coins.... But it seem to me they would last longer...isn't that what smart business buy, products that are Value Purchased not cost purchased. It is also interesting also The Dollar Coin Alliance, which favors the House bill, said the two Massachusetts senators have a specific reason for wanting to protect the dollar bill, arguing that the Senate bill is aimed at protecting Massachusetts-based Crane & Co., the sole-source supplier of paper used to produce dollar bills. So what else is NEW! More cronyism? A poll conducted this year for the Dollar Coin Alliance showed 65 percent of Americans favored the move to a coin, and that more supported it once they realized the savings associated with the switch. And other countries who have done same have benefited overall in the Cost of Producing currency. "Other countries that have replaced a low-denomination note with a coin, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, stopped producing the note," the GAO said in March. "Officials from both countries told GAO that this step was essential to the success of their transition and that, with no alternative to the note, public resistance dissipated within a few years."

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