welcome to lovely scenic sodden nevada county

(oops, it got garbled when it Published. cleaned it up some, removed more over-the-top material, ie cheated and edited the post. not that you are likely to care.)

well I was going to just post this -

broken record

Too windy and too late to write much, so let me summarize--

Read Brad DeLong. Read Timothy Burke. Read DeLong. Read Burke. Read DeLong. Read Burke. Don't spend time here, read them.

And if you run across others of the same caliber, let me know.

but I can't now or you'll think I'm a whore. No slut though, no sirree, I only link to the top stuff. Mostly because as Brad points out it is so hard to find the the rest. (ed. note--not really, just hard to find the rest that hasn't already been blogrolled to death)

well while you're here, since you obviously didn't take my advice, a couple of questions for you and some links--

first the questions--

I'm up in smalltown/rural Nevada County CA where politics is a contact sport - and there was quite a battle last year for control of the Board of Supervisors, which the so-called conservatives won by 20 votes with the aid of $28k in mystery money (from 21st Century Insurance Group ? (la times, name and pw imahogg))

Fortunately we have the dedicated team at Yubanet for the county scoop online (The Union has had some good reporting on growth issues lately, but historically it has tended to be less informative), and KVMR news if you'd rather hear than read it, but it feels awfully lonely. Are there other communities going through these struggles and getting the word out with online news 'papers'? if so where are they? please email me if you know of any. Thanks...

2nd question - I keep vaguely remembering articles that I'd forgotten to save links to, and some of them are ones you'd need to search for by concept rather than by keyword (for ex. George Lakoff's metaphor of liberal vs conservative as family roles), so they stay lost for a long time or forever. Is there a metafilter-equivalent out there for the memory-impaired, where when we're being tormented by a lost link we can post a description of the page/article/post & get the URL from someone who knows?

links:

• this might look new to you, it's old enough--remember Abigail's dream from 1995?
  
• a couple of quotes on why intolerance of the fringe is bad for society-
  
  • From Tom G.'s comment on Shelley's post on Uncompromising Individualism -
    

    the 'cranks', the 'eccentrics', are the ones who make it possible for the wheel of the culture to turn: if everyone's sitting at the hub, no change is possible. Every society needs its questioners, its doubters, its devil's advocates, belonging by not belonging, supporting by not supporting...

    
    
  • From Brad Templeton's A Watched Populace Never Boils:

    The mainstream is often more comfortable with monitoring, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. The fringe is often feared by the majority but it is the lifeblood of the society's future..."

  
  
• Malcolm Gladwell, fount of much fascinating and retrospectively common sense, very much in the DeLongian-Burkeian vein. (I will confess to feeling a perverse pride in having helped him to write The New-Boy Network: What do job interviews really tell us?. or rather having helped Nalini Ambady (see section 2 of article) to do the research on snap judgments of teacher effectiveness that he cites. or rather having been one of the teaching fellows videotaped during the training program. And, according to student reviews, not in the correct tail of the distribution...)
  
• the funny business.
  • Chasmo's rant on Doin' The Backspace Mambo With Microsoft Word 2000
    
  • the posts to misc.rural of Ronnie Dobbs of the Hastings UFO Society, however the best ones seem to be missing so never mind.

hey, thanks for visiting.