Quartz City

Welcome to the Golden Age of Totalitarianism. The London police commissioned these posters – ostensibly to put public fears at ease, but coming off more like a hyper-paranoid Philip K. Dick book cover.

OMG, this is so totally brilliant:

As I sat pondering the President’s motives one day, it suddenly dawned on me that it is entirely likely our Commander in Chief has never played a single video game in his life. “Of course!” I exclaimed, startling my girlfriend, who was driving at the time. “Without the catharsis that video games provide, Bush has no way of fulfilling his militaristic fantasies other than actually fighting wars.”

Our course of action is clear, my friends: We must help this man, and in so doing, help those whose lives will be affected by a full-scale invasion.

We of course cannot trust that Bush will eventually discover video games himself. They are not of his generation, and he is an extremely busy man besides. It is up to us, America, and so I propose the following: We must pool our funds and buy Bush a PlayStation 2.

The “Buy Bush a PlayStation 2” campaign was posted to Fark and within a couple of hours the goal was reached. Stay tuned!

Excellent Paul Krugman analysis of US wealth-disparity in the New York Times.

Kevin Phillips concludes his book “Wealth and Democracy” with a grim warning: “Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime — plutocracy by some other name.” It’s a pretty extreme line, but we live in extreme times. Even if the forms of democracy remain, they may become meaningless. It’s all too easy to see how we may become a country in which the big rewards are reserved for people with the right connections; in which ordinary people see little hope of advancement; in which political involvement seems pointless, because in the end the interests of the elite always get served.

Am I being too pessimistic? Even my liberal friends tell me not to worry, that our system has great resilience, that the center will hold. I hope they’re right, but they may be looking in the rearview mirror. Our optimism about America, our belief that in the end our nation always finds its way, comes from the past — a past in which we were a middle-class society. But that was another country.

Let the conspiracy theories fly fast and wide on this one. Wellstone was one of the few good guys left in the Senate who supported organized labor, living wages, affordable housing, human rights, and wasand (to the extent that a major party politician can be) a friend to hippies and intellectuals in general. More importantly, he was one of the few congressman to vote against the use of force in Iraq.

Patrick Leahy is basically the only guy left.