Thursday’s New York Times carries an article on research into how happy people spend their time. The results are not surprising:

…since I harshed your mellow. Chris Floyd steps up to do the job:

Indeed, the entire arc of America’s bipartisan policies in [Central Asia] over the past 40 years can be seen as the elaborate construction of a gargantuan, self-propelled blowback machine, producing an endless effluent of violence, threat, chaos and crime that is now sluicing through the entire world. But blowback, as we all know, is not a design flaw of imperial policy, at least not for the most part; it is a design feature. No War Machine without perpetual war and rumors of war; no war profits – and no war powers – without the War Machine.

He’s talking about Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledging an escalation of their countries’ military commitments to Afghanistan. Executive summary: more death and misery for the people there, more profit and power for a very select group of people here.

lots of factoids with neat gfx:

Advice from the wise folks at T.Bear Sachs:

IRAQ WAR ENDS and other great headlines in today’s (fake) New York Times (courtesy of The Yes Men).

Nate Silver over at 538 has a post that argues against the assertion that the “Obama voters” (read non-white) were responsible for prop 8’s passage.

At the end of the day, Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two … The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that — and there’s no polite way to put this — the older voters aren’t going to be around for all that much longer, and they’ll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. 

Read it and be reassured.

Good.is has a snappy video breaking down the $3 Trillion cost of war (as documented in Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilme’s exhaustively researched book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict)

I suppose, in retrospect, it was inevitable:

Mark Newman at the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan generated this awesome collection of election maps. My favorite is above.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

UPDATE:
As Steve and Josh commented, the red/blue colors can give a biased visual perspective. Here’s the same map with the hue rotated 120 degrees.

After the hoopla of winning the election, and a lot of wonk-talk about the cabinet posts, I was so greatful to read this today:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials

I think that closing Gitmo as one of his firsts acts in office will send a strong message to the world, and americans at home, that morality is back on the table as an important american value.

NOTE: Pre-emptive anti-snark statement… I know the witch has many sisters and that Glinda herself has been known to cohort with lobbyists, but give a munchkin a chance to party a bit. ; )