Ayatollah Cameron Threatens to invade Ecuador Embassy re: Assange (or, Whitewashing Iran for the US National Security State) | Informed Comment

Good for Ecuador. Remember when the US and the UK were supposed to be
the defenders of international law, and supposed paragons of
transparent governance?

Maybe that never existed in fact, but at least we had stated ideals.
We've fallen far in the last 12 years.

http://www.juancole.com/2012/08/ayatollah-cameron-threatens-to-invade-ecuador-embassy-re-assange-or-whitewashing-iran-for-the-us-national-security-state.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+juancole%2Fymbn+%28Informed+Comment%29


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The Bunker Rises on Smith Street

This was the deadest, ugliest spot on the Smith Street commercial
strip. I'm looking forward to this building opening up and
contributing to the block.

http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2012/08/the-bunker-rises-on-smith-street/


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USA Today: Brooklyn Is Back

Uh oh. This is troubling, but if we make the cover of TIME, all is lost.

http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2012/08/usa-today-brooklyn-is-back/


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Standard Chartered Settles with New York State for $340 Million « naked capitalism

I had never heard of Lawsky before last week. This is some truly
impressive work.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/standard-chartered-settles-with-new-york-state-for-340-million.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29


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For New York Bike Advocates, Delayed Gratification - NYTimes.com

Transportation Alternatives is not an overnight success story. It's a
story of a team of hard working, dedicated and incredibly talented
people working to implement good policy. Paul Steely White and the
rest of the TA crew should be a case study in effective civic
activism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/nyregion/for-new-york-bike-advocates-delayed-gratification.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

Mark Ames: Paul Ryan’s Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls

Ayn Rand (born Alisa Rosenbaum) was an all around awful human being. And the people who fetishize her and her objectionable Objectivist philosophy (cough Paul Ryan cough cough Alan Greenspan) are at their cores truly horrible people. 

But all that said, even I was not prepared to learn the depths of her depraved thinking. 

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Mark Ames: Paul Ryan's Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls

Yves here. There is one way that Mark Ames' underlying post needs a smidge of updating. Sadly, the technocratic elites in Europe are now firmly trying to inflict bone-crushing austerity on ordinary workers, despite visible evidence of its failure (debt to GDP ratios keep rising as the economies contract) and widespread public opposition. There the rationale is a bizarre combination of "punish the borrowers" when countries like Ireland and Spain were held up as poster children of economic success until the bust, and a need to hide the fact that what looks like rescues of the PIIGS is in fact bailouts of French and German banks.

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled

To celebrate today's announcement that Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan will in a few months' time be a heartbeat from the presidency—and to honor this special moment, marking the final syphilitic pus-spasms of America's decline and fall–we are reposting for your edification Mark Ames' 2010 article about the man behind the Rand: Ayn Rand's unrequited adoration of a notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman. Yes, Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan owes his entire "moral" worldview to a lowly groupie of serial killers, a 1920′s prototype of today's "Joker" wannabees. Yes folks, in a few months' time Americans will finally be able to stand up and declare: "We are all serial-killer groupies now."

There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people go frothing batshit angry at the suggestion that maybe health care coverage should be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it; or when they froth at the mouth in ecstasy at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of their population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays ...

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New York City Sand Pit

200 million tons of sand excavated from LI to build NYC buildings and infrastructure. That's a lot of scratch. 

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New York City Sand Pit

The previous post reminded me of a site I've meant to post about literally for years now, ever since first reading about it in Michael Welland's book Sand.

[Images: Sand mines, via Michael Welland's excellent blog Through the Sandglass].

Toward the end of his book, Welland points out the role sand plays in the making of concrete—and, of course, the role concrete plays in the making of a city like New York. But where, he asks, did all the sand that made the concrete that made Manhattan actually come from?

"In 1865," we read, "mining began on the northern shore of Long Island to collect sand washed out from retreating ice age glaciers."

Immigrant workers from Europe, many from Sardinia, first hauled sand with wheelbarrows; the excavations grew with mechanization, and eventually the cliffs and the landscape were leveled. Port Washington was the center of the business, as endless convoys of barges carried the sand to Manhattan. The last sandpit closed in the 1990s, by which time more than 200 million tons of sand had been excavated to build the city—bridges, highways, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the World Trade Center.

As the New York Times reported back in 2008, a "monument honoring the sand mining industry" has since been erected in Port Washington, from whence more than 140 million tons of sand were excavated. There is still one open tunnel there, as well as "the remains of a conveyor," in the landscape—which has since been turned into a golf course. Historic photos of the site in its sand-mining heyday are pretty incredible.

A helpful website exists, meanwhile, courtesy of the Port Washington Public Library, offering a wide swath of resources about "the geography and geology of the sandmines; t...

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