Saturday Links for the Week — August 11, 2007

Amazing Visualizations Blog: Kudos to my colleague Greg Turko for finding Strange Maps, a blog of unusual and sometimes brilliant visualizations that add meaning to and make sense of information. The top one reproduced above is a picture, from Japan, of the most prevalent Web 2.0 sites and how they’re connected. The one below it tells lonely single males to go East, and lonely single females to go West.

Helping Communities Work Better: The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is doing two things to make communities more resilient: Lobbying to change laws to encourage local sustainability (New Rules Project) and working to encourage extensive recycling in all US communities (Waste to Wealth Project).

Journalism and Propaganda: John Pilger explains how the mainstream media and the mainstream political parties are distracting us from the need to dump them both in favour of independents interested in more than money and power.

Republican Presidents Forever?: In a related story, both the New Yorker and the NYT have been following the efforts of both US parties to pervert the workings of the electoral college to their advantage (the Republicans may yet be able to guarantee presidential power forever thanks to a shrewd California initiative), and the efforts of some states and Common Cause to end the tyranny of the college entirely by going to one-person, one-vote (democracy, what a concept).

Early Signs of Crash of Markets, Dollar, Economy: The collapse of the overextended housing market is now rippling through financial markets despite the trillions of dollars governments worldwide are furiously throwing into them, while the US dollar is poised to fall through the floor. Maybe just a dress rehearsal for the economic crisis ahead. Maybe not. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link and the two that follow.

ALEC, the Corporatist Trojan Horse: NRDC is co-sponsoring a site to throw light on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a consortium of huge multinationals working together very successfully to get corporatist-friendly legislation and deregulation passed.

Visual History of Religion in 90 Seconds: A neat video on a map of the world tracks the growth of the world’s Big 5 organized religions since prehistory.

Thought for the Week: Another great quote on community, by eco-feminist Susan Griffin, contributed by reader Peter Dixon: