Rachel Maddow had Frank Schaeffer on again. The rhetoric from the far right has become more "incite"-full.

Video after the jump.

Asia Times, By Andrei Lankov, November 12

SEOUL - In the past few weeks, North Korean watchers have been confronted with a sight they do not see frequently: Americans outsmarting North Koreans.

Usually, the opposite is the case. North Korea might be a failing state, balancing on the verge of famine, but when it comes to diplomatic games, North Korean politicians are second to none.

They have studied the dangerous art of manipulating great powers since the 1960s, when they played Russians and Chinese against one another. They perfected their skills in the 1990s, when they managed to manipulate the US, South Korea and China into providing large amounts of food and energy aid while giving essentially nothing in return.

In the 1930s, Okies saw California's Central Valley as a Garden of Eden. Now it's dying of thirst.

Mother Jones, By Josh Harkinson, November/December Issue

When I meet Javier Vaca on a dusty strip of blacktop, he's been walking for three days. The skinny 18-year-old is being carried along in a procession of 7,000 farmworkers and farmers as it crosses California's Central Valley, his baggy jeans and hoodie standing out amid the work boots and button-downs. He's been told only one thing that matters: Marching 50 miles might earn him a job.

One charity's campaign to register the births of all children in the developing world is transforming millions of young lives.

The Independent, By Nina Lakhani, November 15

This is a story about a project which found 40 million children who didn't officially exist. A campaign that, over four years and across three continents and 32 countries, has helped to protect hundreds of thousands of children in danger of being trafficked, and girls as young as 12 being forced into illegal marriages – and it is now also saving untold numbers of unborn girls from being aborted because they are the "wrong sex". It is that very rare thing: a global good news story.

Minorities find a warm reception through online channels

Washington Post, By DeNeen L. Brown, November 15

A black superwoman appears on your laptop in shimmering blue tights, green socks and a midnight blue cape. Her hair in Afro puffs, she is sitting on a promenade bench. She looks worried and a bit worn out. Her makeup is smeared, probably from crying.

She tells us she has just caught her boyfriend with a "second-rate superhero." The nerve of him.

Defiant 'trouser lady' continues to fight decency laws

Washington Post, By Stephanie McCrummen, November 14

KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- A few months after she was arrested for wearing pants, Lubna Hussein was lounging around her home in a shady, upper-class neighborhood in this capital along the Nile River. It was a hot afternoon, but the 34-year-old Sudanese journalist was wearing thick jeans adorned with sequins and embroidered flowers.

"Since all this happened, I will only wear pants," she said in the calmly defiant manner that led to her fleeting global celebrity as "the trouser lady," and a less-publicized backlash that has included anonymous death threats and newspaper columns calling her a prostitute. "If you have something to fight for, you can lose your life."

New York Times, By Paul Krugman, November 9

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

New York Times, By Benedict Carey, November 9

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

New York Times, By Charlie Savage. October 30

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, leading Senate Democrats and a coalition of news organizations have reached tentative agreement on legislation providing greater protections against the fining or imprisonment of reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the deal, made public Friday, federal judges could quash subpoenas demanding testimony or information from reporters if the judges determined that the public interest in news gathering outweighed the need to uncover the source of a leak, including, in some circumstances, unauthorized disclosure of classified government information.

Protection under the so-called shield law would also be extended to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news.

The 18-foot-tall utensil was stealthily erected as a birthday present. Now the city is considering keeping it as a piece of street art.

Los Angeles Times, By Nicole Santa Cruz, November 7

Pasadena has a fork in the road. And it's 18 feet tall.

Where south St. John and south Pasadena avenues divide, there's a towering wooden silver fork in the traffic median. The utensil has a black steel skeleton and is rooted in 2 1/2 feet of concrete.

The art was originally intended as a surprise for Bob Stane of Altadena, who celebrated his 75th birthday Oct. 29. But Caltrans, which owns the median, and Pasadena, which maintains the land, are deciding whether to keep it up for a while as an impromptu piece of street art.

After a European court rules against crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, Italians from across the political spectrum decry an assault on the country's Roman Catholic identity.

Christian Science Monitor, By Nick Squires, November 3

Rome - Italians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after a European court ruled that displaying crucifixes in the country's schools violated the principle of secular education.

Italy's education minister condemned the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the Christian cross was a symbol of the country's Roman Catholic religion and cultural identity.

New York Times, By Tara Parker-Pope, October 26

Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?

The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.

Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process.

TruthDig/Alternet, By Penny Coleman, October 23

Every day, for four years as a West Point cadet, Tara Krause lived and worked alongside the men who had gang-raped her.

Still, she managed to graduate in 1982. She served as a field artillery officer during the Cold War and was attached to the 518th Military Intelligence Brigade during the Gulf War. In what she calls "an act of incredible self-destruction," she married a three-tour Vietnam vet in 1985 and, for the next eight years, lived "the private hell of his PTSD."

Zero Hedge, By Tyler Durden, October 19

When the financial system almost imploded in the fall of 2008, one of the primary responses by the Federal Reserve was the issuance of an unprecedented amount of FX liquidity lines in the form of swaps to foreign Central Banks. The number went from practically zero to a peak of $582 billion on December 10, 2008. The number of swaps outstanding was almost directly inversely correlated with the value of the dollar (much more on that shortly). A graphic representation of this can be seen below:

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

Rolling Stone, By Matt Taibbi, October 14

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

New York Times, By David W. Dunlap & James Estrin, October 14

Any effort to describe the photography of Lu Guang by reference to the work of other artists would almost certainly invoke the name of W. Eugene Smith. (It is, for instance, just about impossible to look at Slide 4 without thinking of “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.”)

So it seems especially fitting that Mr. Lu, a Chinese freelancer, is the recipient of this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his project, “Pollution in China.” The announcement was made Wednesday evening in New York by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton responded today to a question about a justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to sign the marriage license for an interracial couple out of concern "for the children."

"I've seen the story and I've looked into this a little bit. And I found that, actually, the children of biracial couples can do pretty good," said Burton, who is biracial himself.

"So in terms of anything else, I just think it's something that they're dealing with locally."

Times Herald-Record | Adam Bosch | October 7

Hurley, NY — John Gill tucks a gray pumpkin under his arm and climbs to the top of a rusty ladder. He opens a hatch on the side of a steel pipe, drops the pumpkin inside and sprays it with magenta paint.

"So we can find it later," he says.

The hum of an air compressor stops and, for a moment, the Ulster County hillside is silent.

"You guys ready?"

h/t Lance Mannion: Nothing says autumn like a pumpkin flying into the air at 600 MPH

And watch out, there are more of them, gathering in Delaware in early November.

Introducing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Video after the jump!

New York Times, By Benedict Carey, October 5

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At 84, the writer and activist may be confined to a wheelchair, but his rage – at his country, its leaders and citizens – burns as fiercely as ever.

The Independent, By Johann Hari, October 7

In Russian, the phrase "gore vidal" means "he has seen grief". As Gore Vidal is wheeled towards me across an empty London hotel lobby, it seems for the first time like an apt translation. In the eight years since I saw him last, he has lost his partner of 50 years, most of his friends, most of his enemies, and the use of his legs. The man I met then – bristling with his own brilliance, scattering witticisms around like confetti – has withered. His skin is like parchment, but the famous cheekbones are still sharp beneath the crags. "It is so cold in here," he says, by way of introduction. "So fucking cold."

Slate, By Elliot Spitzer, October 1

Why don't any of the Obama administration's financial reforms help middle-class Americans?

The Obama administration, which has spent much of the past year bailing out banks and protecting the markets, has done shockingly little to help the middle class that has borne the brunt of the financial meltdown. Two acts are particularly revealing. First, the administration failed to go to the mat to give judges the power to reform mortgages in the bankruptcy context. The administration barely winced as the Senate caved to the banks on this critical issue, risking no political capital to protect one of the few reforms that could have totally transformed the mortgage crisis. As the foreclosure wave continues, and as adjustable-rate mortgages hit reset points that are going to cause havoc for millions of additional families, this failure of political leadership by the administration stands as one of the early warning signs that things were amiss.

Echidne (of the Snakes) has a video summary:

Grow A Pair

I heard someone urging someone else to do just that, and that made me wonder what I should grow if I ever were similarly urged. A pair of horns? Bigger divine breasts? A pair of auxiliary eyes in the back of my head? Long corner teeth? Legs instead of a snake tail?

That saying has to do with testicles, of course, and the assumption that testicles equal courage and bravery. Some people use ovaries the same way, such as "that takes ovaries!" or talk about brass ovaries when a woman comes across as daring. But those sayings are slow to change, alas.

GQ, By Matt Latimer, September, 2009

Matt Latimer worked as one of Dubya’s speechwriters during the president’s final twenty-two months in office. He was there to help sell the surge to a skeptical public. He was there as we pretended that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. And he was there to see a president who failed to grasp his own $700 billion bailout package—even as he was pitching it to the American public on live TV. A disillusioned insider reveals for the first time just how messy things got.

As a speechwriter for George W. Bush during the final years of his presidency, I’d seen crises and controversies. But nothing prepared me for the imminent collapse of America’s free-market system.

I was in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with another speechwriter, a young man named Jonathan. (His last name was Horn; the president nicknamed him Horny.) We were chatting casually when the president’s favorite speechwriter came in. Chris Michel was in his midtwenties, with sandy blond hair. He was usually chipper, though at the moment his face was so pale he must have been the whitest man in the Bush White House. And that was no small accomplishment. Chris had just come from a secret meeting in the Oval Office, and without so much as a hello he announced: “Well, the economy is about to completely collapse.”

Wired, By Charlie Sorrel, September 15

Meet the $150 (almost to) Space Camera.

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.