An American Coup d'État? [via Lex]
If an eccentric Marine hero was to be believed, there was a very serious attempt at a coup to overthrow Roosevelt in the 1930's. This History Today article from 1995 explains the details and wonders and speculates why this story was never fully explored.

Boys "R" Us [via Dustbury]
Some graphic artist for Toys Backwards-R Us was apparently really bored and decided to have some fun. It reminds me of the whole scandal with Disney movies. Lion King in particular where the feathers spell out the word "sex" for a brief moment. I thought it was a hoax or that the righty-tighties were delirious, but we watched it over and sociology and sure enough there it was. Beware the bored animator or graphic artist!

Anti-Bush Graphiti defaces UH campus {Beware: Pop-ups}
Suspect in anti-Bush vandalism jailed {Beware: Chronicle article}
I was going to put this in a separate post about political activity and lack thereof at UH, but it turns out that the vandal apparently wasn't a student. He put up the picture to the right on various university buildings. In the Coogfans forum (with the pop-ups) they're also talking about some cameras they put on the campus parking lot. They've been adding security measures on top of security measures to combat UH's unsafe reputation. While the problem is more perception than reality, perception is important: warnings about security was one of the reasons that Eel dismissed the interest that UH expressed in her.

Kansas group monitors sermons
Preach it, my (Big) Brother!
On one hand, I do understand that legally tax-exempt religious organizations are barred from making political endorsements. On the other hand, religious organizations inherently have core beliefs on social morality (conservative churches) and economic justice (liberal churches) and the idea of figuratively taping the mouth or snitching on religious organizations whose ideas you disagree with is troubling. I believe this as firmly with religious leaders that support Democrats as I do those that support Republicans.

U-M Detroit Arab American Study portrays a complex population [via Judd]
As one might surmise from the title, the University of Michigan (at Detroit?) did a survey of Arab Americans in the Detroit area and found some interesting results and some expected ones. Relatively few (15%) have personally had a "bad experience" post-9/11 relating to their ethnicity despite the broad definition (included name-calling) and over twice as many (33%) have recieved explicit support. Lower numbers of in the ethnic community support our adventures in the Middle East, but higher numbers have faith in law enforcement. One thing to keep in mind is that a minority of those polled (42%) were Muslims, so the controls could vary pretty wildly between Christian and Muslim Arabs (and Childeans). You can read the PDF file here.

Virtual Social Climbing
Psychology Today takes a look at invitation-only websites like Friendster and Orkut and finds it lacking. The only way you can really "validate" people in an online networking service is to interview them personally. Except that such things cost money, which create barriers, which make the pool of applicants smaller, which makes it less useful.