Rethinking Blogging

I was reading Andrew Sullivan's article "Why I Blog" and started rethinking my approach to blogging. It is not so much rethinking as much as being inspired to adapt a more spontaneous and less polished style. Andrew links to another blogger's advice:

Farhad Manjoo has a guide to blogging. He spoke with Ambers:

...the best way to stick to a blogging schedule is to write quickly, and a good way to write quickly is to write as if you're talking to a friend. Marc Ambinder, the political-news maven at the Atlantic, told me, "I've found that I tend to write the way I speak. Short, staccato sentences, lots of parentheticals. That annoys purists, but it's uniquely my own voice, and I think it helps to build a connection with the reader." Also remember that your readers want you to get to the point. "Be clear, not cryptic," Salmon says. "Blog readers have neither the time nor the inclination to read between the lines; blogs aren't literature."

Most of my posts take at least an hour to compose, particularly if they require me to find some data and links. That mostly explains why I average a mere one blog post per week since I started bloggin in May 2007.

So, my readership of one, namely myself, should brace for a larger count of short and spontaneous posts which will give "Random Thoughts" a new level of ... randomness.

Comments

Correlation Between Taxes and Social/Economic Programs

I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....

Plea to Barack on Foreign Aid

Barack Obama has been my candidate of choice from the beginning. I have outlined a few of the reasons I support him . One I didn't mention is the issue of foreign aid. As I discussed earlier, US government's foreign aid as a % of its GDP is one of the lowest for any developed nation. Economic Aid to Developing Countries - The Stats To make it worse, much of the aid is given to two sources: Military and economic aid to Israel and Egypt to keep some peace in the Middle East Colombia, Peru and Bolivia to fight drug The tiny bit that is left goes to countries where the US has foreign policy interests. The aid is used for political leverage. Here is where Barack Obama comes into the picture. He has said that diplomacy and restoration of American image in the world would be the pillars of his foreign policy. One way to improve America's image in the world is to provide more foreign aid, particularly one that is not directly used for political leveraging. Obama promised ...

Victim of Asylum Roulette

Not too many stories resonate with me as much as the plight of legitimate asylum seekers whose desperate plea to find refuge in the US is ultimately decided by the questionable preference, judgment and mood of a single asylum officer (with some oversight from a regional asylum director) on one fateful day. That decision, according to numerous credible and through studies, depends largely on the location of the regional asylum center, the legal representation of the the applicant, the gender of the asylum officer just as much as the merit of the asylum case, while in fact the legitimacy of the asylum case should be the only relevant factor. This phenomenon has become so real that researchers at the Georgetown University law school have dubbed it the Refugee Roulette . Why am I so sensitive about this subject? My most devastating tragedy of late has been the denial of my legitimate and honest application for political asylum at the Chicago Asylum Office. When I applied believing the ...

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