These are pretty brief lists. Emphatically brief. So much so that sometimes they’re not even lists. I’ll expand on them, but for now the goal is simply to provide the most basic but wide-ranging sites in a few particular areas. Categories in order: General and Uncategorized Reference Pages, Activism, United States Politics, Economics, Election, Leftist, Dope, Religion. And Music. Along with the Blogroll, these are basic reference sources to which I turn pretty regularly.
General and Uncategorized
LibrarianChick–no, it isn’t what you think, so look elsewhere for Mary Bailey in glasses and little else– offers a nice set of basic reference links in all subjects. If she can’t help, try the volunteer librarians at Radical Reference.
Before you forward me one more damn e-mail telling me that the Post Office is going to start taxing my e-mail, that the government is shutting down NPR (that would be a bad thing?), or whatever half-witted gibberish your panic-stricken friends are forwarding to everyone in their address books, please check it out on the invaluable Snopes Urban Legends page.
Online newspapers is a database of all the papers online around the globe. For all the stuff your local doesn’t publish, check out your local Indymedia. Here’s Boston’s.
Global Issues is a first-rate resource for data on, well, most “global issues,” including but hardly limited to water resources, corporations, Africa, etc. Lots of cross references. An excellent place to turn for backstories on whatever ugly new issue has raised its head in your morning paper and sent you scurrying to the sports section.
Activism
Protest.Net provides a calendar, alerts, news, etc on protests around the globe. Why follow Dave Matthews around when you can start your very own situationist uprising?
In Massachusetts, read up on Boston Indymedia; subscribe to the ACT-MA listserve. Take a nice walk through the South End and visit the Lucy Parsons Center–this is a truly great, unique store–and have a look at the fliers.
United States Politics
The Authentic History Center, subtitled “Popular Sources of American Popular Culture,” is a wonderfully engaging compendium of graphics, multimedia, texts, etc. Each period covered includes political speeches, but the pages devoted to specific events—e.g., Temperance movement images or the readiness of too many cartoonists to fall back on the instantly hackneyed drawing of a tearful Statue of Liberty on 9/12/02 –are as insightful a commentary on the (d)evolution of the “American” sensibility as any text.
dKosopedia, hosted on Wikipedia, is an ongoing project the Daily Kos community. The summary states outright that the encyclopedia is “written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point of view while also attempting to fairly acknowledge the other side’s take.” The 6500+ articles are categorized by Issue, and provide an excellent starting guide for anyone curious as to how the Byzantine political system works, and doesn’t, in the US. Also includes “Hot Issues,” and “Projects” (“How to Run for Office,” etc.).
Politics Nationwide is a database of state and federal-level legislators and agencies w/ links to home pages. So go badger somebody.
GovTrack is a simple tool for tracking federal legislation. Can track bills by name, number, and subject, search archived bills by subject, track changes as a bill moves through Congress, etc. Concerned about seals? So’s the United States Senate. Constipated? The House has got your back. But the world’s foremost deliberative body has more profound matters to ponder.
Named after SCJ Louis Brandeis and created by the Sunlight Foundation, the Library of Unified Information Sources is working towards “a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government.” Put a pot of coffee on and settle in for a long night searching keywords in Congressional records, hearings, and reports, GAO reports, and presidential documents. I’m serious. Great fun.
Public Citizen’s CongressWatch keeps daily tabs on Congress from a populist consumer perspective. Kind of like having Ralph Nader as a house guest.
Pollster is a phenomenal resource for tracking polls and surveys. Includes breaking news on poll results as well as links to major polls. (Poll junkies will also want to consult MyDD).
Economics
The Center for Economic and Policy Research includes first-rate reports on economic issues nationally and globally.
Election
ProjectVoteSmart is an ambitious and successful project that provides in depth information on officeholders and candidates. Includes voting records, positions taken on specific issues, ratings of candidates by issues groups, and campaign finances. Also offers an encyclopedic list of maps and demographic charts, a catalog of think tanks, a comprehensive index of US political parties, polling resources, state-by-state resources including political parties, press, and regional demographic maps, and resources for young voters and teachers. This is a volunteer, non-partisan web site that belongs in every voter’s bookmarks folder. Navigation tool here.
Want the abbreviated version? 2decide includes a nice table identifying the candidate’s positions (yea/nay) on a number of issues.
Open Secrets is an indispensable record of who’s paying off whom. Not to imply that the pharmaceutical industry’s $20 million in contributions during the ’06 cycle was inspired by anything more than sheer idealism, of course. The site can searched by donors (want to know to whom your boss contributes?), recipients, election cycles, and industries; the industry section is especially valuable, as the site provides background pages detailing each industry’s lobbying goals, as well as congressional campaign contributions, PACS, etc. Were I teaching a U.S. Civics course, this would be my textbook. Everything else flows from it. Like a reverse sewer hose.
DC political report is a daily wire offering updates on campaigns.
FactCheck is the bipartisan site that pays close attention to the endless stream of jaw dropping falsehoods, obviously empty promises, made up statistics, and dumbass errors that flows, gushes, and dribbles from the jabbering jaws of our esteemed candidates. Excellent work here.
Leftist
Leftist Link Archive contains hundreds of links to journals and magazines, films, posters, bookstores, political parties, list-serves, and academic groups and conferences. A nice, bare-bones Web site.
Jay’s Leftist and “Progressive” Internet Resources Directory is a vast catalog of leftist oriented sites, organized by site type (General Personal, Web rings, etc) and subject matter. Astoundingly comprehensive. A real labor of love and and an invaluable resource.
Wikipedia has what seems to me, in my blissful ignorance, to be a nice collection of Marxist material (see the sidebar at right). Louis Althusser provides a brief schema for reading Capital. For more in depth study, see the vast collection at Marxists.org, especially the astounding library. I can hardly think of a better way to celebrate the holidays than to purchase everyone on your list a copy of the Grundrisse; if you’re in Boston, buy it here.
Infoshop, meanwhile, provides one-stop shopping for materials on historical and contemporary anarchist theory and practice. Includes a library, FAQ, wiki, and store. Site is divided into subject “portals,” e.g. Libertarian Marxism, featuring some works by Rosa Luxemborg in PDF.
Dope
Enter the The Vaults of Erowid to unearth everything–and I do mean everything–you need to know in order to plan your next psychic vacation and to ensure that it is exciting, rewarding, and unlikely to result in permanent psychological damage–or, at least, to prepare you for the likelihood of the same. History, use, dosage, user experiences, growing, synthesizing, legal issues—it’s all here for most every substance humankind has used to get off. Much of it is written by folks with extensive backgrounds in chemistry–imagine a sizeable department at MIT given over to growing, synthesizing, and sampling all the lovely alkaloids. Have a nice amanita cap sitting in the refrigerator (scroll down for sample resources)?
Similarly, TOTSE, a site reminiscent of Disinformation (and worth exploring for other reasons) includes a lengthy and engrossing set of user-posted comments, tips, etc. on hallucinogens.
HowStuffWorks includes a good overview of how marijuana “works.” I know, you don’t care how it works, only that it works. For a more high level approach, discover the chemical secrets behind psychopharmacology at Hallucinogens.com.
Cannabis Culture Magazine is a superb portal into the same. Have a look at the extensive library, forum, and video.
Part of the Drugtext Libraries, the Psychedelic Library is a impressive collection of studies, monographs, and even novels dealing with botanicals and synthetics. Provides full texts of the sorta thing I was devouring with far too much enthusiasm in 1975–Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Alan Watts’ The Joyous Cosmology –when I ought to have been studying trigonometry (non, je ne regrette rien)–along with along with Hoffman, Metzner, and intrepid psychobotanist Dr Andrew Weil. Other categories include treaties on psychiatry, social policy, and the “religious experience.”
Ethnopharmacology.com provides a good set of links to other sites dealing with what today go by the name of “ethnogens.” After reading a superb National Geographic account of ayahuesca, you might want to plan your own voyage.
Religion
The Internet Sacred Text Archive is an absolutely stunning collection, a genuine treasure. It’s all here. Read the Kama Sutra in Burton’s original translation. Study the Koran, and while you’re at it, a broad assortment of Sufi texts. And the history of Islam. Cast a spell. Hell, cast a few hundred. Butt heads with the rabbis—Torah, the Talmud, the Haggadad, the Midrash, and the Kabbalah—all here. Along with the classic medieval folklore concerning the “grateful dead.” And so much more.
Site Unseen: The Best Jesus Infused Sites You Never Knew About left me slack-jawed. Started shaking my head about halfway through this list of 6,000 links handpicked by two young lunatics, categorized with a real sense of discrimination–my favorite category is Churches that are part of the post-denominational, postmodern, prophetic revolution (90 links), though I’m also quite keen on Neo-Monastic Communities and the subtle differences that differentiate them from Old School Monks (breakdancing Francisans in Adidas, RUN-DMC on the turntable?). It’s actually an astonishing list, worth scrolling through for curiosity’s sake alone. They describe their collection as “books [that] are created, down through the millennia, by mavericks and ne’er-do-wells like yourself: Rag-tag seekers who are desperate for the Spirit’s stirring, to reveal the face of Father God in His beloved Son, Jesus the Christ.” They’re very seriously Christian but wear it lightly, and what they’ve compiled here represents what real labor inspired by Christ, or simply the idea of Christ, if you prefer, can achieve. Yes, I’m impressed. Still something mildly lunatic about the enterprise.
The Christian Classics Etherial Library. Basic collection of the Ante-Nicene Fathers; The World Wide Encyclopedia of Christianity; (Encyclopedia, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, Torrey’s Topical Textbook, and Elwell’s Dictionary of Christian Theology), Study Bible, and a mind-boggling collection of Christian documents including the complete works of Calvin, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Dostoyevsky’s novels, Philip Schaff’s 38-volume history of Christianity, etc. Many notable exceptions (where’s Simone Weil?), but a first-rate resource of both primary and secondary documents relevant to the origins and growth of Christianity.
For research into the early Church and primary sources relevant to the development of the faith, see Early Christian Writings. Contains lost and secret and Gnostic gospels, ante-Nicene fathers. Missing, sadly, the Clementine Recognitions, from which William Gaddis drew the title of his 1955 masterpiece, arguably the greatest American novel of the last century. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist).
Music
Best and Worst of: lists from Spin (be sure to check out the left-hand frame), Blender, Rolling Stone. MOre to follow here. I’m sadly outta touch.
