Thank God it's Good Friday. A good day to reflect on this sculpture of #HomelessJesus

Others residents have spoken out against "Homeless Jesus," calling it creepy or insulting or just plain bad for the neighborhood.Democracy is for me more an attribute of social processesWhat are the limits when a country is no longer a #democracy but an #oligarchy? https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/14 Our doctoral student Patrizio Lainà just published this on Finland and the Euro Crisis: http://www.economiaepolitica.it/index.php/europa-e-mondo/finland-in-front-of-the-euro-crisis/#.U06ONVeYegh …"Capture the person, not just the face." Top 10 Tips from portrait artist Suzanne du Toit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27051743 … pic.twitter.com/aoX8hR6oOS @JanneMa Ei oo vessassa kuin käsipyyhkeitä - ja koko muu toimitus on lähtenyt kotiinsa. Twiittaan täällä yksin. #stadinepätoivoisinjätkäwhether the U.S. is a democracy. "Until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions [that U.S. policymaking operates as a democracy, versus as an oligarchy, versus as some mixture of the two] against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues." That’s an enormous number of policy-issues studied. What the authors are able to find, despite the deficiencies of the data, is important: the first-ever scientific analysis of whether the U.S. is a democracy, or is instead an oligarchy, or some combination of the two. The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media). The U.S., in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious "electoral" "democratic" countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now. Today, after this exhaustive analysis of the data, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” That's it, in a nutshell. Want to replace me? Search for Professor of #WorldPolitics (during my research leave at Helsinki Collegium) now open: http://www.helsinki.fi/rekrytointi/index.html?id=85426 …