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Over the weekend, Glenn Beck held a rally in Washington, D.C. on the anniversary of, and at the spot of, a much more famous speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While he was likely hoping for bigger crowds to arrive, Credible estimates of the crowd peg it at about 87,000, short of the intended target and far short of any inflated numbers you may see in opinion pieces or elsewhere.
The theme was "Restoring Honor", and if it truly was about returning to our values at their best, in optimism and working with each other, in uniting as Americans instead of being divided by politics, race, or other factors, avoiding polemics and politics, and presenting a message for all Americans and not instead, about crassly insisting that America is a Christian Nation and will only become glorious when purged of other possible schools of thought, or attempting to appropriate a movement that was started to counteract much of the message he's been shilling on his program, then he can sit well on his speech and the rally.
Even if the happy, good message is the intended one, though, there will be people who will miss the point by a wide margin in their haste to demonize the people that they should be reaching out to, insisting instead that "they much reach out to us first, but they won't do that because they're evil", or "No Matter what was actually said at the rally, the Liberal Media will paint it as racism". One might charitably call those kinds of columns pebble thinking instead of dirt clod thinking, even though that will usually invite the response that one is envious of things unrelated to the message, a response generated because of the way the pebble thinks, not because of how the world works. We do more to restore honor in letting criminals interact with their families and give their children school supplies donated by a local church than we do in most of what Mr. Beck says (and advertises) on a day-to-day basis or in the vitriol and closed-mindedness of the column above.
Elsewhere in the world, The paranoia of terrorism and crime permits the government and police to intrude more on your private lives in the name of stopping terrorists or criminals. We have some highly-publicized items, like backscatter x-ray machines at airports. And then there's all the other stuff they do that they're hoping you don't notice, like equipping mobile vans with the same technology and scanning other vehicles with them or planting GPS devices on your car while its parked in your driveway because they think you're growing pot, and then having judges uphold that the government can do so because you have no right to privacy in your driveway.
Those expecting a swift recovery for the economy worldwide may have to settle in for the long-term haul, with at least one projection suggesting it would be 10 years or more before the economy recovered to its pre-crash levels. Mr. Krugman thinks that our austerity and savings kick is actually causing some of our long-term economic problems. Now, while consumers and people aren't able to max out the credit cards and not be ruined, the government could probably serve as a channel for everyone's savings to become investments.
I think this will make the moralizers squirm - did we mention that many of the men in Afghanistan take boys as lovers? They make it sound practical, after all - women are covered head to toe and can't be talked to without proposing marriage, so they go to the next best thing - pretty boys. Now I wonder how many of our Republican hawks, especially the ones that are anti-gay crusaders, feel about fighting a war that supports people that NAMBLA would approve of.
If you want to see how the Taliban fights and thinks, a Norwegian documentary provides some insight into the day in the life of the insurgency. Perhaps it will be widely circulated so that Mr. Karzai's criticism of the counterinsurgency strategy will at least look like its being listened to.
And speaking of criticisms, according to an unnamed watchdog agency, a significant amount of money was wasted in the rebuilding of Iraq to put structures in place that won't be used, or in building things that are incomplete or abandoned.
Domestically, if you're a prisoner in California state, say hello to your newest order-keeper - a pain ray that the military passed on for use in Afghanistan. It's only going to be used on the disruptive people, of course, which makes it totally okay to shoot pain at someone.
Public hospitals, those owned by local governmental entities, are likely to be sold off to for-profit companies as their costs rise and they continue to be the places of last resort for the uninsured and sick. Your health, managed by Conglomerate HMO, who insists that if you can't pay, there's no care for you today. Yet insurance reform will take years to kick in, assuming that the next administration doesn't dismantle it and repeal as much as they can get away with. Everyone's talking about the cost of care going up, and entitlement spending going up, and very few people seem to want to pay attention to the insurance companies, their practices, and the the means by which they profit. There was more of it earlier, when the bill was being negotiated, but there appeared to be no real effort anywhere to try and change the insruance-by-employer system into something that would be better.
A middle school received serious scrutiny when their student election policies insisting that only certain races could hold offices came to light. Since then, the school has scrapped the policy, calling it "a misguided attempt at affirmative action". How long was that policy in place and working merrily away before someone finally noticed it and called them on it? 30 years?
In technology, Paul Allen files lawsuits against most of the web for their e-commerce and/or recommendation systems...except Microsoft, where Mr. Allen apparently still has quite a cozy relationship. Nothing like making sure you're the only player in town by suing everyone else, huh?
And further making sure that there will be nowhere to go that is private on the Internet, facial recognition software that will be able to identify people on Internet photos by comparing them to a known photo of that person. So your corporate mugshot could be used for your employers to check up on you and what you do in your time off or at conferences. Or your iProduct could be used to track you and allow Apple to brick your phone remotely if you do anything they don't like.
In cooler things, beer microbes can live outside, in the vaccuum, and successfully did so for more than a year and a half.
Finally, a new hypothesis that suggests the altruistic drive in some creatures is not related to wanting genes to be passed on, but in structuring such that the group becomes the most important unit, not the individual, and thus, self-sacrificing actions to help the group make sense, instead of looking weird.
In opinions, first it was let out that News Corp backs the Republican Governors Association. Not wanting to make it seem like they're the only biased bunch, The Washington Examiner fires back by pointing out that many people you see and hear on other television networks gave havily to the Democratic Party. So now both sides can accuse each other of bias, and the status quo is restored. Nobody gives a thought to the idea that perhaps this solution, while stable, is not optimal, and would like to work toward making it clearer who's bringing you what messages. They Are Not Unbiased. Do Not Trust The Pusher Robot. We Are Here To Protect You.
The standard conservative approach to November, in a model piece by Mr. Du Pont - stop spending by reversing everything that's been done so far, then cut taxes so that there's less income coming in, and trust completely that the private sector will take that newfound wealth and invest it in jobs. Add in a dash of conservative takeovers are inevitable, because the populace is totally disaffected with the administration (while glossing over precisely what it was that was the root cause of the current dissastisfaction in eceonomics, because it's not kosher to point out that the collapse began under the Republican President, after having been fed by several decades of Republican Presidents and Republican Congresses) and accusations that the administration has fallen so far that is it flatly lying to the people about what their policies are doing, and you've got what the recess and the months leading up to November will be in terms of attack advertisements.
Last out, Mr. Fund taunts the Obama Justice Department, indicating that they should have long ago approved Georgia's election law requirement that voters prove their citizenship, and that this proves ideology reigns there because they only backed down when they were faced with a bigger piece of their agenda potentially being overturned. Well, it's always nice to know that you'll have to be able to prove your citizenry. Perhaps we should all be requesting extra copies of our birth certificates from our departments of vital records, because it certainly seems like it will be the real document that we need to do anything, instead of a state-issued identification card or license to operate a motor vehicle.
Enjoy all these distractions and shiny web links.
The theme was "Restoring Honor", and if it truly was about returning to our values at their best, in optimism and working with each other, in uniting as Americans instead of being divided by politics, race, or other factors, avoiding polemics and politics, and presenting a message for all Americans and not instead, about crassly insisting that America is a Christian Nation and will only become glorious when purged of other possible schools of thought, or attempting to appropriate a movement that was started to counteract much of the message he's been shilling on his program, then he can sit well on his speech and the rally.
Even if the happy, good message is the intended one, though, there will be people who will miss the point by a wide margin in their haste to demonize the people that they should be reaching out to, insisting instead that "they much reach out to us first, but they won't do that because they're evil", or "No Matter what was actually said at the rally, the Liberal Media will paint it as racism". One might charitably call those kinds of columns pebble thinking instead of dirt clod thinking, even though that will usually invite the response that one is envious of things unrelated to the message, a response generated because of the way the pebble thinks, not because of how the world works. We do more to restore honor in letting criminals interact with their families and give their children school supplies donated by a local church than we do in most of what Mr. Beck says (and advertises) on a day-to-day basis or in the vitriol and closed-mindedness of the column above.
Elsewhere in the world, The paranoia of terrorism and crime permits the government and police to intrude more on your private lives in the name of stopping terrorists or criminals. We have some highly-publicized items, like backscatter x-ray machines at airports. And then there's all the other stuff they do that they're hoping you don't notice, like equipping mobile vans with the same technology and scanning other vehicles with them or planting GPS devices on your car while its parked in your driveway because they think you're growing pot, and then having judges uphold that the government can do so because you have no right to privacy in your driveway.
Those expecting a swift recovery for the economy worldwide may have to settle in for the long-term haul, with at least one projection suggesting it would be 10 years or more before the economy recovered to its pre-crash levels. Mr. Krugman thinks that our austerity and savings kick is actually causing some of our long-term economic problems. Now, while consumers and people aren't able to max out the credit cards and not be ruined, the government could probably serve as a channel for everyone's savings to become investments.
I think this will make the moralizers squirm - did we mention that many of the men in Afghanistan take boys as lovers? They make it sound practical, after all - women are covered head to toe and can't be talked to without proposing marriage, so they go to the next best thing - pretty boys. Now I wonder how many of our Republican hawks, especially the ones that are anti-gay crusaders, feel about fighting a war that supports people that NAMBLA would approve of.
If you want to see how the Taliban fights and thinks, a Norwegian documentary provides some insight into the day in the life of the insurgency. Perhaps it will be widely circulated so that Mr. Karzai's criticism of the counterinsurgency strategy will at least look like its being listened to.
And speaking of criticisms, according to an unnamed watchdog agency, a significant amount of money was wasted in the rebuilding of Iraq to put structures in place that won't be used, or in building things that are incomplete or abandoned.
Domestically, if you're a prisoner in California state, say hello to your newest order-keeper - a pain ray that the military passed on for use in Afghanistan. It's only going to be used on the disruptive people, of course, which makes it totally okay to shoot pain at someone.
Public hospitals, those owned by local governmental entities, are likely to be sold off to for-profit companies as their costs rise and they continue to be the places of last resort for the uninsured and sick. Your health, managed by Conglomerate HMO, who insists that if you can't pay, there's no care for you today. Yet insurance reform will take years to kick in, assuming that the next administration doesn't dismantle it and repeal as much as they can get away with. Everyone's talking about the cost of care going up, and entitlement spending going up, and very few people seem to want to pay attention to the insurance companies, their practices, and the the means by which they profit. There was more of it earlier, when the bill was being negotiated, but there appeared to be no real effort anywhere to try and change the insruance-by-employer system into something that would be better.
A middle school received serious scrutiny when their student election policies insisting that only certain races could hold offices came to light. Since then, the school has scrapped the policy, calling it "a misguided attempt at affirmative action". How long was that policy in place and working merrily away before someone finally noticed it and called them on it? 30 years?
In technology, Paul Allen files lawsuits against most of the web for their e-commerce and/or recommendation systems...except Microsoft, where Mr. Allen apparently still has quite a cozy relationship. Nothing like making sure you're the only player in town by suing everyone else, huh?
And further making sure that there will be nowhere to go that is private on the Internet, facial recognition software that will be able to identify people on Internet photos by comparing them to a known photo of that person. So your corporate mugshot could be used for your employers to check up on you and what you do in your time off or at conferences. Or your iProduct could be used to track you and allow Apple to brick your phone remotely if you do anything they don't like.
In cooler things, beer microbes can live outside, in the vaccuum, and successfully did so for more than a year and a half.
Finally, a new hypothesis that suggests the altruistic drive in some creatures is not related to wanting genes to be passed on, but in structuring such that the group becomes the most important unit, not the individual, and thus, self-sacrificing actions to help the group make sense, instead of looking weird.
In opinions, first it was let out that News Corp backs the Republican Governors Association. Not wanting to make it seem like they're the only biased bunch, The Washington Examiner fires back by pointing out that many people you see and hear on other television networks gave havily to the Democratic Party. So now both sides can accuse each other of bias, and the status quo is restored. Nobody gives a thought to the idea that perhaps this solution, while stable, is not optimal, and would like to work toward making it clearer who's bringing you what messages. They Are Not Unbiased. Do Not Trust The Pusher Robot. We Are Here To Protect You.
The standard conservative approach to November, in a model piece by Mr. Du Pont - stop spending by reversing everything that's been done so far, then cut taxes so that there's less income coming in, and trust completely that the private sector will take that newfound wealth and invest it in jobs. Add in a dash of conservative takeovers are inevitable, because the populace is totally disaffected with the administration (while glossing over precisely what it was that was the root cause of the current dissastisfaction in eceonomics, because it's not kosher to point out that the collapse began under the Republican President, after having been fed by several decades of Republican Presidents and Republican Congresses) and accusations that the administration has fallen so far that is it flatly lying to the people about what their policies are doing, and you've got what the recess and the months leading up to November will be in terms of attack advertisements.
Last out, Mr. Fund taunts the Obama Justice Department, indicating that they should have long ago approved Georgia's election law requirement that voters prove their citizenship, and that this proves ideology reigns there because they only backed down when they were faced with a bigger piece of their agenda potentially being overturned. Well, it's always nice to know that you'll have to be able to prove your citizenry. Perhaps we should all be requesting extra copies of our birth certificates from our departments of vital records, because it certainly seems like it will be the real document that we need to do anything, instead of a state-issued identification card or license to operate a motor vehicle.
Enjoy all these distractions and shiny web links.
