"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying."--Bertrand Russell
I'm shocked, shocked to hear that Republicans are lying...
in reference to:"The Republican “Pledge to America,” released Sept. 23, contains some dubious factual claims: It declares that “the only parts of the economy expanding are government and our national debt.” Not true. So far this year government employment has declined slightly, while private sector employment has increased by 763,000 jobs."
- FactChecking ‘The Pledge’ | FactCheck.org (view on Google Sidewiki)
Great article on the value of Facebook's super users, and the potential for a business built on paying its users what they're worth.
in reference to:"If we awarded 4/5 ths of the value of Facebook (and the same exercise could be done with Google at a couple of million superusers) to its superusers, leaving the tool managers $5 billion in value, each superuser would now be worth $200,000 from their contributions to this tool alone. But they aren't. They haven't earned a penny for their effort."
- COGNITIVE SLAVES - Global Guerrillas (view on Google Sidewiki)
Suppose you had spent the last five years actually believing what you read from the usual suspects — the WSJ opinion pages, National Review, right-wing economists, etc.. Here’s what would have happened:
In 2006 you would have believed that there was no housing bubble.
In 2007 you would have believed that the troubles of subprime couldn’t possibly spread to the financial system as a whole.
In 2008 you would have believed that we weren’t in a recession — and that the failure of Lehman was unlikely to have bad consequences for the real economy.
In 2009 you would have believed that high inflation was just around the corner.
At the beginning of 2010 you would have believed that sky-high interest rates were just around the corner.What the hell is wrong with people who will vote for people who are so consistently wrong?
Funny that we haven't heard more about this...
Obviously being powered by very warm surface temps in the ocean, hurricanes are both very powerful this year, and very numerous. Now, what were those predictions of hurricane activity based on a warmer planet?
"hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University told CWG (Capital Weather Gang) that between August 27 and September 15 there have been four (Danielle, Earl, Igor, and Julia) category 4 hurricanes -- the most on record in such a short period."
- Hurricanes keep avoiding U.S., will it continue? - Capital Weather Gang (view on Google Sidewiki)
Now if someone really wanted to start some shit, they could pile up all the religious books they could find, from every religion, and turn them to ash with a giant flamethrower. Or, they could send an army of young people, without enough training or oversight, into a very angry place and start killing civilians indiscriminantly. Either way, you wind up with some very pissed off people, but, at least in the case of the pile of smoldering Bibles and Korans, you wouldn't have any corpses to collect the fingers from.
in reference to: US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies' | World news | The Guardian (view on Google Sidewiki)I went to the Berlin Contemporary art museum today. The had a retrospective of artist Bruce Nauman. I'll call his work non traditional. I arrived at the museum just in time for a tour in English. Included in the group were some 12th grade art students from an English language school. They were a cross section, Asian, Muslim, German, etc.
One of the artists "events" was a 20 x20 dark room with videos of clowns. Each end had a projected large image, wall 3 had 4 video screens, the 4th wall was the audience. One of the projected clowns was talking loudly and unintelligibly except one word could be heard repeated over and over. I don't remember the word, it is unimportant. The tite of the installation event was "torture of the clowns."
When we stepped out to discuss what we had seen I offered that if done today the artist might have called it Fox News Channel.
They got it. 12th graders know that Fox news blabs and blabs with constant throwing in of one intelligible word which propagandizes the audience. Words like, Muslim, socialist, not legally born, abortion, or whatever the propaganda buzzword of the day is that corporate elites hand down.
12th graders here better understand the propagandizing of American better than many Americans. Maybe they are equally propagandized by the same elites.
And that is the way it is in the 2010 election cycle.
How long until some Republican says (again) that offshore drilling is perfectly safe, we don't need a moratorium, and anyone who says we do is a commie bastard?
It sickens me to think of all the "reasonable" people who are planning to vote GOP in November. Screw the future, eh? Anyone who would even consider voting GOP is a sociopath.
