December 2010
“The Civil War was scarcely more than 150 years ago. It’s yesterday. Race in...”
– William Gibson (via azspot)
The GOP loves the 1950s. They really love the 1850s.
November 2010
“…many of the same people who supported the invasion of Iraq and/or who support...”
– Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
American lives versus foreign lives. What’s the ratio for these pro-war, pro-life charlatans? 10,000 dead Iraqis before you start to care? Beyond morally bankrupt.
The Men Who Stole the World
In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover, as did FORTUNE. He was 19 years old. That same year, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, working with two other programmers whose identities...
271 Picasso Paintings Discovered In Paris
via telegraph.co.uk As a retired odd job man and electrician, Pierre Le Guennec is the unlikeliest of art collectors to be discovered with a haul of 271 unknown works by Picasso. Mr Le Guennec claims that he was given the collection by the artist when he carried out odd jobs for him at his Côte d’Azur home 40 years ago. However, Picasso’s son, Claude, suspects that the works were stolen. ...
Hitchens vs Blair [Video In 8 Clips]
It was a debate on religion in Toronto. I remain in awe of Hitch’s energy. A BBC summary of the debate can be listened to here. The videos continue here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.
And here is Hitch again on the subject of the Washington novel. In chemotherapy at 61, he has the tenacity of most healthy people in their twenties.
via...
Repression And Control Via Religion
azspot:
Religion as a Tool of Repression
Our every social institution, including the church, is corrupted by the theocracy of capitalism. Particularly during times of conflict, the church is needed as a moral counterweight to war and aggression, to greed and unregulated corporate power. But the church is impotent and irrelevant as a moral force. Not only does it fail to challenge the unethical...
Report: US Says Saudi Donors Finance al Qaeda
via rawstory.com
File under “no shit”:
A quick aside in a New York Times article about leaked diplomatic cables is sure to spark renewed interest about the role of the US’ biggest ally in the Gulf supporting terrorism.
In their wide-ranging précis of the leaked cables, Times reporters Scott Shane and Andrew Lehren mention in passing a key detail from one of the diplomatic...
Forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here...
ih8religion:
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution...
Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild
Todd Friel: If [God] judged you by the standard of the Ten Commandments, you'd be going to Hell.
Christopher Hitchens: If you believe in the God of the Old Testament, [I would] not. Because there's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified, as I daresay you know. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.
Todd Friel: So--
Christopher Hitchens: So I'm not sure you know quite what you're talking about.
“If you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion”
– Christopher Hitchens (via ana-bella)
3 tags
“…most of our current political craziness is not so much about hoary-stupid...”
– David Brin (via azspot)
Watchbrooklynmutt:
Christopher Hitchens destroys David Berlinski’s assertion that the Nazi party was Darwinistic or in anyway secular.
“When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it,...”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Papers, X6 B 79. (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
Ex-House Leader Tom DeLay Found Guilty in Texas...
Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful and divisive Republican lawmakers to ever come out of Texas, was convicted Monday of money laundering charges in a state trial, five years after his indictment here forced him to resign as majority leader in the House of Representatives. … The verdict ends the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also...
Married MN Republican With Gun At Clinic: "I'm...
A security guard at a St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic called the cops last week after he spotted a Republican state lawmaker with a loaded gun in the parking lot. But the pol says he was only “checking on” his online girlfriend, who he thought may be on a date with another man — a claim police have not been able to corroborate because the man did not have a phone number or...
“We have in the current GOP a truly disturbing and cynical view of politics:...”
– Andrew Sullivan, writing as a featured guest at “The Economist” (via ryking)
What if the Tea Party were black? →
taniada:
edman:
Nailed it.
“Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the...
“Increasing taxes on capitalist income is anathema to the supply-side economists...”
– Tax the Rich (via azspot)
Progressive Taxing Works: FACT. Even the Republicans long for the 1950s when the top marginal tax rate was 92%, unions were strong, and educations were economical [see GI Bill]. We all know these were strong years for America because we invested in ourselves.
Another Palin Drop-off
thesmithian:
‘After setting a TLC ratings record last week, Sarah Palin’s reality show plummeted for its second episode. Sarah Palin’s Alaska fell 40% on Sunday night to 3 million viewers. Not many were in the key adult demo either. Only 885,000 viewers were ages 18-49, dropping 44% from last week. In fact, the median age of the show is 57—that’s 15 years older than...
Poll Shows "GOP Mandate" Is Fiction
A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want...
“With Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on her side, Palin...”
– Frank Rich (via azspot)
Big, big difference. Bush was just the Zoolander of the real machine: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, Addington, and Rove.
These were 30 year in-the-making relationships. Rumsfeld and Cheney were BFFs from the Ford administration. This was a neo-con cabal, where...
Wikileaks: New Iraq War Logs 'seven times bigger...
Wikileaks has announced it will release a third set of war logs which will be seven times bigger than the last batch. In a defiant posting on its official Twitter account, the website’s founders said it was ‘under intense pressure’ over the disclosure but vowed to press ahead anyway. ‘The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined. Keep us strong,’ they added. The...
Buffett Says Rich Should Pay More
Billonaire investor Warren Buffett said the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich should be allowed to expire at the end of the year, the Financial Times reports, “adding that, if anything, the wealthiest Americans should pay even more in taxes.”
He also “scotched suggestions, promoted by Republicans, that extending tax cuts for the rich would lead to more investment and have a...
Palin Won't Talk to Couric Again
In an interview later tonight on Fox News, Sarah Palin said she would never do another interview with Katie Couric, calling it a “waste of time.”
Said Palin: “I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still...
1 tag
“It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be...”
– a disgruntled TSA agent.
Nov. 22, 1963: Zapruder Films JFK Assassination
via wired.com 26 seconds of silent history. RIP JFK. “Zapruder sold the publication rights to his film images to Life magazine, which ran the jarring, graphic still frames in its next issue a week later. The sequence was not shown as a film clip on network television until 1975.” We still believe a “magic bullet” theory after all these years? American denial and...
Of Course Republicans Aren’t Going To Repeal...
The promise of repeal is a shiny object to distract the drones in the GOP base.
More than a few Republicans know that while the politics of trying to nitpick provisions and curb funding are appealing, any wholesale repeal of major provisions of the health care overhaul is likely to generate a backlash.
Even the Republican-leaning electorate on Nov. 2 was evenly split on repealing Obamacare,...
Krugman: GOP Sabotage Making America Ungovernable
“The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming. […] On...
An Exerpt From Palin's New Book
“But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures.” - Sarah Palin
via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
Like her coded love for Real Americans reveals, Palin fails to mention things like slavery.
“Often and repeatedly, she writes huge numbers of people out...
Pentagon Aims To Repeal DADT
Gates, Mullen urge Congress to act on gay ban instead of courts; Gates to release report early
The Pentagon’s top leaders warned Sunday that if Congress fails to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the military, the courts may order changes that military leaders consider too fast or poorly thought-out.
via rawstory.com
I’m sure McCain will ask for more time or another report.
thesmithian:
‘…If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned.
If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform.
If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that...
1 tag
“The billionaires and their supporters in Congress are hell-bent on taking us...”
– Sen. Bernie Sanders (via azspot)
Total mensch.
“Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of...”
– Schneier on Security (via jgh2, squashed)
“[Senator Susan] Collins argued that the bill would place undue burden on small...”
– Republicans vote unanimously against equal pay for women bill | Raw Story
Only a Republican could vote against what they themselves enjoy. The GOP lacks empathy, en masse. Imagine if Collins made less than male Senators? - liberalsarecool