Uncategorized
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Greenwald vs. O’Donnell, Round 2
I said I wasn't going to talk about politics much anymore, but the election and the the postmortems are interesting to me for what they say about our present confusion. So I was interested this morning to see this YouTube of Greenwald on the Lawrence O'Donnell Show last night which, I think, provides a needed…
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Now for Something a Little Different . . .
This lecture by Leonard Shlain is worth your time. It connects to several themes I’ve developed in the past that I plan to get back into, but this will be a reference point. Lecture starts at the 2.30 minute mark.
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Dude, Look at Your Pay Stub
Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally. Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you're so very angry. You should be angry. You're getting screwed. I think you know that. But you don't seem to know that it doesn't…
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Slim Postings
Lots of family stuff going on so not much time–and not much to say, except to belabor the obvious. But a happy new year to you all. I'm reevaluating the value and purpose of this site. I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort and whether my energies couldn't be spent more productively on…
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Obama’s Nobel Speech (Update)
I'm at a point now when I'm responding to Obama's speeches similarly to the way I responded to Bush's. Obama's might be more interesting to listen to, more eloquent and complex, but ultimately his speeches, like Bush's, are just propaganda. They are window dressing for a policy driven by a logic that has little or…
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Quote of the Day: John Coles
. . . a weak public option is worse than no public option at all, and a carelessly constructed public option will just become a dumping ground for high-risk patients that will require billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up. A couple years ago I said that I thought health care reform was…
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Obama’s Afghanistan Speech
Greenwald sums it up pretty well: He's convinced his admirers that this is a form of noble "pragmatism" but, far more often, it appears to be a mishmash of political calculations bereft of principle and plagued by numerous internal contradictions that make it impossible to understand, let alone defend. Everyone gets to read into it…
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Can the Dog Wag the Tail?
We all know that we’re not leaving Afghanistan or Iraq even if the ratio of good reasons to leave was 5 to 1. We’re not ever leaving because it makes sense; we’ll only leave because we’re forced to, as we were forced out of Vietnam in the seventies and the Russians out of Afghanistan in…
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Design Change
I've had enough complaints over the years about how hard to read the drop-out type was–I just like the idea of the word appearing out of the night, so to speak. But when a glitch occurred with the "Kierkegaard on the Couch" post, I finally decided to just go more conventional blog readable. So it's…