Now that I’ve had a chance to see both the new Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and J. Edgar, I want to make some comments before they’re out on video already for a year or two. It’s so rare that I get to see Oscar-potential movies while they’re actually in the theaters (last year, I had [...]
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So, there’s a bit of drama going on in atheist circles dubbed “gelatogate.” The Angry Astronomer has a decent, and not very angry, explanation of the deal on his blog; but in brief, here’s the deal: Christian local businessman pops over to the annual free “Skepticon” conference to see what’s going on. Thinking, understandably so, [...]
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Had an interesting day last week with a significantly important coincidence: So we spent two hours at work last Wednesday doing our annual insurance benefits review. For two hours, with our insurance broker and our Aflac rep, we discussed how much our insurance costs. How many thousands our deductible is. What’s in-network and what’s out. [...]
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Unfortunately, despite what the conservative-leaning Supreme Court thinks (vis-à-vis “Citizens United v FEC”), corporations aren’t people. They are a collection of people, that, like any collection of people, make a gestalt that is very different than the sum of its parts. To claim to not be able to analyze and critique (and judge ethically) corporations as a separate thing because they’re made of people, is utterly meaningless. By that rationale, nothing could be said about anything within the realm of human culture and creation because, after all, it’s all made by, or made up of, people. Like all forms of human culture and its production, corporations can — and should — be analyzed and critiqued as a concept that acts separate and apart from humanity in general. Why? …
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This has, without a doubt, been an absolutely terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Probably the worst one, evah! (The only, and I mean only, bright spot was I finally got my Masters Degree in English . . . and even that’s pending until next year when I pay for and turn in super-expensive [...]
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Once again, it’s the season where I’m absolutely inundated with requests — no, demands – that I vote. I’m told it’s my civic duty. I’m told in haughty, self-righteous, proud acrimony that if I don’t vote, I have no right to complain, as if my freedom of speech is revoked should choose to not select [...]
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(Update: As usual, Roger Ebert does a far better job discussing the issue; and, he has person experience with it.) As I write this, the last of the Chilean miners, trapped underground for more than two months, has been rescued successfully! I can’t even imagine the trials they must have faced, and the joy and [...]
READ MORE »This is a must-see video where Lawrence Lessig gets to the heart of the problem with our current government and what must be done to return or republic to something resembling a truly representational democracy (whether that’s a good or bad thing is a different topic). (It starts looking like a video all about youth [...]
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Roger Ebert once again reminds us he’s a journalist who happens to excel at reviewing movies. He wrote a recent article,”BP’s tree fell on my lawn,” in which he details exactly all the ways in which BP was negligent and irresponsible. But perhaps even worse, how they gamed the system to look victimized. How they [...]
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(yeah, I’ve never claimed to be a blog title expert.) Peter Schiff wrote an article titled, “Why Not Another World War.” It’s actually an interesting article in which he explains how we all agree that World War II ended The Great Depression and sparked the greatest American economic trend, so why not have another? This Gulf War [...]
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Coming up in this post: Glenn Beck and his perversion of history, logic, and data. Stay tuned. There’s a hilarious video I can no longer find of a British comedy show sketch. Four stereotypical young anarchists come into a messy flat, and one of them passes out copies of Marx and Engles’ Capital. He says [...]
READ MORE »Hawaii’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle is a giant [insert pejorative of choice here]. She recently vetoed a state bill that would grant equal rights to gays via civil unions, that straights get to enjoy through marriage. Note that this bill was passed in both the state’s House and Senate when she says: “It would be [...]
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Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet: “Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative (Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)” “When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, [...]
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Oh my! It’s hard to argue with that cartoon! Look how evil and scary unions are. Are you an American who believes unions are organized extortion, protecting the lazy and demanding luxuries like Bon-Bons for workers? Please take 30 minutes of your day to listen to the 1st half of this Small World podcast for [...]
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If there’s anything Enron, the West Virginia mine tragedies, AIG and Goldman Sachs have taught us is that corporations care about safety, employees, doing the right thing, because capitalism and the mystical magical “invisible hand of the market” encourages corps and their owners to not put profit above all else! Oh, wait…. “A Smoking Gun [...]
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It’s Everybody Draw Muhammad Day today! Because depicting Muhammad is severe enough of a crime to fundamentalist Muslims that people who have done so have been attacked, beaten, even received death threats. PZ Myers at Pharyngula posted “Violence is not free speech”, decrying the asinine violence and includes a video of a Danish cartoonist being [...]
READ MORE »I’m going to keep this short, because I want to mainly present this potentially interesting documentary in the works: “Skipping Sunday School“: I’m amused and annoyed by the old and ridiculous canard of Pascal’s Wager used at the end of the clip. Spoken by the guy who throughly didn’t believe that a person could be good without the indoctrination [...]
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Marxist criticism of the capitalist system says that it’s rife with contradictions. I want to spend a few minutes discussing what I see is one of the biggest, overarching contradictions at the very foundations of capitalism. In short: capitalism has forced us to live in a world in which humans, (who presumedly control society, economy, [...]
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First, a little story: I’ve been a huge fan of SF author Steven Brust since circa 1988 when Taltos came out. (I didn’t know at the time that was not the first in the “Vlad Taltos” series, but it worked out OK.) After becoming a fan, I discovered Brust was a self-described Trotskyist. Being in [...]
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I have in the past, for several years now, used the terms “corporatocracy” and “oligarchy” in describing the form of government we have here in the United States of America. I’ve used these terms because ever since the Founding Fathers made it so that the New World aristocracy–the white, land owning men–controlled government, we’ve had [...]
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