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maybe if i keep posting from time to time, someone else will eventually

2.2.11 by Tim + 83 comments!

Latest spam highlights- portuguese! If you happen to be looking for “Replicas de relogios famosos com a melhor qualidade,” you know where to look (in the spam comments). Also, “Tired of getting low numbers of useless visitors to your site?”. Judging from the amount of spam here, yes, what this blog clearly needs is a higher number of useless visitors.

Anyways. I am not planning on making any sort of political point here, I just find this funny. Very recently I’ve started reading the news from cnn.com, and I usually skip over titles of articles that seem really uninteresting/unimportant. But when I saw one the other day about the prime minister of Canada visiting the white house I was really curious what sort of things they would talk about, so I checked it out. From http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/01/us.canada/index.html

“Harper and Obama will discuss the bilateral relationship between the North American neighbors and key global issues, according to a White House statement Tuesday.”

Sooooo I laughed for a bit, and then remembered that you can find all of the white house statements on it’s website. So for a little more detail, here is the white house’s statement, in its entirety.

“President Obama will welcome Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada to the White House on Friday, February 4. The two leaders will discuss our important bilateral relationship and key global issues.”

Great Job, Senator Bunning

3.3.10 by LucasWBSmith + 75 comments!

Last night the Senate was preparing to vote to extend unemployment benefits for 30 days. Sounds like a good idea right? Apparently not, Senator Bunning of Kentucky used parliamentary procedure to sink the bill. His argument was that no one is considering how to pay for unemployment benefits, so he decided to leave thousands of Americans hanging in the wind. Have we really gotten to the point where fiscal conservatives are sacrificing the well being of the average American for political points?

It certainly seems so.

The recent halt to unemployment benefits has left 400,000 Americans  without income. That means 400,000 will be unable to afford the basic neccessities. WAY TO GO BUNNING!  Additionally, 7 states have been hit especially hard.

And guess what? Heeeeeeeeeeee is back! Thats right, Senator Bunning is back on the floor holding up the passage of the bill again, hopefully this time he won’t last.

The solution is obvious, get Bunning to leave the room. THAT IS ALL THEY HAVE TO DO. Bunning just has to leave to pee and bang we have unemployment benefits.

The worst part is that the Democrats talked the talk threatening to stay on the floor till the bill is passed. But Bunning call them on their bluff and the DEMOCRATS ended the session. THEY JUST GAVE UP. Its time for the Democrats to stop just talking and start walking. Not just on unemployment benefits, but in general. They must stop compromising and start doing.

Apparently, members of Congress have staged an intervention to help Bunning with his obsessive need to object.

I believe that eventually Bunning will stop and it will be renewed. But why did this even happen? We shouldn’t be debating on whether or not to leave Americans with out income. It should be so simple. The good news is that Senator Bunning is retiring at the end of his term. Probably a good idea because I doubt he would get reelected, since 3,181 of his constituents just lost their benefits.

Here are some articles

http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2010/0302/Seven-states-hit-hard-by-Jim-Bunning-s-delay-on-unemployment-benefits

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/400000-will-lose-jobless-benefits-next-week/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030201150.html?hpid=topnews

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/03/02/jobless.benefits.bill/?hpt=T2

FIND OUT HOW IT EFFECTED YOUR STATE

http://www.nelp.org/page/-/UI/march.PR.chart.pdf?nocdn=1

AND TO TAKE A STAND

http://www.ombwatch.org/node/10802

Glenn Beck at CPAC- Fact Check

2.24.10 by LucasWBSmith

Glenn Beck gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. And I took the liberty of reading and fact checking.

First, Mr. Beck makes an important mistake in his speech; He refers to all progressives as communists. Guess what Glenn? When Republicans ended slavery it was considered progressive, so does that mean that the beloved Republican icon Abe Lincoln was a communist? I think not!

This assumption is a faulty one and because he likens all progressives to communists he flaunts his own shortcomings as a thinking human being.

Mr. Beck also claims that the sole difference between a revolution and an evolution is that “one requires a gun.” At face value Mr. Beck’s arguments seems valid. Generally revolutions are violent and do involve armaments of some kind, but this definition is simple. Revolutions are radical and sudden shifts in power and ideology of government. Evolution on the other hand is what democracy is supposed to do. The constitution was written to be a pliable document, something that will change as needed to serve each generation. If anything our Founding Father’s condoned progressivism and evolution in government.

Mr. Beck also uses a Roosevelt quote where Roosevelt argues that we should only tax or take property for the good of the community. What wrong with that? The Constitution says provide for the general welfare, defense, etc. Those things don’t come cheap. Beck also goes on to claim that it is anti-founding fathers. But remember that the Founding Fathers granted the right to tax because it is a necessity for a government to function.

Mr. Beck proceeds to trash the government for a spiraling debt and incredibly high taxes. Mr. Beck is right we should be addressing these problems. But we must first recover from this economic crisis. Secondly, we must be willing to be taxed; the answer to the deficit isn’t to cut all programs. It is to cut the bad ones, stop adding unnecessary ones, and tax to gain revenue. The problem is the current system needs reform. We need to be progressive in how we handle finances and government.

One of the greatest examples of Mr. Beck’s flawed logic is that he attributes his knowledge and success to reading books at the public library. First, libraries are not free they are paid for via taxes. Secondly, libraries are about sharing things collectively as a community, which is one of the most pure and central tenets of communist philosophy. Put simply all communism is kindergarten gone global.

Beck goes on to oversimplify the Constitution, where he claims that “the only job of the United States government is to save us from bad guys.” Sure provide for the common defense is there. But what about providing for the general welfare? Maybe Glenn skipped that line. Furthermore, The Constitution allows for the federal regulations of interstate commerce, that is tantamount to encouraging the government to do something. Also, the “small government” rhetoric that Mr. Beck uses has been tried; it was called the Articles of Confederation and it failed. The Founding Father’s tried to maintain a small federal government, but it was a disaster. The government could not raise money, inflation skyrocketed, and it created piecemeal state policies because the federal government did not have the authority to act uniformly. That is why the same Founding Fathers came together and drafted the current Constitution, which created stronger and larger federal government.

Mr. Beck then proceeds to dedicate a large portion of his speech to trashing Woodrow Wilson. He attacks him for the Fed, for the income tax, and for taking us into WW1. With the Fed, there are legitimate concerns as to its purpose and it warrants reforms, but Mr. Beck fails to provide any. The income tax is not bad, and I will get to that below. And WW1, we had to fight after the German’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare killed 159 Americans. Mr. Beck says that government should be responsive to the people, Wilson was simply doing what the American people demanded: War.

Mr. Beck then proceeds to attribute the Great Depression to Hoover’s reign of unchecked spending. But that is not true. Hoover was a classic fiscal conservative. He cut taxes but he cut them so much that we had a deficit because revenues were so low. Hoover then failed to act when the economy crashed, making it much worse.

But on top of Beck’s logical fallacies, the progressive movement brought about many important changes that are fundamentally important to America’s democracy.

1. Graduated Income Tax- Yeah I know taxes are “bad”, but it is because of this tax that government works. It also is the fairest tax imaginable, the rich have more money so they can spare the most. People who are poor can’t spare a lot, so the government takes as little as possible.

2. The Roosevelt Administration passed laws that placed minimum standards on the quality of the food we eat, specifically in the meat packing industry. If you want to know more I recommend Upton Sinclair’s”The Jungle”.

3. Roosevelt “busted” trusts to free up markets so that we would have actual free market competition.

4. Pendleton Act- Mandated that 10% of federal offices be given on merit not political connections, a major step forward

5. National Parks

6. Campaign Finance Reform- These laws were recently overturned by the Supreme Court, but were the first laws to attack political corruption

7. Under Wilson, who Beck claims to hate, we passed child labor laws. Who can say now that was a bad idea?

I recommend people go to the following websites:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978060978&grpId=3659174697241980 for the text of Glenn Beck’s speech.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html for info Hoover’s economic policies

http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Preamble because you should probably at least peruse it.

I also recommend taking a US History class.

It just so happens that your blog here is only MOSTLY dead

7.22.09 by Tim + 112 comments!

I think my problem is that I expect coherent thoughts that take more than a paragraph to express, and I expect to get them expressed well before I publish. This generally just prevents me from posting anything at all. So. No more attempts at coherent posts.

The moon really fascinates me. Everyone knows what it is, but it’s one of these things that we just can’t comprehend. Next time you notice the moon’s around, stare at it and comprehend the fact that what you’re staring at is 238857 miles away. Think about how HUGE it’s got to be. (can i make “that’s what she said jokes” on this blog?)

I am vaguely reminded of an incident at Boys State, when we were waiting in the basement of the cafeteria for the hail to stop, and I found myself conversing with someone about climate change, the environment, and natural resources. he explained to me his really interesting view of space exploration- eventually humanity is going to grow off of the planet earth and into colonies on other planets, first in our solar system, and then beyond. He thought of it as a magnificent destiny for us, but I thought it seemed kind of sad, relying on being able to leave behind planets which we’ve effectively destroyed or which have no more resources that hold value to us.

I like to read anti-civilization books sometimes. Anarcho-primitivism is pretty cool i think, even if it’s not ever going to happen just because we want it to. Derrick Jensen in “A Language Older Than Words” wrote an interesting passage i thought… something about how every day he gets up and wonders if instead of writing the next chapter, he should blow up a dam. I’m afraid I’d lean more towards the blowing up a dam side.

suggested anti-civilization reading: Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization (Daniel Quinn), A Language Older Than Words (Derrick Jensen), this one pamphlet I found downtown about how agriculture is bad.

Freenet is a weird concept. First off this is not the Freenet which has wireless hotspots around town (”they’re not free”) this is a network designed to give total privacy to its users. I really think I believe in privacy, but I wasn’t happy with it. Because it was pulling everything off of random other computers, in random pathways where everything is encrypted, it was almost unbearably slow, even for pages that were purely text. what was interesting was what it was used for. A significantly large amount of the websites were either: porn, in french, or about ecoterrorism. So you know, if you ever need information about blowing up dams or monkeywrenching, i can totally show you where to go.

I’m pretty confident in that stream-of-consciousness kind of organization. this was a triumph. just as a test, anyone who reads this should comment so we can get an idea of how often anybody’s checking the blog at this point. THE END

Free Shepard Fairey

3.22.09 by Ruth + 89 comments!

According to this article in … yeah, I don’t really have to tell you what publication … an artist, Shepard Fairey, (who is incidentally most famous for another piece of art) was brought to court this week in Boston for vandalism.

An example of the charges against him:

Here’s something else which was painted on concrete…

…in Berlin, in 1989.  That piece of concrete is now an art gallery.

There are many many many more examples.

Remember the trash cans at Central which had reproductions of famous pieces of art on them?  If you didn’t go to Central, pretend you remember them anyway.  I think we can all agree that that was a pretty awesome idea.  It was an awesome idea because it took blank surfaces and made them interesting.  The difference between that and the examples above is, essentially, the pressence of permission.  As rebelious teenagers, I think we can all agree that permission isn’t important.

If you were considering going out and spraypainting “Free Shepard Fairey” on the sidewalks, you should call me so I can go with you.  Actually, if you are Shepard Fairey you can probably afford both a good lawyer and bail.  Nevermind.

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