I don't think I'm good at spotting liars. I don't usually recognize the that I've been lied to until after "things just don't add up," and that might be a long time after the lie occurs. I'm almost always surprised when it turns out that my trust was betrayed. This two-minute How-Cast video gives a brisk summary of some some advice that resonates with me. Now I'll just have to see if I'll be able to employ this advice to good effect.
Those torture "not-torture" memos are a bit tedious to read. In this video an enterprising fellow put them to music. Equally catchy and tragic.
[via Colby K. Clark]
Over at The Nation, Naomi Klein interviewed Michael Moore, who has just released his newest movie: "Capitalism: A Love Story." You can hear the entire podcast here. What follows are three excerpts from the interview (Michael Moore speaking):
You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point. . . . Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. . . . [W]hen anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined." Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.
Where can you see a feather fall as fast as a hammer? On the moon. Watch this delightful 1 minute demonstration by astronaut David Scott of Apollo 15:
Bill Maher is distressed about America's lack of capacity to do good things and stop doing bad things. Our mechanism for meaningful change is completely broken.
Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016.What do we need?
a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.I find Bill Maher to be especially insightful--he cuts right through the BS over and over. This particular article by Maher was especially well written.