Charlie Chaplin speaks

I hadn't before seen Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Great Dictator, but it ends with a rousing speech. First, a bit of background from Wikipedia:

Chaplin spent two years developing the script, and began filming in September 1939. He had submitted to using spoken dialogue, partly out of acceptance that he had no other choice but also because he recognised it as a better method for delivering a political message. Making a comedy about Hitler was seen as highly controversial, but Chaplin's financial independence allowed him to take the risk. "I was determined to go ahead," he later wrote, "for Hitler must be laughed at."Chaplin replaced the Tramp (while wearing similar attire) with "A Jewish Barber", a reference to the Nazi party's belief that the star was a Jew. In a dual performance he also plays the dictator "Adenoid Hynkle", a parody of Hitler which Maland sees as revealing the "megalomania, narcissism, compulsion to dominate, and disregard for human life" of the German dictator.
Watching this speech reminds me about how history so often repeats itself.

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Not living with much

I enjoyed looking at this series of photos of Swedish students showing their modest amounts of possessions. I know that I'm no longer a student, and I do have children who have their own collections of things, but I do aspire to have a more portable existence. If I were to move to a small space, the most obvious problem is that I have thousands of paper books, many of them with my hand-written notes inside. If only there were an efficient way to scan all of those pages, to shrink all of them to the size of an external hard drive. Another problem is that I have a workshop full of tools. Last night, I reached into some spare parts and fixed the furnace, so I'm weary of giving away even the boxes of odds and ends, much less the tools that I use to repair things at the house. And what would I do with my musical instruments? I have several guitars, as well as a PA and (once again) boxes of music. Then again, I sometimes imagine the house being destroyed by fire--we all escape with nothing at all, but I do have backup hard drives off-site with all of my writings, photos, movies, financial paperwork.   It would be a disaster, of course, but in this thought experiment it would also be an opportunity to rebuild my collection of possession leaner and meaner.

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HSBC’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Former Prosecutor Neil Barofsky explains that HSBC is too big to fail, just like several other Wall Street banks. The evidence is that prosecutors had the goods on HSBC--it was clear that HSBC knowingly laundered $800 Million in Columbian drug money, but used its political influence to cut a deal to write the whole thing off as a relatively small cost of doing business. As Barofsky explains on Cenk Uygur's show, we need to break up and "neuter" the big banks, but he's not optimistic that this can happen before yet another crash.

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Stunning gun statistics

The following statistics come from an article in the Minnesota Post:

680 Americans were killed accidentally with guns each year between 2003 and 2007. 46 Americans committed suicide with guns each day between 2003 and 2007 Two-thirds of all murders between 2003 and 2007 involved guns. The average number of Americans shot and killed daily during those years was 33. Children in the U.S. get murdered with guns at a rate that is 13 times higher than that of other developed nations.

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