dear clusterflock
Best Pixar movie.
Hope.
Dear Clusterflock - forgive this indulgence but I wanted to share something tonight with a couple of friends here who had asked me to finish a thought.
Unfortunately my site seems to be down for the count and I’ve had to post elsewhere. Once things are up and running I promise I’ll clean up this little mess!
[...] Socio-political isolationism.
And so I don’t care where you fall in the political spectrum as I know that nearly half of you will make the wrong choice this year. You always do. I’ve lingered in the shadows of this codified cynicism for long enough to know how it all works.
But something just feels different this year. Something is on the wind - out of place even. I can’t quite pin it down.
It smacks of Hope.
At the risk of tipping my hand I’ll admit that the notion is foreign to me [...]
thoughts before the election
1.
The failures of the last eight years are not a peculiarity of Bush; they are a failure of Republican ideology. When you stitch a party together from anti-intellectual Christianism and tax cuts for the rich, this is what you get.
2.
The repudiation of McCain-Palin isn’t simply a repudiation of George Bush, it’s a repudiation of Ronald Reagan.
3.
This is the easiest election you’ll have the luxury of being involved with. If you like the way the last eight years have gone, vote for John McCain. If you want to undermine the chances of the best candidate being elected, vote for a third party. After the last eight years, it’s as simple as that. 2004 was the last time anyone had the luxury of thinking otherwise.
Daryl, Deron–I Told You Not To Run Over Those Squirrels!
Texas leads the nation in deaths from vehicle/animal crashes.
What did I tell you?? It’s like running with scissors.
A Sobering Thought
So my school used an internal mail system/bulletin board system which kept a log of all the time spent online using the school’s email or message boards. As of today, my total time spent on this system over the past four and a half years is 8 weeks, 1 day, 18 hours and 40 minutes. And that’s purely active time, since the system logs you out after a few minutes of inactivity.
I propose that Facebook and MySpace institute a similar mechanism, that when one logs off, it would say “You have spent x weeks, y days, etc. on Facebook.”
I think that faced with such an exorbitant number, everyone would become more mindful of the time spent online, and perhaps a bit more conscious of their usage. If one knew one spent four hours on Facebook in one day alone, perhaps one would consider making some changes. Remember reading? Painting? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to spend a lot of time online, rather that much like watching T.V., most people are unaware of just how much time they are using.
George Will
not speaking kindly of John McCain.
From the Washington Times, August 22
(I know of this because of WashingtonMonthly.com.)
“Mr. McCain will attend a fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton on Monday, the day the Democrats’ convention opens, bringing together top leaders from the Los Angeles business and entertainment communities, according to an invitation for the event obtained by The Washington Times.
Show business publication Variety reported that Angie Harmon, David Zucker, Jon Cryer, Lionel Chetwynd, Craig T. Nelson, Jon Voight, Craig Haffner and Robert Duvall are among those expected to attend.”
Robert Duvall should be ashamed of himself.
Don’t let flocking make you stupid.
Y’all? Sorry I haven’t been around much. I’m doing this work-and-school thing, you know? And all my blog-reading time has been completely soaked up. But I did want to respond to something from over in yesterday’s open thread, where Jake wrote,
I mean this in all seriousness, since I was seven when Dukakis coughed up a 30 point lead. Is this the beginning of a meltdown, or is this something where people who see this as ridiculous on its face [are] just having a really good time with this?
I’m in Spain and kind of self-select my media through RSS. What kind of serious discussion is this getting Stateside?
and Cindy replied,
Jake, after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, it takes a lot of stupid to bring on a meltdown. I will say, though, that I was happy to find colleagues at work discussing the interview when I arrived today, and it was featured on NPR this morning.
So. At school on Tuesday, in a class that has a different guest speaker every week, we had a great session with Ethan Zuckerman, whose basic argument was that while the Internet provides us with this unprecedented ability to exchange ideas with people from all over the world, in fact what tends to happen is that we hang out online with people who have very similar lifestyles, values, and opinions as ourselves. And so sometimes we don’t realize that everybody else doesn’t think the way we do until it’s too late. He gave as an example the profound astonishment and disappointment of Howard Dean supporters in 2004. Insert your candidate of choice here. Read more
Nothing Left to Lose…Except….
Pakistani public opinion was already incensed by the U.S. airstrikes into its territory, which have intensified over the last few weeks and have killed civilians as well as militants. That turned to uproar after the first ground assault by U.S. commandos onto its soil earlier this month, in South Waziristan, another part of the tribal territory that runs along the Afghan border. The country was stunned over a New York Times report this week President Bush had secretly authorized the new policy of incursions into Pakistan in July.
It’s just an outrage (sadly one of many) that this administration, in its lame last days, would risk so much for the potential feather of a big “kill” that would benefit McCain and a bankrupt party. There are new people running Pakistan, and what a wonderful start we are getting at enlisting their help. I guess Bush hasn’t heard that they are a nuclear power, and this makes “kick ass and take names later” diplomacy much more dangerous. I recall Republicans decrying Obama’s notion of going into Pakistan to get Bin Laden–but of course Obama’s comment referred to knowing exactly where Bin Laden was, taking him out, and then smoothing the ruffled feathers–not just generally going in whenever for a look-see and blowing up a bunch of crap up without achieving much.
the best TV show ever
Jason made a post yesterday about the best TV shows and followed it up today with a poll he created. I know we kind of talked about this recently. I’m still curious what people think.