Strategic Marketing Dude specializing in launching new software products. Aging guitar hacker. Currently working on launching a new Rich Cloud Service.
Note how the largest decrease is in the Health segment. When you mouse over the big red square you find that this is a decrease in Medicaid funding to the States. Hmmm. Letting the States fend for themselves in figuring out how to pay for a Federal Mandate like Medicaid. I guess that is one way to go.
History, Distilled
Frank Hurley, courtesy Scott Polar Research Institute The polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
People don’t travel like they used to. The Associated Press reports that five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring a hut in the Antarctic that was used a century ago by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
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How brilliant is this speech? From the movie Network - done over 30 years ago (1976):
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Howard Zin, may his memory be a blessing, was like a laser that cut through the pile of hubris that passes for political debate. I have to admit that I only discovered him recently, but I miss him already. Here is a posting of some of his commentary.
"A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught….
Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, 30 years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.
Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.
Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that — not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor — is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.
If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there — the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances” — do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth."
Read that last one again. If we understand that the Government does not have our interests at heat then we are on a course towards truth.
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Very funny captions under photos of people in modern and post-modern architectural settings.
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A very cool app which lets you visualize moving through the universe at different scales. From the smallest sub atomic particle to the largest galaxies. Fun.
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Howard Zinn died yesterday. Here is an obituary.
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