Mike Daisey, seen here herpin’ and a derpin’.
Back when I was a kid, my parents explained Mutually Assured Destruction to me. They thought telling a kid they might be blown up in a nuclear attack (or, more likely, slowly eaten away by fallout radiation) would be a cool thing to do. They said that the Soviet Union was run by a corrupt oligarchy and that I should probably know they might kill everyone I knew at a moment’s notice.
Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This makes no fucking sense because truth is a quality of a statement which describes its factual accuracy and isn’t a human being which might wear shoes. But he might have been trying to point out how easily it is to make false statements and misrepresent the truth compared to the effort required to correct the lies.
Bryan Fischer is a living case study of this phenomenon. He’s the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, which is the organization which collaborated with Texas Governor Rick Perry in throwing their little rain dance / prayer rally last month. He’s also very active on The Twitter, spending maybe an hour or two every day typing out the most dishonest possible way to attack the gays, Muslims, liberals, moderate Republicans, and bears. That’s actual bears, not big gay dudes. He might be the inspiration for Stephen Colbert’s character’s fear and hatred of the godless killing machines.
Ryan LeVin is the 36 year old millionaire jewelry heir who this past weekend got away with murder.
That’s not to say that he was found not guilty in court. He was found guilty of killing two people (they were British businessmen, but let’s not split hairs) and was sentenced to two years of unmonitored house arrest at his parents’ oceanside condo and ten years probation.
So it looks like that nice union thug lady defeated Scott Walker’s boyfriend David Prosser in the state Supreme Court election this week by only 204 votes. And our friend Governor Walker (@GovWalker on Twitter – send him an uplifting message, please) is throwing a hissy fit over it:
Eartha Jane Melzer is a reporter for the Michigan Messenger and has been covering recent “budget repair” legislation in Michigan which almost makes Scott Walker look sane by comparison.
The common conservative response to our recent story on Governor Scott Walker is that it merely proves that Walker has been saying the same thing publicly that he’s been saying privately, and that there was therefore no news value to it. The claim was first made by the Governor himself, when he initially confirmed that it was in fact his voice on the audio recording we posted:
“The thing’s I’ve said are things I’ve said publicly all along. The fact of the matter is people have brought up all sorts of different options and as you saw if you listened to the tape we put that down.”
-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
The Republican governor of Wisconsin is trying to push through legislation which would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. You’ve probably heard about this by now.
In response, thousands of protesters have filled the streets of Madison. Here are some of them:
OK, when I first heard the title of this movie, I thought Moore was going to try to restore Marx and talk about how misunderstood he is by today’s society. Of course I figured it would mostly be about the bailouts and the fatcat bankers and all that stuff, too. But the “love story” bit sounded, at least to me, like there would be some mention of Marx.
Anyway, the reason I thought about Marx was because although he hated capitalism for all the reasons which are pretty well understood, he also kind of loved it at the same time. In only a few decades, the Industrial Revolution had driven advances in technology the net effect of which had been rarely, if ever, seen in human history. So for Marx – at least as I read him – capitalism was this necessary transitional stage which served the purpose of getting us the tools we need to form a more just and equitable society. That’s kind of an important part of his theory of history which is often overlooked. Marx is probably one of the most misunderstood philosophers ever, except maybe for Nietzsche.
Atheist Hobos 