Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). “I’m offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering.”
Pain free animals for farming. I can’t forsee any possible problems there…
AT&T was happy to sign up as many iPhone customers as they could. Their mentality was probably very similar to gyms who sign up as many people as they can in January when everyone makes their New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Gym are packed the first few months after January but then there’s a drop-off in attendance, because people tend to slack off
In fact, far from being New Years’ Resolution Gym people, iPhone users are probably using their iPhones to stream music at the gym. All the more data for AT&T to try and avoid handling.
Krugman, writing in a blog post, notes the same utterly detached form of group insanity that Joe Klein observed at a recent Arkansas town hall:
The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.
Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.
At least on the point of the communist nonsense (and, if you haven’t been following the output of the nuthatch: Obama is secretly larding his White House with Marxists), I think we can parse the madness pretty damned easily. The first signs of it emerged from the fact that various high-level advisors who report only to the President are commonly referred to in the popular media as “Czars.” That must refer to some kind of a Marxist, right? Why, there are more “Czars” in the Obama administration than in Old Russia! Where there was one… and the more frequent english spelling there is actually, uh, “Tsar.” But let’s take it at fully idiotic face value: never mentioned or grasped is the seemingly equally critical fact that Obama’s is the first administration since Reagan (whose team seemingly popularized, but didn’t invent, the term “Czar” in its modern US political usage) that has actually stopped using the term at all. Early on during the transition period, the administration went out of its way to put a stop to the common usage, going so far as getting out there and providing quotes that made it into various stories, such as this one in Politico, which specifically note that:
“Obama aides say that Browner will not be called a “czar,” a term they dislike. They say she will simply focus like a laser beam on energy-reform issues, which the president-elect has named as a top priority and one of the linchpins of his economic recovery plan.”
Of course, the media positively loves the term. And continued to use it. Even when specifically corrected:
Reporter: On Ken Feinberg, I think that he’s maybe the 20th czar-type position you’ve named.
Gibbs: No, I think the title is “special master.”
And now fans the flames of this nonsense by failing to mention any of this, ever. And act as though this is the first administration EVAR to have such positions and to call them something like “Czars”, and it is all so much more evidence of secret Marxism in the Obama administration.
Secondly, that “Something” of Krugman’s post is largely personified in the form of one Glenn Beck. Who holds particular disdain for one Van Jones, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). See, absolutely no mention of “Czar” in there anywhere. Why, that gets us one closer to the number of Tsars around in the time of the Romanovs. In fact, I think we can all probably agree that Jones is a secret Marxist because Color of Change, an organization he co-founded has, as of this moment, successfully peeled off no fewer than 57 advertisers from Beck’s show. Clearly, only a secret Marxist would do such a thing, and a grateful nation owes Glenn Beck much for so selflessly pursuing this issue… That most of those advertisers still have contracts with FOXnews is troubling, but at least it’s a start. One might think that there’s a good MSM article in there somewhere, tracking the various personal vendettas that the right-wing echo chamber turns into grist for the mill. But, no, not interested. It’s just a “strange thing we’re observing on our various excursions flying across the hinterlands. Wonder what that’s all about?” Or, more succinctly:
“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”
God help us if we ever get a functional media class. People might actually learn something. Starting with those people in the newly functional media class.
“My fellow Americans, we say that healthcare is a right of all citizens. The other party says that it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you agree with them that healthcare is a privilege, not a right, then vote for them. We would like to persuade you to join us, but if we can’t, then we are going to defeat you.
"Decades ago our opponents tried to block Social Security and Medicare, using the same bogus arguments that they are using today against healthcare reform. They said Social Security and Medicare would bankrupt the country. They were wrong. Once we fix the cost inflation of our broken medical sector, with some minor tweaks Social Security and Medicare can be made solvent forever.
"Decades ago, our opponents said that Social Security and Medicare would turn the United States into a fascist or communist police state. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And not only are they wrong, they are hypocritical. Many of our opponents who claim absurdly that universal healthcare will bring tyranny to the U.S. have defended some of the greatest assaults on civil liberties and the rule of law in American history during the previous administration.
"They can draw a Hitler mustache on me. They can draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, for all I care. They are wrong and we are going to defeat them.
"We won the elections and we are the majority. We would like to build the biggest consensus possible, but progress is more important than consensus. Our job is to help the American people, not split the difference between right and wrong by giving a veto to the party that the American people have rejected.
"In this fight, as in earlier struggles, powerful interests are opposed to the needs of the people. In the 19th century, we the people defeated the Southern slave owners, freed the slaves and saved the nation. In the 20th century, while fighting alongside many other nations to save the world from militarism and totalitarianism, we the people here at home tamed the corporations for a generation and fought segregation based on race, gender and, more recently, sexual orientation.
"Today the campaign for affordable healthcare as a right, not a privilege, is opposed by powerful interests in the medical and insurance industries. They seek to deceive and confuse you. And they seek to bribe or intimidate your elected representatives into serving their will rather than the needs of the public.
"They may win this battle. They may win the next. But we will never stop fighting for the needs of the many against the greed of the few. For more than 200 years, from the time we threw off the tyranny of the British empire and established our republic, we have worked to realize the spirit of ‘76 on this continent and in the world beyond. The enemies of progress have money on their side. We have history on ours.”
Lemkin 