August 2010 archive

I posted the following on September 4, 2005 at The Dream Antilles and I cross-posted it in various places.  Five years later, there’s really very little I can add to this, so I am re-posting it:

cross-posted from Sum of Change and check out Pam Spaulding’s post at PHB for more thoughts and discussion.

Yesterday we sent cameras to Glenn Beck’s 828 rally and Al Sharpton’s rally and march. We posted a handfull of videos from each. But first, a personal comment, if you don’t mind. My parents and grandparents were civil rights activists (not to mention anti-war activists and labor organizers). On the same grass where we stood yesterday, my mother stood 47 years ago to watch Martin Luther King Jr. declare his dream for the world. I highly doubt anyone will remember yesterday the way my mother remembers 47 years ago.

We will begin with Beck’s event::

happy thoughts for you…..

In 2004, I saw the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 for the first time on an internet video.  The building had not been hit by a plane, had insignificant damage from falling debris from the other two big towers that fell, and had spotty fires burning asymmetrically across a handful of its 47 or so floors.  Out of nowhere, it suddenly dropped its four-square topmost corners symmetrically and descended rapidly to the ground as if the entire supporting matrix of steel I-beams had not just weakened according to local areas of damage, but had vanished entirely and instantaneously:

Although I knew instantly — by my own cognitive recognition hardware — exactly what I was watching from seeing many similar demonstrations before, I watched the video again another 25 times, or so, out of sheer incredulity at the implications (eliciting the subsequent autonomic re-shuffling upon first viewing), before sitting back in my chair and conceding, “Holy shit!  That is a fucking duck!

Physically, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just about the biggest, strongest Republican of them all, and even mentally, compared to the rest of those idiots, he’s almost a genius. But in a battle of wits against anyone of approximately average intelligence, the Governator has about as much of a chance as Elmer Fudd against Godzilla.

For example, in Arnold’s recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he makes several claims that even a fifth-grader could refute.

Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to public employees who opt to retire at age 55 and are entitled to a monthly, inflation-protected check of $3,000 for the rest of their lives.

Hundreds of the Wall Street Journal’s dim-witted readers accepted this silly claim with pitiful credulity, little suspecting that their all-time favorite action-hero was about to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a left-wing Terminator.