So as predicted, Republicans won in yesterday’s elections, even bigger than expected. It had all the hallmarks of a wave election, with Democrats who had were favored in polls struggling to hold on to seats while Republicans cruised to easy victories. When the dust finally settles, the Senate may have as many as 54 Republicans.
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Wherever there are large amounts of ordinary people’s money, you can be sure that greedy wealthy people are eying it and thinking up clever ways to siphon it away into their own pockets. Money for public schools, pension funds, and Social Security are the prime targets for their rapacity. The assault on the first has been going on for some time with charter schools being a prime vehicle for diverting funds.
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Tavis Smiley has written a book Death of a King about the last year of Martin Luther King’s life where he discusses what I have been arguing for a long time, that King, in the five years after his “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and especially in the last year of life had a much darker view of America, highlighting America’s abuse of power abroad (and condemning the Vietnam war) and its class war at home against the poor, and its endemic racism. His message became much more powerful and because of that he became vilified and marginalized by whites at that time and is ignored now.
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So I voted today, as I always do. However angry I get at the rigged system that is currently in place, I have this unshakeable feeling that I need to go out and vote. But I do understand why some might feel that they cannot in good conscience vote using the lesser-of-two-evils doctrine and I oppose efforts to shame principled non-voters into feeling that they are somehow shirking their civic duty. This is why I never wear the ‘I Voted Today’ sticker that they give me.
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If I were a religious person looking for something to prove the existence of god, I would not waste my time with things like the bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting mechanism or other esoteric phenomena that few other than biologists really understand. I would instead point to the properties of water.
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Today is election day in the US and in his latest investigative report John Oliver points out that while all attention is focused on elections to Congress and the governors races, the real action takes place below the radar in elections for state legislatures where much of the legislation that impacts our daily lives is enacted.
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I had never heard of the app Yik Yak. It is a Twitter-like app that uses GPS location sensors to allow people to post their views (“yaks”) anonymously within a highly limited geographical area of 1.5 miles, thus making it a hyper-local social network. This enables people to comment anonymously on matters of purely local interest. You can read how it works here. The app is particularly popular on college campuses where people can share their opinions on what’s going on in and outside of class.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show goes deep undercover to discover the threats they pose to America and find out what they are really up to.
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Tom Magliozzi, irrepressible co-host with his brother Ray of the highly entertaining call-in radio program Car Talk, has died at the age of 77 from complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
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John Malkovich is one of the most interesting actors around, willing to take on a wide range of characters, thus ensuring that he is impossible to typecast. In yet another weird departure from the norm, he appears in a series of iconic photographs where his carefully posed image replaces that of the main character in it. Photographer Sandro Miller explains that this project was his way of paying homage to the great photographers who inspired him.
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