I've been rereading old issues of The Avengers from the late 1970s, where the team suffers under government regulation.  While the government (embodied by Henry Peter Gyrich) is clearly presented as a obstructive interloper, the feds have some valid points.  Points that tend to be obscured by iffy writing on both sides of the issue ( Read more... )

I love the look and feel of The Incredibles, but I think the film stumbles with its thematic parts.  The idea that the supers aren't allowed to exercise their special abilities out of jealousy doesn't follow from the film's backstory, where we see people complaining about Mr. Incredible's use of excessive force (or his basic heroism, in the case of ( Read more... )

Activist David Suzuki says that although environmentalism has won many battles, it is losing the war for human survival. It is losing the war, because it ignores both public and private perception. Environmentalism has won only legislative battles, never changing the mindsets that make such battles neccessary. Such problematic mindsets have ( Read more... )

Georgia's Congressman Jack Kingston dismisses the possibility of climate change, because he believes science is essentially unreliable. As proof, he claims that climate experts in the 1970s warned of an impending Ice Age, while modern experts warn of Global Warming. Scientists can't get their stories straights, so why should we let scientists ( Read more... )

The U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled that one's "right to remain silent" when questioned by the police only works if you explicitly announce your intent to invoke it ( Read more... )

I've got lots of thoughts running around inside my head, but am not having much success fleshing them out into real posts. I'm giving up on development, and just throwing out a few rough comments:

This weekend, I was able to compare some 1960s Avengers comic issues to some just-published Avengers issues. The difference in tone is stark. In the ( Read more... )

The U.S. government has escalated its traditional interference in the economy. (Some) business leaders are upset. Upset enough to promote Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. There is allegedly a movement for productive members of society to protest the government's escalation by "going Galt ( Read more... )

Salon also reports that Vice President Cheney has clearly implicated top Congressional Democrats in the White House's criminal surveillance program.

It's looking more and more as if our government needs to be burned to the ground, to let us start building afresh.

Regardless of your opinion of the election results, you may find interest in the Orlando Sentinel's graphic report on Florida's county-by-county results. The majority of Florida's counties voted for McCain/Palin, but most of the dense populations went for Obama/Bide (Jacksonville being the exception...wonder if there's a connection with locations ( Read more... )

Considering the idea that Obama would make a bad President because he wants to raise our taxes, I direct your attention to a graphical assessment of McCain's and Obama's two proposed tax plans:


( Read more... )