Posts Tagged ‘Idiocracy’
Saturday Links
* Pope Calls for Church Austerity, Wants to Focus on Poor.
Meeting with journalists this morning, Pope Francis laid out his vision for the Catholic church, which includes cutting spending on ornate ceremony and instead spending that money on the poor. He urged excited fellow-Argentines to skip the costly trip to Rome to visit the first non-European Pope in almost 1,300 years, and instead give that money to the poor.
“Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” he told the gathered journalists. He explained the reason he took the name, Francis, after St. Francis of Assissi, was because of St. Francis’s devotion to the poor and love of animal life. On climate change, the Pope remarked, “Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.”
* The rich are different from you and me.
The report, authored by David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha, found that “wealthy interests are keenly focused on concerns not shared by the rest of the American public, like keeping taxes low on capital gains, and often oppose policies that would foster upward mobility among low-income citizens, such as raising the minimum wage.”
* Chicago tried to ban Persepolis? Why? Why?
* The letters of Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee.
* Your Own Private Google: The Quest for an Open Source Search Engine.
* Ricky Gervais: The Office Revisited.
* Idiocracy watch: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a Big Gulp.
* Last Survivor of Plot to Kill Hitler Dies at 90.
Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”
“He got up from his chair,” von Kleist remembered, according to an account by The New York Times, “went to the window, looked out of the window for a moment, and then he turned and said: ‘Yes, you have to do that. A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life.’”
* The dissertation is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
* Why are working conditions for restaurant employees so bad?
Rhetorical Question of the Day
From the Awl: Do you think future generations will look back at this era as the point in human history where the solutions to our problems became impossibly complex while, simultaneously, the consistent and powerful strain of anti-intellectualism foisted on an already suspicious society in an attempt to discredit ideas which might prove detrimental to the interests of large corporations helped encourage the belief that everyone is an expert and an amateur opinion is just as valid as a trained one, and these two developments finally intersected to create a world where “Tell us: How would you fix the oil spill?”-type polls became the norm?
Late Night Shouldn’t-Have-Taken-That-Nap Links
Late night shouldn’t-have-taken-that-nap links.
* Stephen Colbert to guest-edit Newsweek. That’s just weird.
* Yesterday marked the first night in my life where I had any real desire to see The Tonight Show; the Daily Beast has a few highlights. For my part I thought Conan did pretty good, despite some jackass fans who demonstrated that adoration and heckling meet again someplace on the other side. Someday I may even watch the Tonight Show again.
* But you don’t have to take my word for it: Conan’s got the coveted Obama endorsement now, too.
* Anthony Stewart Head is still teasing a Ripper spinoff.
* ‘No Lifeguard on Duty’: empty and abandoned motel pools.
* 75% of Americans now convinced terrorists have superpowers. Advantage: idiocracy.
Ev’ning Links: Slouching Towards Idiocracy
Ev’ning links.
* It is totally, 100% appropriate to have paid product placement on the morning news.
* Slouching towards idiocracy: the L.A. Times is shutting down its book section.
* It hasn’t been a very good week for John McCain. Having successfully goaded Obama into making a tremendously successful overseas trip that has managed to erase any lingering justification for McCain’s own candidacy, he’s now reduced to bitter rants that even a Villager like Joe Klein characterizes as scurrilous and desperate:
John McCain said this today in Rochester, New Hampshire:
This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.
This is the ninth presidential campaign I’ve covered. I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.
* I hadn’t heard very much crowing from early Obamaniacs on the internets, and I’m glad of that, but the netroots should really be breathing sighs of relief that they didn’t get their way about John Edwards:
The National Enquirer spent months chasing John Edwards and digging into his relationship with Rielle Hunter before busting him spending the night in a hotel with the woman and the former Democratic presidential candidate’s alleged love child.
* And The Edge of the American West remembers the Detroit riots, 41 years ago today.
Idiocracy
Slouching towards idiocracy: an energy drink company will be putting out Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator as an actual product, while the Pur water filtration company puts out a new version that will put a lot of flavored crap back into the water you just filtered.
Gerry Canavan 