Keeping up with the odd man out.
Go to comedy central, the daily show section, and look for the clip entitled “rambling man”.
You can see all of bushes speechs in about 30 seconds.
I really wish the daily show, john stewart, steven colbert et al* would release a central repository/dvd of these mashups. I also wish the MSM would learn from the technique.
This one is really good. I *highly* recommend it.
* - Is that the proper usage of et al?
Kind of like Janie’s Got a Gun.. ;-)
Seriously, though, this is gonna be sweet. GaiaGardener (as she has decided to name herself) has a lot of good ideas, and can totally use and contribute to the community of the web. :-)
Check it out, should be good stuff.
On the way home from my internship, I was listening to NPR’s On point. The topic was US spending and the Iraq War: how could we have better spent our 400 billion (estimated over the total time in, and related expenses even when we’re done to push 2 trillion). They first tried to demonstrate in a real way just how much money 1 trillion dollars was. Apparently, if you stacked $100 bills, a $1 trillion dollar stack would be 12 miles high.
But I digress. The main point here is that no one on the show talked about energy. Not the guests, not the callers, not the host. The central issue behind why we care about the middle east, meaning the central issue behind why we got hit on 9/11, meaning the central issue behind why we’re there instead of in afghanistan or korea, and no one talked about it!
I actually called in…but unfortunatley it was a re-run from earlier today.
How can they have not talked about energy? Energy is what our economy runs on. Without cheap energy, everything crashes. The economy. The schools. The law and order. All gone.
You want to know what we could have done to best spend our $400 billion dollars on security? Invest in alternative energy research. The only thing that should’ve counted for the research should have been things we could do on our own land (not even oceans: land) to allow reliable, distributed, afforable energy. We should have set up a acquisition shop to seek out, verify, and fund every technology that could contribute to our energy on shore. Hydrogen fuel injection? Ok. Every different viable alternative to solar? Ok. Industries that support renewable energies, like silicon production? Ok. Smart grids? ok. Have a department which not only reviews technologies and funds viable ones to capacity, but also have a sectoin of that department which seeks to coordinate and integrate those technologies with a goal that every community in America can have cheap, renewable, redundant energy. NO sliver bullets and single points of failure, either. Every community should have multiple types of power generation. The more, the better. Hell, every house. Do that, and not only will you enhance our security 100 fold, but you will also send the economy soaring. Imagined if we could sell our complete, varied energy solution to all the other developed and developing countries in the world. Imagine if, as good will, we could give endless cheap energy to every developing nature in the world, allowing them stop concentrating so hard on surviving and start concentrating on living and learning and growing. Security would no longer be a problem.
$400 billion could literally have saved the world.
To anyone who has ever read What’s the Matter With Kansas, you have a pretty good idea that, long term, tax incentives to draw corporations to your state or town are a really bad idea. The end result is that corporation play states off each other, keep moving jobs, and generally destabalize the country.
Well, this issue has made it into the courts…I think it would be a really good idea to pay attention to this and send a letter to your congressman.
The issue raised in court is that creating a tax incentive is the same as creating a tarrif, just in reverse. Therefore, it impedes interstate commerce, and creates artificially broken competition between the states. All very true.
Perhaps this practice should be banned. We’ll see how it plays out.
