JimBlog.net

The Onion.com makes me belly laugh every time I visit. Here are some favorite headlines gleaned from a recent stumble thru the site, to encourage you to visit, and laugh:

Bush Vows To Remove Toxic Petroleum From National Parks
CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department
Astronauts Suffer Agonizing, High-Pitched [...]

infowars.com
For the past two weeks I’ve been listening to Alex Jones daily. This is the Austin, Texas radio journalist and activist who has remained focused for longer than anyone in the media on exposing the drift of our American experiment in democracy toward tyranny. Special concerns of Jones and his guests include 9/11, [...]

Sin blinds.
Power corrupts.
God loves.
Truth shines.
The battle rages on.
The darkness
of misapprehension
is a fog
of war.
All souls
are soldiers,
knowingly
or not
willingly
or not.
Every mind, a moral agent.

netflix.com page for film
imdb.com page
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

No End In Sight is a well-made feature-length documentary film which reviews the mistakes made by the Bush Administration in Iraq. I just finished watching it, and it prompted me to write the following observations.
The biggest frustration I have with Bush is that he and his dwindling followers convince themselves [...]

America, why not take back our airwaves for neighborhood radio stations?
PROBLEM:
Radio stations across America are being consolidated quickly into fewer and fewer large multi-national corporations. The local voice of local radio is drowned out by ClearChannel, Sirius and XM satellite radio, and even NPR’s local voice is abdicated more and more to the national [...]

UPDATE: Now that the event has finished, the archiving begins. You can still hear all the testimony at the links below. But Democracy Now! is devoting a portion of their hour long show every day this week to rebroadcasting portions of it. Go to democracynow.org for more.
Iraq Veterans Against the War
warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008

You owe [...]

Corporations have brought great amounts of inventiveness and positive change to Planet Earth. But at what cost? And if it will soon be too late to fix the global damage due to CO2 and other pollutants, why is Exxon attempting to delay the inevitable changes that must happen in order for the human [...]

If the dictator is perfectly benevolent and infinitely wise, then dictatorship is to be preferred over democracy.
If the dictator rules in a laissez-faire fashion regarding his subjects’ free moral agency, no one would rebel against him; there would be no motive for revolutionary regime change.
If the dictator had omnipotent power, but only ever chose to [...]

Having 66,000 pages of tax code is a powerful smoke-screen for the Federal Reserve/IRS’s sleight-of-Invisible-Hand, enabling the power-knowledge of “what does the law mean?” to be reserved to a shadowy priesthood of tax lawyers and high-level economics gurus. Who knows these people? When do they get questioned by journalists on our national news [...]

“What this suggests about the people running America is far worse than if they were simply malevolent super-geniuses: They don’t know the backstory and couldn’t care less. It’s as though we’re riding in the back seat of a car driven by people who demanded the wheel but aren’t sure what the gas pedal does or [...]