Scooped! Digital Legacy Will Shape Future

The editor-in-chief of Mashable just published an opinion on CNN about our future, and how being recorded and published will leave so much information for future generations.

Of course, that's old news to ZVTS readers.  Back in early July, we covered that subject.  And for the most part, came to the same conclusions.  While there will be plenty of noise and useless detail (your My Little Pony phase will be recorded right alongside your Bad Boys Are Fun season), we will emerge as fully chronicled people.  Our values and our culture will be referenced, the ultimate time capsule.  Dates, pictures, blogs and websites can exist forever.  Google will someday be the next ultimate information source, as the Internet generation ages and is replaced.

History is a mighty thing, and we should remember we are part of it.  Pavarotti, Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama, John Williams, The Godfather, To Kill A Mockingbird, Stephen King, Michael Jackson, Star Wars, Princess Di... all of those live with us today.  Thanks to the Internet and relatively cheap storage, they will exist in perfect detail for people hundreds of years from now.  The information we have collected, the scientific breakthroughs that come out, they will never be erased.  We will never have to start our learning over.  I still say that will be one of the ultimate marvels of our generation.  We just said it way before Adam Ostrow, so he is officially scooped.

Digging It

Archaeologists in Austria say they have discovered a large, well-preserved school for Roman gladiators.

The remains of the school, at a site east of the modern capital, Vienna, were found using radar imagery.

The school was part of a Roman city which was an important military and trade outpost 17 centuries ago.

Though excavations have yet to begin, the radar images show thick walls surrounding the compound which contained 40 small cells for fighters.

There is also a training area and a large bathing area in the Carnuntum ruins.

This is an enormous find, and another chance to recreate how gladiators lived. Seventeen centuries seems like a long time, but it is just a blip for those who can reach out and touch the walls, walk the floors, and know what it is like to stand in the training field of a gladiator. There is a lot of work to be done, but the emphasis is on the quality of the preservation. We could learn a lot.

I feel a sudden craving to go watch History Channel.

We Don't Need No Education...

We just need her thought control.

Painting herself as a "constitutional conservative" Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann told Sen. Jim DeMint's forum Monday that if elected president she would look to get rid of the Department of Education, among other things.


"Because the Constitution does not specifically enumerate nor does it give to the federal government the role and duty to superintend over education that historically has been held by the parents and by local communities and by state governments," she said, responding to a question by DeMint, a popular figure among the tea party movement.

Another item on the chopping block: The Affordable Care Act.

People "see that the current government is acting outside the bounds of the constitution. Probably the most obvious would be this, Obamacare and the individual mandate that is unconstitutional and is currently contained in Obamacare," she said.

Throughout the question and answer, Bachmann highlighted her understanding of the Constitution and the need to return to a limited federal government.

"And when I'm working with the Congress of the United States, my guiding principle will be that the government works best when it acts within the limitations of the Constitution," she said. "The current president of the United States has failed to demonstrate an understanding."

For her next trick, after getting rid of corporate taxes and the federal government, Michele Bachmann will just get rid of America, period.  The resulting city-states will squabble among themselves for resources, but wars will mostly be prevented by regularly held Olympic contests.

Preferably ones near large pits you can kick Persian diplomats into.

I had no idea Bachmann was running on the Hunger Games ticket.

They Blinded Themselves With Science

Over in the Village Voice this weekend the great Roy Edroso takes on the right-wing blogosphere's lame defense of "anti-science" Republicans, and pulls a grand total of zero punches, especially on their defense of Rick Perry.

"In no sense that the ordinary person would understand the term is Rick Perry 'anti-science,'" asserted National Review's Rich Lowry. "He hasn't criticized the scientific method, or sent the Texas Rangers to chase out from the state anyone in a white lab coat."

In fact, said Lowry, "Perry's website touts his Emerging Technology Fund as an effort to bring 'the best scientists and researchers to Texas.'" As if that weren't convincing enough, he also pointed out that Perry's home state "has a booming health-care sector," which proves Perry's devotion to science much as Texas' record drought might prove his devotion to dehydration.

Lowry admitted Perry has a "somewhat doubtful take on evolution," but explained that it "has more to do with a general impulse to preserve a role for God in creation than a careful evaluation of the work of, say, Stephen Jay Gould." Also, lots of Americans don't think man came from no monkey, neither. So Perry has great motives for his anti-evolution stand: God, and possible election to the Presidency.

By contrast, said Lowry, liberals only believe in evolution because they hate God. "Science is often just an adjunct to the Left's faith commitments," he wrote. "A Richard Dawkins takes evolutionary science beyond its competence and argues that it dictates atheism... They are believers wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of science while lacking all the care and dispassionate reasoning we associate with the practice of it." Scientists, huh? Rich Lowry will tell them what science is!

Ridiculous as this is, Lowry's colleague Jonah Goldberg managed, as is his wont, to make it worse.

"You only struck a glancing blow at my biggest peeve about the whole anti-science thing," Goldberg told Lowry: "Why does the Left get to pick which issues are the benchmarks for 'science'?"


What? one is tempted to ask, but Goldberg went on: "Why can't the measure of being pro-science be the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the existence of fetal pain?"

Because the measure of pro-science has to do with widely accepted scientific principles, not "Whatever we want science to mean so we can attack President Obama."   Other countries laugh at us when in 2011 we have people running for the presidency that openly question evolution and climate change despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists, and the fact that is is widely accepted among scientists internationally, and in the case of evolution, has been for centuries.

Just because you don't want to believe it doesn't change the facts and evidence.  It doesn't make being challenged on your stance against the facts "persecution".  It means if you're a scientist, you should be able to defend your position in a scientific manner.

And when scientists do this and present reams of evidence supporting evolution and climate change, that evidence is ignored.  Instead, we get that anti-evolutionists and climate deniers are the "true" scientists because they believe the evidence supports their theories.  I could say the moon is made of delicious cheese too, and I could call anyone who challenged me a persecuting monster, but it doesn't mean the moon is made out of delicious cheese.

At some point, you actually have to be right on science, and ignoring the facts means you lose the fight automatically.  Dig?

Oh and yes, Edroso takes on all that plus "black people are intellectually inferior!"  It's a good read.

Getting Serious On Syria, Part 2

Meanwhile in Syria, President Bashar Al-Assad's bloody crackdowns continue.

Syrian security forces have killed at least 20 protesters since the European Union expanded its sanctions in response to President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on dissent.

At least two people died today in the central town of Talkalakh, in the Homs governorate, while several people were wounded in the northern province of Idlib, Mahmoud Merhi, head of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, said by phone from Damascus. Eighteen people were killed yesterday in Homs, Idlib and the Hama governorate, he said.

Nine people, including an army officer and five soldiers, were killed and 17 injured when a “terrorist group” ambushed a military bus in the central area of the country, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said yesterday. Security forces killed three people after pursuing the attackers, the news service said, citing an unidentified military official. 

The EU has stepped up sanctions over the weekend, but that's only made the response from Al-Assad that much worse.  Not sure how long this will keep up in Syria, but something's going to give and shortly.  Of the big five UN Security Council nations, Russia is the one most in Syria's corner, but I can't imagine that will keep up for much longer either given the crackdowns being stepped up in response to sanctions.

We'll see where this goes, but Al-Assad can't have much longer.

StupidiNews!

• Thousands of residenst near Austin, Texas are waiting for the all clear to return to their homes as firefighters battle a massive wildfire.
• British officials are looking into claims that terror suspects were rendered to Libya for detention and torture.
• Archaeologists are exploring the Cahokia Burial Mounds site in Illinois for clues to the fate of early Native Americans from 1000 years ago.
• Rick Perry faces a gerrymandering trial as Texas Democrats accuse the Governor of engineering Latinos out of Congress.
• Intel wants laptop makers to use its chips to create super-light "ultrabooks" to compete with Apple's MacBook Air.

Last Call

We end Labor Day tonight with this E.J. Dionne piece on the end of Labor Day as we know it.

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

I hope he does.  But even the idea that labor can create is anathema to the Republican worldview.  Today, we celebrate the American worker.  The other 364 days of the year, we celebrate the Almighty Job Creator Class that owns us.  And even that one day is too much for some.

Hope everyone had a good day today.

It's A Teenage Wage Land

Raise your hand if you think the problem with our economy right now is that teenage workers making minimum wage are in fact making too much money. Guess what?  That's exactly what FOX News analyst Gary B. Smith believes.



In Smith's world we could employ a hell of a lot more cheap teenage wage slave labor for peanuts if we got rid of the minimum wage. Stupid workers wanting to be paid! CUT TAXES!  BLARG!

Republicans Drop A Special Delivery

Here's an example of the Republican jobs program: a US Postal Service on the verge of collapse in mere months and the GOP is happy to see it go.

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances. 

Yeah, and the odds of that are pretty much next to zero.  Add postal carriers and mail sorters to the list of evil, immoral government employees and retirees that are the bane of America's existence and must be made to pay.  Meanwhile, let's eliminate corporate taxes!

Seriously, Republicans now have the opportunity to extract even more concessions from middle-class America in order to transfer untold billions to the top of the pyramid.  But the problem is all those welfare queens delivering your mail, right?

[Postmaster General] Donahoe’s hope is to cut $20 billion of the $75 billion in annual costs by 2015. To do that, he wants to close many post offices and slash the number of sorting facilities to 200 from 500 and trim the agency’s work force by 220,000 people, from its current 653,000. (A decade ago, the agency employed nearly 900,000.)

Wait, we've already cut 250,000 postal workers over the last decade and now we have to cut 220,000 more?  You're telling me the problem in America is that we can't afford a postal service?  Seriously?  It's almost like massive tax cuts are a problem in the long run or something.  Here's the kicker:

Meanwhile, Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says the pension proposals would amount to an unjustifiable bailout that would not solve the agency’s underlying problems. He is pushing a bill that would create an emergency oversight board that could order huge cost-cutting and void the postal service’s contracts — a proposal that not just the unions, but Senators Carper and Collins oppose. 

That's the backbreaker, right there.  If that's allowed to pass, then Republicans will use the oversight board to void all government worker provisions and fire millions in an effort to privatize and monetize as many government services as possible.  It'll also mean the end of organized labor in America, for good.

And that's the real memo to be delivered.  PS, $75 billion a year, the entire bill for the Postal Service, is roughly one quarter of the average yearly cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last nine years.

But what we really need is more tax cuts.

Flaming Bank Statement

In which an artist shuts down stupid cops with a dose of common sense:

Twice they've come to investigate why the 41-year-old Eagle Rock artist is painting an image of a bank building going up in flames.

Schaefer had barely added the orange-and-yellow depiction of fire shooting from the roof of a Chase Bank branch when police rolled up to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street on July 30.

"They told me that somebody had called and said they felt threatened by my painting," Schaefer said.

"They said they had to find out my intention. They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting."

No, Schaefer said. He explained that the artwork was intended to be a visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy.

A terrorist certainly would not spend hours on a public sidewalk creating an oil painting of his intended target, he told the officers.

Not one visit.  Two visits.  Twice he had to answer subtle questions such as whether he intended to blow up a bank.  Because his art is slated to hang in a gallery, but made someone uncomfortable.  This is as depressing as it is stupid, which ranks a solid "Pretty Damn" on the Stupid-O-Meter.

A visual metaphor for how the banks burned us, and they just don't see it.

Happy 65th, Freddie!

Today would have been Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday.  Many remember him from Bohemian Rhapsody or maybe even the Flash Gordon theme (ahhahhhhh!).  His popularity often excluded him from the "classically sound" musicians, a mistake the he took with as much grace as possible.  A talented singer, he was really one of the best composers of our time.  He took risks and accomplished the true mark of success - his music transcended genre.

My friend Kate posted this in Google+ and I  knew I had to share it.

The GOP Assault On Voting

I firmly believe that the Republican war on voting is the biggest political story of 2011.  Nothing else comes close to the far-reaching and profound effects of the GOP efforts to reshape the electorate to suit their needs.  TPM's Ryan Reilly has an excellent piece recapping the Republican assault on voting rights in 2011 at the state and federal level.

It all started in January, as many new Republican state legislators who had been swept into statehouses across the country in the 2010 elections started pushing like-minded legislation soon after they took office.

"These bills started popping up everywhere and what started as a trickle almost seemed like a flood," Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told TPM.

Altogether this year, 20 states which did not have voter ID laws and 14 states that already had non-photo ID laws have considered legislation requiring citizens have a photo ID to vote, according to the latest figures from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Of those 34 states which considered voter ID legislation, six of them enacted laws: Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

It's impressive on some level.  In just eight months, Republicans in 34 states pushed efforts to restrict voting.  That's what these efforts are, the quest to make voting more difficult.  Considering everything past Americans did to secure the right to vote for future generations, the notion that we have to restrict voting to "protect" it should be laughed out of the room.  It's completely obvious what the Republicans are truly up to on this issue.

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals."

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote," Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.

"Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor," Vadum writes. "It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers."

It really is that simple.  Conservatives believe that voting, and participation in government itself, should be restricted to the elite, the wealthy, and the powerful.  It's no longer John Birch fringe to believe that the underclass, those who don't belong in the lofty presence of the job creators, have no place in politics.  Conservatives are increasingly blaming them for all of society's ills, and are just wondering how hard they have to push in order for the dwindling middle-class to declare war on the poor, and leave the lords at the top to reap the spoils.

In short, Conservatives don't think everyone in America should have the right to vote, period.  They discovered their mistake in 2006 and 2008, and it was allowing the unwashed masses the right to vote.  And should they get back into 2012, they will eliminate that right.

Keep that in mind this Labor Day, and into November 2012.

Holy Hypocrisy, Batman!

Apparently, the Westboro group can dish it out but can't take it.  Surprise, surprise.

The Westboro Baptist Church has set its hateful sights on the movie, "Red State" -- which will be released in theaters later this month -- calling director Kevin Smith "a God-hating clown."

The Church spokesperson says, "God hates fags, God hates fag enablers, therefore God hates Kevin Smith."

The movie puts the spotlight on a fanatical church whose members kill "sinners" -- many say it bares a resemblance to Westboro.

Neener neener, assholes.  I guess it's hard to ignore the stupidity when forced to actually look at it.

Labor, Dazed, In America

McClatchy's Tony Pugh points out this Labor Day that the millions of long-term unemployed in America are the new untouchable class, and Republicans are wasting no time in demonizing them as the country's 21st century "welfare queens".

Many companies now shun the long-term unemployed when filling positions, fearing their skills have eroded or their talents don't measure up.

America's jobless also face increased hostility from conservative lawmakers, as more states cut the amount and duration of unemployment benefits, while making them harder to get and easier to lose.

In South Carolina, where state-funded jobless benefits were cut from 26 to 20 weeks, Republican state senator Kevin Bryant blogged in April that "Part of the unemployment problem is that our human nature is to take advantage of the ability to get paid to not work. ... I'm very sympathetic to those out of work desperately seeking it, but I'm disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching (off) the system."

Similar comments from a variety of conservatives reflect a sneaking suspicion that 99 weeks of extended benefits have taken the urgency out of job searches.

"Two years is a long time. At some point you've got to provide more incentives to get people to do things," said Frederick Tannery, an associate economics professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.

Leeches.  Welfare queens.  Lazy.  Immoral.  Evil.  Republicans are putting forth the illusion that there is no job creation crisis, that tens of millions of "good, high-paying jobs" are out there going unfilled because people are simply too shiftless to work.  Everything's a zero-sum game for them.

But it's head scratching.  Real corporate taxes are low.  Major corporations are making record profits.  It's absolutely an employer's market out there for labor as companies can hire people with four-year degrees for entry level positions.  It should be a boom time for hiring.

But it's not, because the problem is demand.  Even the Moonie Times admits the problem in the US is demand:  the middle-class consumer in the US has been so utterly crushed by the New Gilded Age that they're not buying anything because they can't afford to.  And if they can't afford to buy more, why hire more?

“There are no quick fixes on the horizon for the millions who are still unemployed,” said Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association. “Until businesses see a significant and sustainable uptick in demand for their products and services, we will not see a meaningful increase in the number of new permanent jobs.”

According to surveys conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business, small businesses, which employ the most Americans, have complained for months that “poor sales” are their biggest problem and the reason they aren’t hiring.

Large businesses also have seen little reason to add to staff in a stagnant U.S. market and collectively are sitting on more than $1 trillion in profits that they otherwise could deploy to beef up employment and expand if new sales opportunities arose.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said Friday’s jobs report showed that businesses have no reason to hire. In fact, they even cut back the hours of their existing workforces last month.

“The main issue is lack of demand,” she said. Employers have “substantial room to meet unmet demand by increasing hours of existing workers; if private-sector employers were to simply restore the hours of their workers back to pre-recession levels, that would be equivalent to adding over 1.2 million jobs.”

This is the real issue in our economy:  lack of demand.  And Republicans see the government as having to tighten its belt too as millions of local, state, and federal government employees get furloughed and laid off completely, instead of the government being the demand generator of last resort.  Republicans have tied our hands on this, and more than a few Democrats have gone along.

You'd think pro-corporate Republicans would want to boost businesses in order to get more money into the economy, but they could care less.  All they see is the opportunity to yell and scream that "America can't afford to help the poor" anymore and to throw them down the nearest open manhole.  Not only are jobs being cut, but hours, overtime, benefits and wages as well for those of us that do have jobs.

No wonder corporate profits are sky-high...and yet we're told businesses are being crushed under taxes and regulations that are driving jobs offshore and putting companies out of business.  The truth is these companies are going where the demand is, and they are taking their jobs with them, while this Labor Day the American worker is being put out to pasture...and then the glue factory.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Some 29 are confirmed dead as Typhoon Talas slammed into Western Japan late Sunday, leaving record rainfall, flooding and wind damage.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party has suffered significant losses in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg as leftist and Green party candidates pushed conservatives to a distant second.
• Twenty years after a deadly chicken plant fire killed 25 in Hamlet, NC, progress in worker safety measures appears to be on the wane.
• The trial of deposed Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak continues in Cairo, but cameras have been banned from the proceedings.
• Smaller tech firms are the new big battlefield players in smartphone patent wars as they line up to get a piece of the multi-billion dollar market.