But Kucinich was instrumental in putting Obama on the road to victory by throwing his support to him instead to Hillary or keeping his campaign alive for ego’s sake. So those Kucinich supporters who claim their man is all principle and no pragmatism need to think that through. Or maybe the ire is because Obama owes his success to a compromise: which is it? The act or the man?

And the PUMAs who see the White House as Hillary’s entitlement for the rough ride she endured in the 90s may want to consider how lucky we are not to have Caribou Barbie a heartbeat away from the noo-kyoo-lar button. I don’t know how a McCain/Clinton matchup would have come out but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.

Neither Clinton nor Kucinich are bad people, poor politicians, or bad Democrats. Far from it: they have both sacrificed personal ambition — no easy thing for the narcissistic personality required of successful politicians — for the greater good, for an end to the destructive policies of the first 8 years of this century that would likely have been followed or made worse by McThuselah and his sidekick.

And then there’s the pundit class whose very existence depends on attacking both sides, undermining any success, and generally doing whatever it takes to get on teevee, write OpEds and self-serving books. These people make their living stirring it up: political uproar is not incidental to their work — it is their work. These modern-day apparatchiks, like yesterday’s pols but unlike today’s, are friendlier to each other in their off-hours than when we can see them but just like today’s pols have nothing in common with the people who allow them a living.

The people who knocked on doors and collected signatures and manned phone banks and drove voters to the polls and who know that hard problems many years in the making are not solved with the stroke of a pen were not the target of Gibbs’s remarks: it’s the nattering nabobs of negativism, to coin a phrase, the naysayers who think clapping harder and wishing gets it done. Reagan/Bush pére/Clinton/Bush fils all contributed to this mess and if you’re giving up after 18 months after all these achievements, you’re letting yourself and everyone else down. If you don’t realize, after all this, that compromise and horse-trading, accepting that progress is a journey, not a place, you’re never going to be happy.

I don’t want to hear it about trust-fund hippie kids. Yeah, it is infuriating that they can use the safety of their middle class lives to tell themselves they are adventuresome. If they’re sanctimonious on top of that, that’s really frustrating. BUT. Think of it this way. This is what people do when they know they are safe. These kids have felt safe their entire lives and trust the world, and what do they do with that? They choose a lifestyle of openness and gentleness, of connectivity and consciousness. When you know your whole life that you can have what you want, what they want is to be in a tribe and care about nature and spirituality. (Maybe they care about nature and spirituality in an easily accessible way, but as far as cheap philosophies go, it is a kind one.) This is also what impresses me about Burning Man. When privileged people have everything they want, the next thing they want to do is build amazing things for other people (and celebrate and be nude and beautiful). People who have never been scared don’t want dominion. They want expressiveness and connection.

[From From the archives: Go to work!]

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

He sees the technology taking the middle ground between cargo ships and jet service — faster than a boat, cheaper than a plane.

“They travel at optimum at about 140 knots,” Rist said. “As they get down to 80, you can save that much more fuel because the more the helium takes over.”

He said that intercontinental delivery times would be comparable to second-day air service, with a transatlantic crossing taking as little as 23 hours.

The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was “psychologically inadvisable” for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

How do you tell your children “I’m sorry” when what you are apologizing for is failing to leave the world in better shape than we found it?

The old saw that everybody saw what needed to be done, anyone could have done it but no one did it is as true as it ever was. But the simple fact is today, more than ever, it’s easier than ever to get involved, become informed, and make your voice heard. And it has never been more necessary. For too long, we have seen too much power in the hands of too few but the pendulum is swinging back.

The opposition message machine is going on and on about how President Obama is a “Socialist”, but it’s clear neither they nor their audience know what that means nor how their lives are already impacted by socialist policies. And they don’t stop to define it, other than to say “the government is taking over our lives.” What it really means, in the current debate, is that government is trying to give us back control of our lives, with respect to access to healthcare.

Maybe they’re not worth listening to.

Michelle Bachman wants us to think that the 1% AM radio listening audience who regularly tune into Limbaugh’s show is a majority of people. They’re louder but since when does that count in a democracy? Everyone votes once, no matter how they press down with their pencil, and last November, people voted. It’s time to collect on the promise of that election.

The opposition, the small fringe who are beholden to a few large corporate interests, don’t care that we live in a democracy. They probably don’t want a democracy if it means they have to make policy and defend their positions. They certainly don’t want to live in a democracy if they can’t really claim to have the support of the majority anymore. I keep thinking about what country they could move to if they don’t want to live in America anymore. I can’t think of one.

I watched Al Gore’s talk to the 2006 TED conference yesterday. It’s on Youtube and the TED.com website the TED.com website. He quoted a scientist’s statement that the current climate crisis is the test whether an opposible thumb and a cerebral cortex is a viable combination on planet Earth. The scientist gets it. Al Gore gets it. Most strong progressives get it. We’re not talking about food prices going up. We’re talking about stores being empty. We’re not talking about electricity costs going up. We’re talking about the electrical grid going dark. We’re not talking about sending our kids to their room for getting bad grades in school. We’re talking about sending them to their graves.

What are we really supposed to do? Read. Ask questions. Think for yourself. Talk to each other. Go knock on your neighbors’ door, and ask them over for dinner. Turn off your television and radio, and turn on Facebook, Twitter, and any number of other social networking sites. Express your fears and worries. Get answers.

Vote. It matters who you vote for, but just casting a vote is a huge step in the right direction. Get involved. Go to volunteer.gov, and see what the opportunities are. Ask the person sitting next to you at work if they voted. Go out to lunch and talk about who they voted for.

Teach your children well. Tell them that you love them and that you are doing everything possible to make their future possible. Then do it. Whatever you can do. Whatever it takes.

What do you do? What will you do? Start.

[original here]

As a member of the African diaspora that is now successful and stable in the US, I’d like to answer your question about African Americans. Unlike African Americans, I did not face structural and institutionalized racism in my own country, my father was not lynched for loving a white woman, my mother was not beaten for trying to vote, my grandparents were allowed to read and write and own property. Thus, my family had knowledge, skills, wealth, and pride to pass down to each generation. The question is not really why African Americans are the way they are, history answers that. African Americans still struggle to be treated as equals. The real question is why are the poor white trash still poor white trash hundreds of years after the Mayflower and institutionalizing superiority based on the color of your skin. If America gave you every opportunity to succeed based solely on the color of your skin, white people, ask yourself why you are now a failure and scared that “those people” are taking over your country and your government?