The issue here is the resurrection of a spirit of pan-Arabism after several decades when a sense of Islamic identity seemed to be supplanting Arab identity.

That trend now appears to have been reversed.

This shifting balance between Arab and Islamic identities is a central feature of what is happening in the Middle East today, and it’s likely to generate some heated debate in the weeks and months to come.

He writes:

For the first time in a generation, it is not religion, nor the adventures of a single leader, nor wars with Israel that have energized the region.

Across Egypt and the Middle East, a somewhat nostalgic notion of a common Arab identity, intersecting with a visceral sense of what amounts to a decent life, is driving protests that have bound the region in a sense of a shared destiny.

He continues:

Rarely has there been a moment when the Middle East felt so interconnected, governments so unpopular and Arabs so overwhelmingly agreed on the demand for change, even as some worry about the aftermath in a place where alternatives to dictatorship have been relentlessly crushed … The Middle East is being drawn together by economic woes and a shared resentment that people have been denied dignity and respect.

Mondoweiss:

True views and recent history is one more failing by the Western mainstream media. If thousands of members of secular, liberal organizations in Egypt had been regularly arrested in recent years, the names of their leaders would be household words.

Two resolute and conscientious Twitter feeds on Egypt.
1) Parvez Sharma, New York,
2) Ramy Raoof, Cairo, Egypt.

Gallup Poll:

“Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement.”

Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school teachers are not strong advocates for evolution. Such teachers “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States…”

The current situation in Egypt is, as they say, fluid. There is the remote possibility that the Egyptian people will achieve their apparent ends relatively peacefully, without further loss of life.

But while the power of authority arrayed against them—the police, internal security apparatus, and perhaps the army—relies for its ultimate effectiveness upon the credible threat of violence, the power of protest and resistance relies in the last instance upon a people’s willingness to die for their cause.

This is what it means to be courageous: to place yourself in the path of irresistible force, certain of your own destruction, for a cause higher than yourself and your petty concerns. Flesh arrayed against bullets, bodies against tanks. Lives willingly offered for beliefs and aspirations.

Without sacrifice or the threat of sacrifice, there is no courage.

Profiteers are watching you. Always.

David Cain:

I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that’s something that interests you. If it’s billions you’re after, I’m a bit suspicious but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Aspiring to trillions, though, is the domain of the wicked alone and we won’t be able to be friends any more.

The big money isn’t in creating products, it’s in creating customers.

A single, lifelong customer who lives his life spending the way you want him to is worth six or seven figures. A single one. Creating millions of these is the only way to make trillions.

You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something.

It does take some capital to get it going. You won’t be able to manage it with 5-dollar-an-hour overseas virtual assistants, but like I said I’d prefer if you didn’t strive to be a trillionaire, because it’s not so good for the rest of us.

While were at it, who’s the most loathsome in America? #1 is you:

Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority.

You’re not in control of your life.

You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time.

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stunned.

ours

Apollo is our benchmark. My mind changed and never stopped that first day outside Earth. Discovering home. There cannot be enough seeing ourselves. No puzzle is better. Suddenly we.

The effort in this shot !

Light balance. The depth of field. The triumph, Jimmy’s brow.  Seconds, anyone?

Sweepstakes here.

Which politician seeking the Presidency said this?

“…the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States….Men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”

A California resident filed a class action lawsuit Tuesday against Apple Inc. alleging the iPhone 4 has a manufacturing defect that causes its glass housing to break after ‘reasonable use’.

Peeved.

Adrian Hon:

Someone is making a lot of money out of this.

A new breed of computer games is creating compulsive behavior.

Isn’t the entire point of games that they are more engaging and fun than poor, passive TV? Yes, TV shows are driven by commercial motives and try to be just as manipulative as games with their incessant cliffhangers, but a show with cliffhanger every 30 minutes pales in comparison to games containing ‘mini-cliffhangers’ every 30 seconds.

Nota bene: “Developers aren’t doing this on purpose.”

Succinct is always nice. Succinct that says it all is dynamite.

I can’t say I was surprised by a single Wikileak … they all seemed so deja vu and utterly timeless, as if they could have been intercepted letters, hand-written by Napoleon-in-exile to his cohorts on the mainland.

Humorzo noticed this great line by Sylvia Paull.

Who woulda thunk it?
So it ::: is ::: possible to design safe itty bitty cars.

Oh, if we had goals and targets too.

[link]

So why isn’t there more agreement? Certainly some smart people out there must have figured out the “right way” or the “best solution”… right? Well, NO.

See, that’s the problem that so many of us make, and definitely one that the legislators and zealots make A LOT. There is no single right way, no single best solution. Each of us has different goals, different skills, different resources, and different motivations; and that doesn’t even take into account different cash flow and different climates and different environments. Given all the unique factors that an individual must take into account, how can we expect to have a single right answer? We simply can’t, it’s just not realistic. We each need to figure out what we need to do for our desired situation and then determine how to best achieve it based on our individual parameters.

Charles Sullivan:

Corporate power expanded.

Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets.

Money triumphed over people.

With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy eroding liberties and killing the planet.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public.

And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.

Democrat Congressman Frank Pallone read the natural born Citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor, Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution.

A woman seated in the front row of the public gallery shouted out, “Except Obama! Except Obama! Help us, Jesus!”

Unlawful conduct, disruption of Congress; processed and released by the Sergeant at Yarns.