Well I’m going to keep straying away from politics for a while. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the serious stuff soon but I just couldn’t pass up posting this video. The filmmakers (Concord Music Group) recorded one street musician’s interpretation of the Ben E. King classic “Stand by Me” and then took that recording to other countries, allowing street musicians from around the world to record their own accompaniments. Then they mixed it all together. The result is both musically pleasing (its a really creative arrangement) and surprisingly touching. Street musicians from New Orleans to the Congo riffing together on a song whose message they understand all too well. Anyway, hope you enjoy it! Don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.
Hey look, a timely article for a change! Finally I’m addressing a phenomenon before it happens and not days/weeks after it has passed. Anyway, you may or may not have heard about the “tea-party” anti-tax movement that’s developing around the country. This tea-party movement consists of people gathering in various cities on April 15th holding protests about the “terrible taxes burdening americans”, and what they see as America’s coming descent into socialism. Here’s a quote from one of the two fawning FoxNews articles that were up about it today. From one of the organizers of the tea party protests:
“People are getting killed — they’re getting hammered with taxes and it’s not the way this country is supposed to be run. … We want to fight back,”
Are people really getting hammered with taxes? I don’t challenge their right to gather and protest taxes or whatever they want, but they may want to check a few facts first. And to make it convenient for them, I’ve gathered the pertinent graphs and information after the jump. I should also note before I begin that not all tea-party participants are claiming taxes are too high and that some are doing this for other reasons (to protest the stimulus, just to express their anger that McCain lost etc), I’m not addressing those concerns here. But these tea-parties are being billed as “anti-tax protests” so this is a significant part of what they’re organizing for and this article will address that issue. Anyway, as best as I can deduce, here’s some relevant historical perspective… Continue reading
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Quotes
"We do not need to judge nearly so much as we think we do. This is the age of snap judgments. … [We need] the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. I am waiting further evidence. I must hear both sides of the question.’ It is this suspended judgment that is the supreme form of charity. Someone has said that you cannot slice cheese so fine that it doesn’t have two sides."
-Dallin H. Oaks
"It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it...The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress."
-Joseph Joubert
"The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know."
-David Freeman
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
