Greg Hollingsworth

note-a-bear:

dandelionchild:

sandandglass:

#accurate 

/dead. Oh my god.

*crying*

Looks like it’s a Television kind of day today.

the-hero-of-ages:

gdfalksen:

Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.

The awesome things I learn on tumblr

politicalprof:

So here’s the thing: Alaska is a socialist state. And it’s in trouble.

No—seriously. Alaska’s socialist. I realize this fact runs afoul of the classic sense of Alaska as the home of rugged individualism, but bear with me.

Why is Alaska socialist?

Well, for one thing most of the oil under its…

The American Anti-Corruption Act was just unveiled. It’s a gamechanging law that gets money out of politics, for good. In order to pass it, we need a million people to add their names as “Citizen Co-Sponsors.” Will add your name now to help put the pressure on Congress?

huffingtonpost:

campaignmoney:

Public Campaign Action Fund and Democracy Corps released new polling today on money-in-politics conducted in the top battleground congressional districts.

It shows, generally, that voters in the most competitive congressional districts have seen what an unfettered system of campaign spending…

I object to this spurious correlation, entirely because they don’t include a single beer that is worth drinking.

(via The Politics of Beer: Stay Nonpartisan, My Friends - Hotline On Call)

ilovecharts:

The careers of the presidents before their presidency

-roonilwazlib

In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Where’s the rest of life represented?”

This isn’t really surprising is it? Law prepares you for many of the things necessary to be a politician, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have an understanding of how law really works before you go into a legislative field.

That being said, it’d be nice to have a few scientists on that list. Question is, how many scientists would actually want to be President?

stepchildofthesun:

[George Bush said] “Our God is the God who named the stars.” [But] two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names.

Thank humanity for NDT.

early-onset-of-night:

Reductio ad Absurdum: Money, Gold, and a Little Known GOP Plank

Much has already been said about the Republican Party platform in recent days, especially regarding the Rape Plank, which bans all abortions, even for pregnancies that result from rape. Unlike everyone else in the universe, I actually sat down and read the whole platform the other day, to much laughter and head-shaking—from me, I should clarify.

Apart from the obviously cruel and anti-American planks like the one mentioned above and the one telling everyone who they can and can’t marry, I found a hidden gem that truly delighted me by its almost mythic stupidity: the Gold Standard Plank.

The Republican Party platform calls for a return to the gold standard—well, for a commission to study the return anyway. It’s not something that can be done overnight. On the surface, this plank is simply an ass-kiss to the Ron Paulians, who tend to be big supporters of the gold standard. God knows the Republicans need every vote, what with the browning of America and all, but there’s more to it than just politics, I feel.

Nice guy that I am, I thought I’d save everybody the trouble of studying a return to the gold standard by writing a handful of paragraphs using only common sense and my computer keyboard:

The desire to link the dollar with gold, whether it be by Republicans or the Ron Paulians (who, by the way, are not libertarians), is simply a desire to turn our money into something real. It still won’t be real, of course, but it will seem, at least, more real: Gold is shiny! Therefore, it actually has value!

There is in existence about $8.5 trillion dollars. Our national debt, however, is $15.9 trillion. This debt is entirely the fault of Obama and has absolutely nothing at all to do with the fact that 53 cents of every dollar taken in taxes is spent on the military. Nothing at all. Ahem. So, if we use all the U.S. dollars currently existing, including the 23 bucks in your purse and the change on your dresser, we will only be able to pay about half the debt. All of the money in the world will be gone, paid to our creditors, and we will still owe them about $8 trillion dollars.

How is it that we can owe more money than there is money? Easy: we made it all up. Money is a figment of our imagination, and its divisions into amounts and denominations are simply divisions and denominations of nothing. 15.9 trillion units may seem like a lot until you remember that it is 15.9 trillion units of absolutely nothing. When philosophers contend that modern human society is at bottom nihilist, they ain’t a-kiddin’.

Tying our money to gold would mean that we’d need to find a lot more gold. The U.S. holds 8,133 metric tons of gold reserves, according to the World Gold Council—about 260 million ounces. The current market price for gold is about $1,667 an ounce, making our reserves worth around $435 billion. So, instead of there being $8.5 trillion dollars worth of pretend money, there’d only be $435 billion dollars worth of real(er) money. Instead of paying down half of the pretend debt with every last cent of the pretend money, we’d only be able to pay down three percent of the pretend debt with every last cent of the real(er) money. In fact, all of the gold currently in existence, owned by the various countries of the world, would not add up to enough to pay off our pretend debt.

The gold standard would make every dollar in “existence” convertible to a tiny amount of gold. Since we have all agreed that there are so many dollars (remember, all of these dollars exist only in our mind by collective agreement), there’s simply not enough gold on this planet, mined or unmined, to cover everything.

I don’t know about you, but I actually find this quite hilarious—especially when you consider that there are serious and apparently educated people out there who really think it could work.

Oh, humanity, why you so silly?

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udontsay:

WhoOwnsPaulRyan

Wal-Mart Takes Over America of the Day: And here we have unimpeachable proof that America’s exponential decay began in 1962. 

[allthatisinteresting]

This is truly terrifying.

futurejournalismproject:

Unfortunate Sign Placement or Acknowledgement?

Via

They certainly helped. 1003% increase in the debt from 1980 to 2008. Yeah, the debt was $998 Billion when Reagan entered office, it was $9.99 Trillion when Bush left office. Only one President in that time actually reduced the debt (if only for two years), and he wasn’t a Republican.

Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words | Fox News

Yes, you read the link above correctly. Paul Ryan told so many lies during his speech that even Fox News couldn’t ignore it.

Larry Womack: Ann Romney Addresses the Common People

Now, it’s not Mitt Romney’s fault that he was born on third base, and I’m sure that he has done a lot of good for his community. My concern is that he a) doesn’t acknowledge the advantages he started with (having worked full-time while attending college and raising a child, I can tell you that I wish I had had some stock to sell so I could “get by”), and b) doesn’t seem to care very much about the plights of people he may never meet.

Put It On Uncle Sam’s Tab: As politicians call for austerity, they are partying on the taxpayer’s dime…

This is no small bar tab. According to Forbes.com, it comes to a grotesque $87 million for both conventions. That includes $50 million for security costs, and another $18.3 million for political activities at each convention.

Someone explain to me why our taxes are being used to fund these two infomercials for the parties that have turned our government into an immovable rugby scrum? Oh, and why exactly isn’t the $87M tab that Uncle Sam is footing major news?