This clip is but the first.  Follow the link below the clip to see parts, two & three.

From the BigThink.com post:

The legendary activist, author, and historian wanted to be remembered for “introducing a different way of thinking about the world,” and as “somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.”

Read More–> Remembering Howard Zinn – BigThink.com

Rest in peace, Professor.

From CommonDreams.org ~ by Mark Feeny:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack [Jan. 27] in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

Portrait of Howard Zinn by Robert Shetterly from his series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Howard_Zinn.php

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s…

[snip]

Read More–> Howard Zinn, Historian who Challenged Status Quo, Dies at 87 | CommonDreams.org.

This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi’s verlet springs.The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline.

More on that project at Information Visualization et al.

In the weeks approaching President Obama’s first State of the Union address, some in the media have claimed that Obama has lacked accomplishments in his first year as president and thus, in the words of Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden, Obama has “little to show for ’09.” In fact, Obama’s first year in office has been marked by a series of significant achievements, including creating jobs as a result of the economic stimulus, eliminating wasteful spending, increasing government transparency, and expanding federal health insurance programs to cover millions more children.

Read More–> Media ignore Obama’s accomplishments to claim he has …

Satire  just makes the impact of it more digestible…  Enjoy!

The Democratic Party got a resounding wake-up call from the voters of Massachusetts on Tuesday. But it’s long been clear that 2010 would be a challenging election year for our party.

With few exceptions, the first off-year election in a new president’s term has led to big gains for the minority party — this was true for Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. After two election cycles in which Democrats won most of the close races and almost all of the big ones, Democrats have much more fragile turf to defend this year than usual. Add to that a historic economic crisis, stubborn unemployment and the pain that both have inflicted on millions of Americans, and you have a recipe for a white-knuckled ride for many of our candidates.

But not if Democrats do what the American people sent them to Washington to do…[snip]

Read more –> David Plouffe – November doesn\’t need to be a nightmare for Democrats – washingtonpost.com.

Thanks to this Scott Brown-related dispatch [emphasis added]:

Mass. could benefit if senators set aside partisanship

Right, and if ponies could fly they’d land on rainbows.

This goes back to the point I made yesterday about how the political press refuses to tell the truth about what’s been happening inside the Beltway for the last 13 months regarding how the GOP has adopted a radical and unprecedented partisan approach to the White House, to the point where basically every single GOP member opposes all key administration initiatives. We’ve never seen anything like it in modern American history, but the press pretends like it’s normal, and that gosh, bipartisanship is still possible.

Does the Globe really think there’s a chance Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner are suddenly going to free their members to vote their conscience on issues and to vote for what’s best for their constituents?

The Globe is being almost childishly naive here.

via Boston Globe wins Most Naive Headline of the Day honors | Media Matters for America.

Of course, neither assessment is correct.

Greenwald deftly demonstrates Brooks’ and the Washington Establishment’s standard disregard for public opinion.

Public opinion merits “the profoundest respect” 19 January 2010 ~

Here we have one of the most common and manipulative tools of the political class:  pretending to care about public opinion only when it’s consistent with one’s own views (it’s “worthy of the profoundest respect”), and disregarding it as the irrelevant bile of the ignorant rabble when it’s not.

I remember another policy that was even more unpopular with the “Ameican people” than Obama’s health care plan.  It was called the Iraq War.

[snip]

If the Washington Establishment is adept at anything, it is ignoring and marginalizing public opinion. That bothers very few of its members, least of all David Brooks. Here was Brooks, in the midst of the deeply unpopular Wall Street bailout, celebrating the return of rule by “a cohesive financial establishment” that “does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge” and which “will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks”: “We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.” The man who yearns for oligarchical rule by good-natured “heads from the investment banks” today parades around as the defender of public opinion.

Read More–>Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.