Quote of the day

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

- Bokonon
(muse of Kurt Vonnegut)

(via whiskey river)

Making the right people nervous

A couple of signs that Occupation Wall Street (and associated protests) are on the right track: powerful people are worried that it could induce policy changes (what? in reponse to public desire?), and financial bigwigs are overreacting out of panic and looking a little crazed as a result. From the latter link:

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Indeed. Keep up the good work, frustrated average citizens! The public understands where you're coming from!!

GOP horse race

Hilarious -- Slate actually animates the polling data for the last 18 months, so you can watch the candidates pull ahead, fall back,...

(via pourmecoffee on Twitter)

The people are speaking

I'm not sure what to make of Occupy Wall Street, as a movement or as a name, but it seems somehow to have come to embody all the injustices of the last few years, in economic and moral terms -- that possibility is discussed here and the sentiment summarized thusly:

There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.

Only time will tell whether this set of demonstrations becomes symbolic of such woes to the more general American public, but if that connection persists, we might have the start of a real revolution, which is something I think that this country is in dire need of.