My music RIP of the day would be to Max Roach, who also died on this date, albeit just a handful of years ago. Elvis never did it for me

Beta and Fernando are in the business, so it's fair game. I follow a fake account for the Buffalo Sabres' GM, and it has a lot of jokes about other people in the organization, because they're business jokes. It doesn't matter if they're personal friends as well, once they're in the business and the PR specifically, they're fair game for satire and parodPr

Yeah I'd say Syria is most certainly next. I'm not into playing chess with the globe, but this administration and every legitimate candidate's, minus Ron Paul, very much are. Even if Obama loses in 2012 I'd expect this military action to be faithfully continued by the following administratioPr

This is a horrible tragedy, but the focus on ideology of the attacker bothers me, just like it did in the Arizona shooting of Rep Giffords. Religious extremism is not a source for terrorism. The Amish are religious extremists. The Tibetan monks are religious extremists. Mother Theresa was a religious extremist. Once again, this is a case where some people who have committed terrible acts have been religious extremists (more often pretenders looking to exploit that centralized power) and people choose to ignore their motivation for more convenient narratives.

What I learned from 9/11 was that deceiving yourself doesn't work. 9/11 was a secular attack - listen to the reasons bin Laden lists for the attack, they're all secular. American support of Israel, funding of the World Bank and IMF, and intrusive foreign policy - nothing about our citizenry's moral standards. Domestic terrorism is a different animal, but again, religious extremism is at best a co-symptom of the same craziness that inspires such violent acts. But our government didn't think we could handle that explanation, so instead we got 2 or 3 years of being told it's a holy war against our way of life. We responded with bombings, invasions, and the stripping of our liberties and privacy - running up a huge national debt while scaring ourselves and the world shitless.

The worst thing you can do with terrorism is overreact to it, since it's only function is to provoke reaction from an enormously larger entity. Treat it as a criminal problem, deal with him like you're dealing with a mass murderer. But don't make him an enemy combatant, don't go to war to make yourself feel braver. We really screwed up post-9/11. Do better with yours, pleasPr

Our armed services veterans have government run health care. Seen any veterans hospitals? No thanks, not for me.

The current system is neither socialism nor capitalism (except for veterans, where it's socialism), it's an ungodly mix of both. Government chose to bind health care to jobs, which is akin to a doctor sewing two people together at the hip because one had a bad ankle. Ever since that decision we've been further adjusting a whole set of perverted incentives and now we've ended up with almost the worst allocation of wealth, technology, and skill in medicine that I can imagine.Pr