The Wi-Fi platform will help connect poor and rural areas to the internet:
Using a directional antenna, the device shoots data to a receiving antenna as far as 60 miles away. Any farther away, and the system encounters problems due to the curvature of the earth.
Hitchens marks the war anniversary by taking the very long view.
There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?
Pack mules have some new competition.
So we now have a pattern. Obama’s chief economic advisor (Austan Goolsbee) and a prominent foreign policy advisor (Power) have now told the truth on two important issues, trade and Iraq respectively. Their truth contradicted some of the overheated rhetoric their boss was using on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton–whose actual positions on trade and Iraq are probably the same as Obama’s advisors–has attacked Obama in both cases for saying one thing and believing another…when she is doing the exact same thing.
You’d hope for something better in a crucial election year, but hey, this is politics. For what it’s worth, I score this contretemps slightly in Obama’s favor: At least his advisors know the truth about these issues and are impolitic enough to be honest about it.
Oe should never under-estimate the opportunism and lck of integrity in the Clinton camp – or the risk involved in handing someone with so little public trust and so much political expediency to the presidency.
If Obama is being compelled to give a speech about his race, and Romney felt forced to give one about his faith, will Hillary Clinton ever have to give a speech about her husband? Has this campaign shown that it is better to address the elephant in the room, or leave it alone?
Well worth a read:
It apparently never occurs to Steele that for a man a generation younger than himself the terms of blackness might be different, that the “totalitarian” demands he encountered in the ’60s might no longer prevail, that Barack Obama’s mixed-race experience might actually be different than Shelby Steele’s.
Steele sounds in this book like a man whose head is full of a music that he alone can hear. It never did become clear to me what he means by the term “a bound man.” But it certainly seems that if anyone is bound, it is Steele himself. He is bound to a set of ideas and theories that he formulated in reaction to his experiences in the 1960s. They once sounded like wisdom, but today they tinkle suspiciously like the bells on a fool’s cap.
Alas, I cannot give a more considered response right now as I have to get on the road. But I do want to say that this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.
And it was a reflection of faith – deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America – its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union – today, in our time, in our way.
I have never felt more convinced that this man’s candidacy – not this man, his candidacy – and what he can bring us to achieve – is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man’s faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.
Bill Clinton once said that everything bad in America can be rectified by what is good in America. He was right – and Obama takes that to a new level. And does it with the deepest darkest wound in this country’s history.
I love this country. I don’t remember loving it or hoping more from it than today.
"I think there will be people who don’t vote for me because of race, there will be people who don’t vote for me because of ideology, there will be people who don’t vote for me because I got big ears," Mr. Obama said. "But you know, what I’m confident about is the overwhelming majority of voters in Pennsylvania and across the country are looking for someone that will deal with the real problems that we face as a country," – Barack Obama.
If you’re actually interested in a longer, fuller sermon by Jeremiah Wright, the one that included the unfortunate remarks about Senator Clinton, but was not edited to send Sean Hannity into a near orgasm, Ben Smith has it.
