Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Opens On-Demand Video Store
g0dsp33d writes "Amazon opened the doors on its new video on demand service. Some promotional videos are free and the quality seems to be good. You can preview the first 2 minutes of any of the offerings. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be 'rented' for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims 14.5K movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchasing the rights to upcoming seasons. Considering alternative, ad-based, free online video sites such as Hulu, is Amazon's service too pricey?"
Facing the political trends today often feels like confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in China. The tank is powered by intellectual lethargy, moral turpitude and an uncontained malice for the freedom and independence that made the country possible and great. Its purpose is to crush anyone who refuses to get out of its way.
Hope? Change? A new direction? Suppose one doesn't want to go in a "new direction" or see the country go in it? Suppose the change one hopes for is the banishment of government and others from one's life, from the economy, from education? Suppose one knows that the only way one can be taken in a new direction is by deception, theft and force?
The Democratic convention in Denver last week presented the latest model tank which the collectivists plan to deploy in the country. Call it the Obliterator.
A succession of speakers, every one of them adopting the tone of an abrasive locker room pep talk instead of a political address, ranted a from a podium on what looked like the topside of a blue Klingon warship - blue, one supposes, for Blue States - incongruously grafted to the faÃade of a Roman temple, doubtless intended to evoke Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forty-five years ago. The parade of blowhards, most of whom combined secular collectivist sentiments with religious altruist ones, complete with quotations from the Bible, was climaxed by the appearance of Barack Obama, who on the evening of August 28 gave his acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for President to a mass of worshipping, weeping, belief-crazed Obama cultists.
From beginning to end, the Democratic convention that ended with his appearance was more like a vaudeville show - "a series of acts," as one admiring commentator told the PBS anchor - imbued with the hysterical spirit of an evangelical tent meeting, in which all the attendees were united in an unreasoning, emotional Gestalt to hail the Messiah (or the Mahdi, the "expected one," to put an Islamic twist on the event). One half expected the 80,000-plus audience to rise as one and do the "wave," the American equivalent of the Nazi salute. To assure themselves that Obama is truly the "people's choice," the Democrats filled Invesco Field with a mob of the faithful to create the illusion that Obama would address not merely a hall full of party hacks, state delegates and their whips, and vote manipulators, but the whole American electorate.
The New York Times, in an adulatory story on Obama's acceptance speech, "Obama Takes the Fight to McCain" (August 29) remarked with brazen insouciance that the speech
"...came on a night that offered - by the coincidence of scheduling - a reminder of the historic nature of the Obama candidacy: 45 years to the day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech on the Mall in Washington."
A coincidence of scheduling? There was nothing coincidental about it. The anniversary was a planned part of the Obama extravaganza to lend it "historical" significance, and perhaps even substance.
Viewers on any of the news programs covering the Democratic convention in Denver were constantly and solemnly reminded by news anchors that "history" was being made because an African-American or an American black was for the first time a major presidential candidate. Well, history of a sort was made, but not the kind that will be much dwelt on.
Obama's race, however, is immaterial. One judges an individual by the contents of his mind, by his values, by the conduct of his life. But Obama from the beginning has angled for the "black vote" and the vote of guilt-ridden whites. Thus, the charade. This is worse than mere dishonesty. It is a fraud being perpetrated on an entire country in the guise of "racial justice."
Much has been made during the presidential campaign of the candidates' experience or lack of it, in both domestic and foreign affairs. This is a straw man. True, any one of the o