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Just Where Is The Lincoln Memorial, Anyhow?
John3 writes "Searching Google Maps for the Lincoln Memorial is returning the location of the FDR Memorial instead. Conservative bloggers smell a conspiracy since Glenn Beck is holding his 'Restoring Honor' gathering at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow (August 28). Notes for the map listing on Google state 'This place has unverified edits'; so, did someone claim the listing and edit the location?"
REAL AMERICANS don't need a map to tell them where their landmarks are located. Anyone that needs to use google maps to locate this rally is a communist or socialist anyways.
Why the hell DOES it redirect to FDR memorial? http://www.google.com/search?q=lincoln+memorial
Looking at specific searches, searching for the Lincoln Memorial gets you the FDR Memorial, but searching for the Lincoln Monument gets you the Lincoln Memorial.
I would imagine that it's simply a matter of the word memorial being attributed to FDR more than Lincoln, for some reason.
The memorial is about half a km north west of what google maps highlights. Google maps has been far more wrong before...
:(
I have a relative that lives several miles from the Grand Canyon, and told me the story of a local who one day ran into a lost tourist, looking for that gorge. He gave the tourist directions, and the tourist asked, "how is it?" The local had to reply, "I don't know I've never been there. I've been planning to go one of these days....."
They talked for a bit and soon found out the tourist was from New York. The local said, "Oh, I've been there. I visited the statue of liberty." The New Yorker said, "Oh, yeah. I've been planning to go there one of these days....."
Qxe4
Don't be a toolbox. Red State makes no mention of a conspiracy, and WTH is "Moonbats" anyway? A real leading conservative blog there. Beck is an entertainer, not a serious voice, yet so many on the left and right moon over him. The summary is just a another smear of conservatives, and since that fits your world view filled with hatred you consider it valid.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Really, if a self-proclaimed conservative—a jingoistic, flag-lapel-pin-wearing, Go-America!-shouting patriot—a dyed-in-the-wool, red-blooded American doesn't know where the Lincoln Memorial is and can't remember a penny long enough to figure out what it looks like while in Washington, DC, he or she might as well give up right there and then, thrown down his or her misspelled, Obama-Iz-An-Atheest-Moslim-Commie-Crony-Of-Wall-Street-Not-Main-Street signs, exchange his or her copy of Going Rogue for a Socialist party membership card, and get in line to be shipped off to the FEMA internment camps, because some re-education is patently and sorely needed.
Get off the Metro at Smithsonian. You're probably facing the Capital. Turn the fuck around and go straight.
It's actually "Glenn"... not "Glen."
To the few people here who apparently believe paranoid conservative conspiracy theorists vandalized Google to obscure the location of this rally: are you completely insane?
I mean, follow the bouncing ball: you're so paranoid that you'd like to hide the location of a giant rally by desecrating Google maps, but you've scheduled said rally at a landmark so famous tens of millions could find it with no maps at all? And how are fellow paranoid conservatives supposed to find said rally? Does Glenn Beck's web page include coded directions, decipherable only by clues so small you'd never notice them if you hadn't read Ronald Reagan's autobiography twelve times?
You may think Glenn Beck listeners somewhat clinically paranoid and/or politically foolish, but you don't look any smarter, more rational, or less paranoid in believing them both smart enough and rationally motivated to vandalize the map but otherwise too stupid to tie their own shoes.
I'd suspect that this sort of thing would work /better/ on Democrats than Republicans, being how Democrats are younger, hipper, and more apt to use Google where as most Republicans probably have a paper map of DC around somewhere. It's a capstone monument on the national mall. All roads lead to Independence and Constitution. It's only a few blocks from the friggin' FDR memorial anyway -- and its not even real blocks. You can see one from the other.
This is just incompetence magnified by douche-baggery and wordpress.
I smell a conspiracy to attempt to bring the US media's favorite vacuous ratings-boosting political flamewar to slashdot by dressing it up in a thin veil of tech.
If you look for the Jefferson Memorial, the same thing happens. The Washington Monument and the White House work fine though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oh shit they're on to us. Come on guys, like we said at the last meeting of the Evil Liberals Who Hate Freedom League, you got to be more careful. Today it's the bloggers, tomorrow it'll appear in forwarded e-mails in 80 point comic sans font, then we're really screwed. Before you know it, they'll break out the ALL CAPS, which as we all know everything is absolutely and unquestionably true if it appears in ALL CAPS.
Also remember: we're forcing people to get gay married and buy health insurance, not hide the Lincoln Memorial. Stay on message guys.
And if those maps come out to 99c, you'll get a free picture of it with your change!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Good thing we have the voice of reason here! I mean you only suggested the OP should be shot for a comment! That's very reasonable. Why would anyone want to stereotype conservatives?
You bring up another great point too. Why on a site that is "News for Nerds" would people mock creationists? It's just not fair! Teach the controversy!
If you live in the US and/or have ever seen a picture of the National Mall, reflecting pool, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument or a map of DC, you'd know where the hell the Lincoln Memorial is.
Yes, now click the button marked 'Search Maps' and see what all of the fuss is about.
Hint: You will now be looking at 'Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial'
i read about it in a blog once
Glenn Beck is a national talk show host, trying to encourage out-of-towners to go to his rally this weekend. That's why this Google flaw is relevant to geeks nationally... it's showing how a political event can be disrupted by those who disagree with the event's sponsor with a simple misinformation attack on Google Maps.
A dirty trick would be putting billboards up giving the wrong date for an election, or bugging your own office and blaming it on a competitor. Someone editing a google map entry, is pretty weak on the 'dirty trick' scale.
Even If they have the best directions in the world they still wouldn't make it to the rally in time. That Beltway traffic is ridiculous. It is a conspiracy perpetrated by the road workers.
Google tries to stay out of politics. Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.
It's only a few blocks from the friggin' FDR memorial anyway -- and its not even real blocks.
A real block? You mean a New York city block? That's about 80 meters by 270 meters-- it varies.
It's about 770 meters from the FDR memorial to the Lincoln memorial.
If you drive around randomly, you'll probably end up in a random traffic jam.
Oh, the Lincoln Memorial? It's on J St.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
meters? commie! true AMERICANS use yards or feet. you know. It takes 50 feet to cross my yard.
"it's showing how a political event can be disrupted by those who disagree with the event's sponsor with a simple misinformation"
Glenn Beck fans cannot be fooled by simple misinformation, they have no need for geographical facts, their gut instincts will lead them directly to the rally.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Wow. Put a label on someone and then you can treat them as sub-human. You're well on your way.
The Statue of Liberty trip is practically an in-joke among New Yorkers. Many (most?) New Yorkers have never been to it, though everybody can see it when you're driving around the bottom of the FDR or West Side Highway. I actually have a beautiful view of it from my living room (I live right on the Hudson River), and have never actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty proper, though I once took a ferry trip to Ellis Island, and that boat took us around the Statue for a fairly close look.
The lines to take the ferry to Liberty Island are ridiculously long on weekends (like 3-4 hours), I walk by them every weekend on my morning walks through Battery Park, so unless you have a weekday off in the city, it actually takes as long to go to the Statue of Liberty as it does to drive to Boston.
Same reason I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building - ridiculous lines.
Make sure you buy your $699 Ed Hardy handbag, you coc...
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Unlike the Panthers of Philly who intimidate voters, unlike the protesters at G-8 who smash and break things. You are a moron. I thought the Tea Parties were a bunch of red neck hicks until I actually attended one. You know what I found out, sure there were red neck hicks there, but probably less than 5% of the crowd were Hicks, but the rest were what you would consider hard working middle class folks. They left the rally or Tea Party in almost the same shape or cleaner that it was before they held it there, the people picked up the trash. I have been to rallies where a bunch people mostly of the liberal persuasion who left the place a complete and utter mess. Yeah, why don't you do a search on how many people get arrested at a Tea Party compared to any protest event held by people on the far left. Gee, The lawbreaking scum that are the Anarachists are pissed about the tea party because they make them look bad and expose them as the miserable human beings they are. That is why there is so much animosity against them.
The .fortune at the bottom of the page showing this story say:
Slashdot has achieved artificial intelligence. Or it's another part of the same conspiracy hiding the Lincoln Memorial from Beck's zombie army. Or both, since "reality has a well-known liberal bias" (- Stephen Colbert).
My .fortune offers a retort: "Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches... -- Percy Bysshe Shelley"
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
You do realize that they aren't censoring Chinese search results, right?
They were originally, like everyone else, but currently they are not. Google.cn just links you back to Google.hk for searches, and Google.hk is unfiltered. You still have to contend with with the Great Firewall, of course, so having uncensored results doesn't mean you can access censored material -- but at least you know what you aren't being allowed to see.
He sells lots of books, gets a lot of money for a TV show and has many, many minions. Wait, how is he an idiot again?
Look, I have no use for the guy, but he's accomplishing more than you or me. We may not agree with what he's accomplishing, but that's irrelevant. I wish I had thought of it. *I* want minions, dammit! I need to find an underserviced fringe of my own to cater to.
You really think he believes half the shit he says? He's playing to the hyper-right niche. Same with Ann Coulter, or Michael Moore for a lefty example. They have targeted an audience and feed them what they want to hear. If Sarah Palin has any brain at all she'll just play the lecture circuit for the rest of her days and put out more books.
Oh, and people like him *LOVE* people like you. Your dislike and insults just play to his cause and give him legitimacy in the eyes of his target market.
Is that MOST people suck at it. Europeans like to laugh at Americans because they generally know the correct locations of more countries... Forgetting that America is bigger than Europe and knowing the correct locations of some states would be the same relative amount of knowledge. Their geography outside of that area is usually fairly limited. Most know where the US is since it is large and in the news a lot, but often little more.
For example I guy I chat with online from the UK had visited Brazil and was thinking of visiting the US. He wanted to know where various people he knew lived so he could decide if he was going to try and visit. I knew there was a good chance he didn't know where Arizona was since it doesn't make the news a lot (the new anti-immigration bill non-withstanding). So I told him it was "Just east of California, and just north of Mexico." He said that didn't help. I though he meant he didn't know where California was so I clarified. No, he didn't know where MEXICO was. He thought it was in Central America, near Brazil.
Thing is, geography is just kinda boring. It is route memorization, and not all that necessary to most people. This is even more true now, what with maps online and so easily accessible. If you need to know where something is, from a countries down to a street, it is easy to locate.
I also get a little tired of geography snobs because it is exceedingly rare that someone can properly locate all the countries in the world. Never mind the amount of time spent, most people lack a memory that accurate. So when people get snobby about parts of geography but can't do other parts, to me that is just saying "What I know is important, what everyone else knows isn't."
Allow me to respond to your inquiry with youtube links!
Glenn Beck on 9/11 victims:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruzvmqbTpPI
That pretty much sums up the ridiculousness of his message. Also may I point you to the Daily Show link which basically rips the "WHO IS FUNDING THIS TERRORIST MOSQUE!?!?" to shreds:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-23-2010/the-parent-company-trap
And here's a few more of The Young Turks on Glenn Beck:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bbgsYV9DXk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-aBUoO7aSA
TYT frequently rips open arguments with facts - and they do it to "both sides" [sorry if the links I posted don't have a lot of fact checking in them. I've been very critical of TYT but past clips do have plenty of facts to back up their claims]. Though lately it has been a lot of Fox News and republican bashing (can't really say there isn't a good reason for it lately).
That's the current definition of "concervative" in the US. Most of his viewers probably define themselves this way.
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance. If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
This bill forces everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, and worse, forces them to buy it from a private third party under penalty of law. Not even the most extreme reading of the Commerce Clause justifies that, and I look forward to your excuses when SCOTUS throws the mandate out as unconstitutional.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
If we really want to fix the problem... to the extent that it can be fixed... then we'll propose what we've proposed for years... for Congress to use the Commerce Clause in what is actually a productive, Constitutional manner and ban states from restricting interstate health insurance competition, which most of them do. This is one of the few issues where the states are wrong about the 10th Amendment. The states don't have a right to tell me I can't buy from a company in another state, and opening up a national market would mean national risk pools. Health insurance would then become more like car insurance. If car insurance were restricted by the states in the way that health insurance is, then no one could afford to drive either. There's a real market for auto insurance, though.
As for your concern about the poor, I might be moved more if I didn't suspect that your solution was probably "let the government handle it". You can help the poor without screwing the rights of everyone else, which this "reform" bill did. Further, this isn't an issue of "the poor", and never was. The poor have had access to paid healthcare for years. That's what Medicaid is, after all. In addition to that, most states have a program for uninsured children if you don't meet the poverty criteria but still have limited income. In Alabama it's called AlKids. The real issue is affordable health insurance for the not poor-and yet-not rich. Which *gasp!* a real market would go a long way towards helping.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Google tries to stay out of politics.
As another poster pointed out with the China angle, your statement is laughable, sir. It would be more accurate to say that Google tries to downplay politics, but the company is neck-deep in politics every day.
Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.
We're all getting the message that some Wiki contributors are throwing a temper tantrum because Glenn Beck is, horror of horrors, holding an assembly in front of the Lincoln Memorial. You know, like other people have been doing for years. What a crime, eh?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That's the current definition of "concervative" in the US. Most of his viewers probably define themselves this way.
OK, prove your assertion. Specifically what makes Beck... or conservatives for that matter... racist? What makes him a nutjob? Be specific. You're making the accusations. The onus is on you to prove them.
If you don't agree with conservatism or don't like Beck, fine. But if you're going to accuse them of these things, man up and prove it. I see you've been modded informative when the only thing you've informed us is that you've made a bunch of accusations... some of them serious...without any citations.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This bill forces them to get insurance.
Yes, and us right-wingers will still complain about healthcare reform, because forcing people to buy insurance doesn't reform the healthcare industry, it gives money to the insurance companies. For a lot of people, the cost of healthcare insurance is so high, that it is crippling. Before I cancelled my policy at work, I was paying $800 a month for insurance. Of course, with copayments and coinsurance, if we went to the doctor, we would still owe another hundred dollars or more still. So we cancelled the insurance, and just pay for the doctor out of pocket. When you look at the cost of paying out of pocket versus paying the premiums and the coinsurances and copayments, it is cheaper to pay out of pocket. Unless you are a genuinely unhealthy person who has a lot of doctors bills, of course. But that is not what insurance is for. Insurance is for "what if", not the unfortunate reality of a health condition.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You know, you can submit map bug reports to Google, and they respond. I've fixed two already, and they've replied about a third.
But I suppose submitting a Slashdot non-story is more fun.
Oh, ya, that guy with clinical depression with a touch of megalomania.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
Well that's why conservatives don't like it, because whether you are "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" or not doesn't mean the government should be forcing you to buy a product or service. Which is what they are doing. We are a FREE nation and we have the right of freedom of choice.
If the decisions an individual makes over the course of their lives leads them to a state where they are poor, unemployed and without health insurance, that's THEIR OWN DAMN FAULT and it's not my job or my responsibility to provide for them. If I choose to do so on my own, then that is my decision. But I should have the choice.
The Washington Monument was started while Washington was still alive, thus, it is a monument, NOT a memorial.
THAT IS AN ABSURDLY MULTIFACETED FALSEHOOD
The semantic difference between 'monument' and 'memorial' is wrong and work on the Washington Monument (which is a National Memorial) did not start until long after Washington's death in 1799.
While a nearby location (now the location of the Jefferson Pier) was specified for a monument featuring Washington in L'Enfant's 1791 city plan, that monument (an equestrian statue) was never built. A different plan for a monument (in the Capital itself) was authorized in 1799, but that one was also never actually started. The monument that actually exists today was the result of a quasi-private project that started in 1832 and spent 26 years in corrupt clusterfuckery. That fiasco got the obelisk part of their design 1/3-built between 1848 and 1858 before running out of money and credible public figures to sully by association. It sat untouched as an eyesore for 18 years, and the work done 1854-58 was such crap that it had to be dismantled before completion of the monument (with a slightly different color of stone and a simpler overall design) could continue.
A moonbat refers to the followers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the guy who supported Nixon during Watergate, went to prison for filing false taxes, has presided over mass weddings of his followers and fittingly enough founded the Washington Times. I lean conservative so don't take this as a "smear" but if you don't know the history of this guy you should stop worrying about scary liberals and realize any time people blindly follow people, whether it's Beck or Obama or whoever, they put themselves in a position to be manipulated.