Watch this clip through, paying special attention to the last 30 seconds or so. Awesome.

Obama’s speech last night was awesome.

His ability to engage us as citizens is far above that of any other candidate. I’d like to share the following line that really stuck with me:

You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

A bit reminiscent of Kennedy’s what you can do for your country speech, don’t you think? It really touches on what I think real leadership is about. It’s not simply about being the boss; it’s about creating passion and empowering those you lead. It’s about making people WANT to work together towards mutual goals.

The complete transcript is available here.

Here’s a video:

The man was love and compassion embodied. On the day we honor him, please watch this short video.

Its timeliness is uncanny.

According to this story on CNN.com, Bush recently responded to people in opposition to his terrorist-surveillance program by comparing the threat of Al Qaeda to the threat of the rise of Lenin and Hitler and saying that Americans are making the terrible mistake of “underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men…”.

Hitler and Lenin used fear to manipulate their followers into granting them unchecked power. That Bush would cite these men as examples in order to convince Americans to give up more of our civil liberties is beyond ironic.

I watched a good portion of the Democratic Presidential Debate last night. One question that really struck me was “What is your favorite Bible verse?”

Joe Biden said “Christ’s Warning of the Pharisees.”

I thought this was an interesting answer, so I did some research this morning. While there are different interpretations of what Biden may have meant by this, I really like the explanation given by Ann Althouse:

If you understand the reference, it actually is a subtle way to imply that religion should not be used publicly for the purpose of achieving worldly goals. It’s good to remind religious people — especially religious people who crave more religion in their politics — that Jesus set his religion apart from politics and gives Christians a religious basis for the separation of church and state.

It’s more than a bit strange that this question was even asked in a Presidential debate in a country built on a foundation one of the cornerstones of which is the separation of Church and State.

There is lots of good discussion of this particular question on Ann Althouse’s Blog. It’s also a great look at some of the answers that could have been, including Samuel L Jackson’s recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction.

This video has been making its way around the tubes.
It’s the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. Dick Cheney in 1994, explaining why invading Iraq would be a bad idea.

Did he really just use the word “quagmire”?

Worldmapper.org is a project that takes the map of our planet and distorts it based on various statistical data.
Here are a few that I found interesting.

Arms Exports 2003:

War Deaths 2002:

While the timeline on these doesn’t line up exactly, this trend has been happening for a long time. Looking at these two maps side by side, it’s easy to see that the United States and Europe are making a lot of weapons, and the rest of the world is buying them and using them to kill each other.

Toys Exports:

Toys Imports:

I knew we got a lot of cheap plastic crap from China and Korea, but these two images really put things into perspective.

Valuables Imports:

Bling bling suckas!

This project is about design at its core. Mixing art and science to find new ways of looking at or interacting with the world around us.

Presidential Speeches Tag Clouds is a great variation on a data display technique known as tag clouds, a type of weighted list that is becoming very popular online. It is usually used on blogs and online communities for organizing what words are used most often in reference to a given article. Here it is used to organize the frequency of buzzword use in presidential speeches. Excellent illustration of how political focus has shifted from issue to issue throughout US history.