So, here are a few things that I think are true.

Even if they’re not entirely true, they’re at least pretty darn close to true, and I think we’ll all do a lot better over the next few weeks if we could all agree to act as if they were true.

1. People chanting “U-S-A” following the death of Osama bin Laden do not hate other countries. They do not hate Muslims. They are expressing a sense of joy, or relief, or closure, or whatever, in a way that feels comfortable for them.

2. People who are too young to remember 9/11 do not necessarily have less of a right to their feelings about bin Laden’s death, whatever those feelings may be. Remember that those kids have lived virtually their whole lives under the shadow of the threats (real and imagined) posed by bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

3. People who are uncomfortable with the idea of celebrating the death of another human being – even bin Laden – do not hate America. Some may wish that bin Laden had been captured alive, but they don’t wish that he was still free.

4. People who lost friends or family members in the 9/11 attacks are having a fundamentally different experience from people with friends and family in the armed forces, and fundamentally different from the experience of people for who are lucky enough not to have been directly affected. None of their reactions are right or wrong. 

5. None of these points apply to the politicians, pundits, and strategists who are going to spend the next several months exploiting and distorting events for partisan gain.

So, you know how around every election, and during every Republican administration, there is a constant buzz of liberals threatening to move to Canada?

But, then, you know, things turn out not to be quite so bad. Certainly not bad enough to justify having your kids grow up calling candy bars “chocolate bars.”

And then in 2008, we actually elected a president who was going to bring real change to Washington! He promised a public option as part of a comprehensive health-care-reform package. He promised to make closing down the abomination at Guantanamo a top priority.

Well, here we are in 2011. While most progressives still agree that an Obama administration beats the hell out of a McCain / Palin administration, there is a real sense of disappointment about the promises broken. You don’t hear people threatening to abandon America, however.

(With the exception of Rush Limbaugh, American conservatives don’t tend to express their political rage through threats to leave the country. They’re more likely to express themselves with racism, Nazi comparisons, and fantasies of gun violence.)

There is one man who has had enough, though:

In his 900th issue, Superman returns from protecting non-violent protesters from the Iranian army. When he is confronted upon his return by government officials, he announces his frustration with being viewed as a tool of US policy.

Actually, contrary to the predictable comments on various Fox-news related outlets (no link provided), this is not about anti-Americanism. It is better described as transcending a narrow Americanism. He is still a champion of the “American Way,” meaning the ideals of freedom and democracy. He is just not an instrument of the “American Way,” meaning the economic and political agenda of the United States.

As Scott Thill notes at Wired:

In an age rife with immigration paranoia, it’s refreshing to see an alien refugee tell the United States that it’s as important to him as any other country on Earth — which in turn is as important to Superman as any other planet in the multiverse.

The genius of Superman is that he belongs to everyone, for the dual purposes of peace and protection. He’s above ephemeral geopolitics and nationalist concerns, a universal agent unlike any other found in pop culture.

Somehow, the idea that Superman should only care about America seems vaguely blasphemous, sort of like the idea that Jesus should be taking sides in a football game.

One last thing. A number of commenters have suggested that if he is abandoning America, he needs to change his outfit, which is weird, since he wears primarily red and blue, with a bit of yellow, which would seem to ally him with maybe Chad or Romania.

So, what do you get as a wedding present for the couple that has everything? Well, William and Kate requested that people donate to charity in lieu of giving them yet another golden dhow, although I should note that my wife and I did that first. They probably heard about our wedding from mutual friends.

This golden dhow was given to Princess Diana as a wedding gift by the Emir of Bahrain. Extrapolating back from recent events, it seems safe to assume that the dhow was purchased with funds from US Foreign Aid, is an honorary member of the US Fifth Fleet, and was tempered with the blood of pro-democracy protesters.

Okay, so you could donate to charity. But what if you have an opportunity to give a personal and symbolic gift? One that translates the inequality and entitlement symbolized by monarchy into a decidedly twenty-first-century context?

If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can delete the facebook pages of fifty activist groups involved in organizing protests against austerity measures in the UK. If you’re unfamiliar with the austerity measures and protests, the issue is basically that the current British government is committed to minimizing taxes for corporations and the very wealthy. Then, they notice that they don’t have enough money and demand cuts in things like education. For the past few months, there have been peaceful marches and protest throughout England, but particularly in London, which have not always been appropriately handled by the police.

A “Police Medic” uses his . . . um . . . +2 baton of healing? . . . at a protest of the 2009 G20 summit in London.  But seriously, all he is doing is ensuring a continued need for the services that he gets paid to provide . . . with taxpayer money.  Hey, you use the tools you have!  Image from Flickr is clearly out of context here, but you get the point.

So, it’s pretty much exactly like what is happening in the United States, except for the fact that no one outside of Wisconsin is sufficiently motivated to protest.

Since the incident, Facebook has issued a partial explanation, claiming that these accounts were deleted because of a violation of terms of service. Specifically, Facebook’s policy is that groups should be represented by “pages,” whereas “profiles” are only for individuals.

Now, it’s not hard to find a ton of profiles on Facebook that are also not individuals, but have not been deleted. Does this mean that Facebook was specifically targeting these protest groups?

Probably not really.

My best guess as to what actually happened is that someone in the British government provided a list of profiles violating this policy to Facebook. So, while whoever provided the list was certainly politically motivated, Facebook probably just acted on the information given to it.

So, lesson one here is that if you have a political group that you are organizing on Facebook, make sure to set it up as a “page.” You don’t want to give your political opponents an easy way to disrupt your network.

Lesson two is that if you are a political group that is likely to piss off government or corporate authorities, you should try not to rely too heavily on centrally controlled tools like Facebook. Facebook can be great for reaching out to large numbers of people, but ideally, you should also maintain connections through networking tools that are more distributed. While I don’t think that Facebook acted with a particular political agenda in this case, they certainly are capable of doing so, and you don’t want your group to be at the mercy of any corporation.

So, after leaving us at terror level “orange” for the past five years, the Department of Homeland Security is finally scrapping the old color-coded system for a much simpler two-tiered system. The two levels are reportedly:

OMG

and

ZOMFG!!!!11!!!1!!11