time for easy blogging

The Thought Shopper has bloggeritis 🙂 
I’ve been using Twitter lately; nearly entirely because the mouse clicks are easier. 

RT @davewiner: Here’s what Woz really thinks about Kim DotCom. http://t.co/MY4GC2NF
 
via @rwchambliss: The secular Day of Judgment: when all externalities are finally internalized.
 
There’s an extra billion people on Earth – if all are as #fat as Americans. – http://t.co/rr2aMtIm
 
“For some rea­son, these and most other rela­tion­ships never quite blos­somed the way we’d hoped…” – http://t.co/3rcFZcvm
 
RT @Nancy_Baron: Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get:Twain. Now – Climate is what you affect, weather is what gets you.
 
“Creditors demand citizens take losses in creditors’ place.” – http://t.co/1fM7oILG
 
Food stamps are really a ‘food and energy’ program– frees up household cash for gasoline. – http://t.co/DMCxZp31 #poverty
 
Look at the car dependent regions as they are emblematic of post peak-oil economic breakdown. – http://t.co/DMCxZp31
 
RT @davewiner: Drone Used To Spy On Miami Partygoers. http://t.co/NHlpa1X7
 
#danger – Fueled by elites, demonizing opponents is out of control and a prime cause of #war. – http://t.co/n1VEnVKD
     

 

is tomorrow a beginning?

Is it Monday or Numbday? 

 

“All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way. Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent, now, completely.

“Increasingly, around the world, the actual computing artifacts of daily life for individual human beings are being locked so you can’t hack them.

“The individual computing laboratory in every 12-year-old’s pocket is being locked down. If you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves, you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.

“The goal of the network operators is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment that she can’t learn from, can’t study, can’t understand, can’t whet her teeth on, can’t do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.”

More notes at Memex… 
“Eben Moglen’s ‘Innovation in an Age of Austerity’.
If you watch nothing else this week, watch this.”

neato pictures of skin

Your skin —the largest organ of the body— weighs about 9 lbs, releases up to 3 gallons of liquid each day, and sheds about 30,000 cells every minute. 

some rants are literature

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. 

Charles Simac:

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal.

It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do.

The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.

Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon.

For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

a vacuum occupied by myth

Deciphering Ernest Hemingway, er, with a twist: 

The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that way, signing himself ‘Old Master’ when he was barely 18.

He made the fiction true, including the fiction of himself, and then struggled to keep up with it.

costs per patient discharged alive

1) The cost per patient discharged alive reflects the times.

2) Since 2001, mortality has been level while the cost per patient has escalated dramatically.

3) The post-2000 era, however, seems to be characterized by diminishing returns, with growth in costs far outpacing reductions in inpatient mortality.

New England Journal of Medicine

rape is our invisible war

1) Today: Lawsuit claims rape, misconduct at D.C. Marine Barracks

2) The Daily Mail: 8 female Marines claim gang rape at Washington Marine Barracks

3) CNN: Female service members sue US Military for alleged rape, sexual assault 

rape in the U.S. military

4) Democracy Now! ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic Military

5) Reuters: ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Wide-Spread Rape in U.S. Military

6) LA Times: ‘The Invisible War’ Sheds Light on Rape in the Military 

7) Salt Lake Tribune: ‘The Invisible War’

8) Associated Press: ‘Invisible War’ Examines Rape in the U.S. Military

9) Forbes Women: Republicans Betray Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence

10) Invisible War – The Movie

as we learn today’s propaganda

Naked Capitalism writes an exposĂ© about the life work of one of America’s most successful propagandists, Malcolm Gladwell. 

A comment from Goin’ South sums it up: 

“What is truth,” Pilate asked. 

In this age when the brains, tongues and typing fingers of scientists, academics, journalists and ‘public intellectuals’ are for sale, it’s quite a challenging question.

The truth is whatever you can pay to make it.

Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project, which stands for “Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.”

Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be in a better position to recognize bias and hidden agendas in their reporting and analysis. You can find a S.H.A.M.E dossier on Gladwell here.