Month: November 2008

“You cannot prove anything to anyone who cannot prove the matter for themselves,” said T.Henry Moray, “…if they haven’t that inner spark, the curiosity, the wonder….”

Busted Baby Boomers might be sufficiently miserable these days to look squarely at, well, more misery. The decrepit days of dying await and very many will not have the income to purchase the services and needs of old age. In this horrid contemplation of final days in poverty, why not innovate?

Daisy Ginsberg : The Future of Money

With an aging population and an overextended NHS, you may find yourself alone, geriatric and diseased in your home, discovering new forms of “Care in the Community”, ordering your food by rescanning barcodes on empty tins of spam and using a webcam to be diagnosed by your GP. So why not choose a cash windfall and a shorter life?

Post Credit Crunch, Genetic Credit has given us unprecedented purchasing power. Gamble on your risky future, and opt for Early Exit: you can eliminate the risk of inherited disease and receive a refund for all the expenses you would have run up.

[tip to PreOccupations]

The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not??
How the cup holds the tea,?
How the chair stands sturdy
and foursquare, ?
How the floor receives
the bottoms of shoes?
Or toes. How soles of feet know?
Where they’re supposed to be.?
I’ve been thinking
about the patience ?
Of ordinary things, how clothes?
Wait respectfully in closets?
And soap dries
quietly in the dish,?
And towels drink the wet?
From the skin of the back.?
And
the lovely repetition of stairs.?
And what is more generous
than a window?

He found himself sleeping in a cot in a crowded homeless shelter in San Francisco… part of a growing trend of homelessness among returning veterans.

More than 2,000 military personnel return home to California each month. Most have no specialized job experience, education or an easy familiarity with civilian life. And many have post traumatic stress disorder, making it difficult to get along with friends and family, and almost impossible to hold down a job.

“You feel like the whole world is against you when you get home.”

President Bush is the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first sought more than six decades ago.

It’s no wonder we all seem nuts.

CNN Poll

Only 16 percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say things are going well in the country today. That’s an all-time low. Eighty-three percent say things are going badly, which is an all-time high.

“The challenge Obama faces has never been greater. No president has ever come to office during a time when the public’s mood has been this low. In the 34 years that this question has been asked, the number who say things are going well has never fallen below 20 percent,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

The 83 percent saying things are going badly is “more than in 1992, when the first President Bush was ousted because of the economy, stupid.

Intel is building vertical and segmenting machines for the medical market. Can you see it coming?

Recent studies have shown that remote components “result in significantly better care”.

Soon, in our palms and on our tabletops we will be polishing new brand names such as the ‘Parent Alarm’, the ‘Tired Mommy’, the ‘Marathon Jogger’, the GPS-connected ‘Polar Bear Trophy Hunter’ or the ‘Alzheimer’s Finder’.

We can call these new sensors the Blood-Pressure Internet.

Automating medicine will bring extra machines but may not reduce our sense that health care is already robotic.

Some say we are confronting loose bankers using us; using us as an agriculture of greed, and I hope we’ll see America’s health care system sees us as green too.

The institution of medicine is what we perceive day by day, but this is old fashioned, out of date. Medicine is no longer a triumph under mere bureaucracy. Doctors are not eager to go to work. Students are in other careers. Medicine is our top jobs engine, but staff is unhappy. The drumming of reports and research is science that is not in most hospitals and never in clinics, but steered to industrial and regional pork. Desperate families are led by petri dish infomercials making rats of us all. Agency watchdogs are overwhelmed and politicized like legislators at lunch. The circus of conglomerates sell patent drugs like Disney sells cartoons. Not quite door to door, commissioned fleets and untethered 1099s follow us into every appointment.

Medicine is a mess, America, because it’s purpose is not society.

It’s not socialist pinko commie to demand better. Why? Because we are the buyers not the takers.

Because we are each for the many and our systems must serve us all.

To achieve a system of sensible medicine, our work as citizens is our most needed critical care.

Q: How do you like your society?
A: Intravenously.

It’s love I want not pride or money. No shine takes this nor silver will. Quit gold now, then diamond, and every wealth. Speed, strength and winning stop. Water and warm and kissing tempt. But eye and eye is my infinity, and us my only earth.

Bill Ayers is a Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He’s a poster boy for the hate dredged by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Waiting for the election to finish, he speaks:

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.

…
At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Here are the Religious Wrong, the ego of America’s Taliban, the pathology of aggrandizement that elevate ignorance while we cower under superstition and anarchy.

1. Pat Robertson – $246,986,289
   Christian Broadcasting Network
2. Southern Baptist Convention – $205,716,834
3. James Dobson – $156,972,266
   Focus on the Family
4. Jay Sekulow, Pat Robertson – $42,658,159
   American Center for Law and Justice
5. Alan Sears – $31,674,124
   Alliance Defense Fund
6. Donald Wildmon – $22,547,087
   American Family Association
7. Tony Perkins – $11,783,971
   Family Research Council
8. Tim & Beverly LaHaye – $10,640,810
   Concerned Women for America
9. Jerry Falwell Ministries – $4,208,989
10. Steve Baldwin – $1,680,914
    Council for National Policy

Top Ten Power Brokers of the Religious Right
compiled by Rob Boston at Church & State magazine. [tip to j-walk]

---

What will these pulpits be arranging to exploit the media popularity of Sarah Palin?

One thing was clear: Many in the Christian Right now view electing Palin as a task ordained by God.

The unanswered question for the rest of us is: How does Palin see herself? Is she someone who merely asks God for guidance — a fairly common practice for religious people in public office? Or does she see herself as carrying out God’s will on the political stage?

The latter would suggest a theocratic worldview that runs counter to the separation of church and state. But because she has so far declined most interviews, we’re left to sift through Palin’s political and religious history for clues.

RANDOM QUOTE:
Would it upset you to know that China, the #2 country for military expenditures, spends 6% of its budget on the military; Russia, #3, the same? Iran, the boogie man of the Middle East is #27 with 1% of its whopping $4.9 Billion Dollar budget spent on its military.

The United States will spend roughly 52% of its budget on the Pentagon.

Psychologists say we’re biased toward the perception that other people are more biased than we are.

A nine-year study by the University of British Columbia has found that 90% of small fish caught in the world’s oceans every year are… ground up as animal feed.

“It defies reason to drain the ocean of small, wild fishes that could be directly consumed by people in order to produce a lesser quantity of farmed fish.” – Pew Institute for Ocean Science Institute

“Although feeds derived from soy and other land-based crops are available and are used, fishmeal and fish oil have skyrocketed in popularity because forage fish are easy to catch in large numbers and, hence, relatively inexpensive.”

According to the study, small forage fish account for 37%, or 31.5 million tonnes, of all fish taken from the world’s oceans each year. Of this amount, 90% is processed into fishmeal and fish oil.

Current figures show 46% of fishmeal and fish oil is used as feed for aquaculture, 24% for pig feed and 22% for poultry.

“Society should demand that we stop wasting these fish on farmed fish, pigs, and poultry.”

Encouraging point of view:

Friday, November 07, 2008
by Heather Havrilesky

I wrote an Open Apology to Boomers Everywhere for Salon on Wednesday, then I walked around the rest of the day with a skip in my step that hasn’t worn off yet. If it’s naive to think that an American president can make a huge difference in the world, I don’t care. I want to feel this way for as long as I can. Obviously the man will make mistakes along the way. But god, it feels so good to believe that he’ll collect information and get a second and third opinion and be as honest as possible and above all, do his very best. I think it’s possible to sense that about him, and that’s one reason why he’s been so popular.

Not that creepy losers aren’t often popular, but let’s not think about them now. Right now I prefer to see the world as populated primarily by smart people and loving mothers and adorable puppy dogs. After so many years of gloom about the state of things, I’m going to bask in this feeling of belief and optimism for as long as I can.

Secret Service agents are reporting that Sarah Palin’s attacks on Barack Obama’s patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president.

If we all had a flu shot, flu would be eliminated. But colds might stay around a very long time.

A plume of cough has finally been visualized using Schlieren photography [wiki] and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Let us not project infectious aerosols into the surrounding air.

---

“Before you spend your hard-earned cash on Airborne, consider the following.

“In March, the manufacturers of Airborne agreed, as part of a class-action lawsuit, to refund more than $23 million to consumers who had purchased the product in the past.”

May 27, 1961

“There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years, a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States, certainly within that period of time.” – Robert F. Kennedy to Voice of America, while he served as U.S. Attorney General

Charles Smith:

My greatest hope for the Obama presidency is the appointment of sober competence in key positions of power in the Federal government.

No one can repair the U.S. economy, but a competent team can put in place policies and management which can lessen the structural damage and suffering, just as an incompetent team can wreak even greater damage.

From the point of view of deep-power structures, the party affiliation of an appointee is basically theater for the masses. Our concern should be on the competence of the people Obama selects, not their superficial partisan labels. The great weakness of the Bush years was gross incompetence in every department and at every level, compounded by the firing or dismissal of competent voices in favor of zealous lackeys and sychophants.

The incompetence cost many fine Americans their lives, and cost the nation trillions of wasted dollars. Look no further than the money-pit Orwellian-named “Department of Homeland Security” and “we don’t do quagmires” Donald Rumsfield as just two examples of hundreds.

And let’s also not forget who influences both parties: the 40,000-strong legions of lobbyists, tax attorneys and all the other well-paid servants of the Elite who actually own most of the U.S.’s productive assets. Just as a reminder:

While the mainstream punditry is palavering on about middle-class tax cuts, let’s focus our attention on the fact that any tax cut to anyone is a forced loan extracted from the earnings of future generations.

The notion of raising taxes on those who make $250,000 or more distracts us from the more compelling need to look at whether those earning $25 million or more are paying any tax at all, and if not, why not?

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002. They served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was killed by “friendly fire” in 2004. Pat’s birthday on November 6.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated and nobody is accountable for it.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.

Leave Us Without a Voice.

A poll of Republicans found that Palin ranks behind Romney and Huckabee for 2012 nominee.

“It’s natural. The frontal lobes used for higher reasoning and cognition of Republicans are flat-lining as Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber appeal only to the brain stem of conservatism….”

Since Ted Stevens is garnering only 22% in Alaska, there are rumors Palin will run for his Senate seat in 2010.

The author at CoolBuzz constructed these words too:

“Simplicity is hard to achieve. While its easy to make a simple thing complicated, molding a complicated idea in a simple manner is hard and when someone achieves just that, it is called creativity. A resourceful mind can map out anything unusual into reality. Sometime it receives applause, and at times it goes beyond such mundane forms of praise.

“A renowned floral urinal designer, Clark Sorensen, has widened his forte, making a Presidential toilet! Mind, it ain’t for the White House but bears President George W Bush’s face – not much to be mocked.

“The designer asserts that his presidential toilet design expresses his view of the President’s last eight years of rule.”

After running for office while carrying water, Ron Paul ponders:

NY Times:

Cheney & Bush rev up their Wrecking Balls

We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

As Les Lohman commented,

The thing to do is to get involved and stay involved. Write your congressman. Phone your Senator. Send letters and emails to the White House. Let ’em know what the will of the people is. Let advisors know. Get on the blogs and comment. Create your own blog and voice your opinion. Pick a method, ANY method, of getting and staying involved. Just DON’T SIT ON YOUR HANDS. Don’t “Wait and See”. Because we, the people can effect change.

“Yes, we can.“