big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
about a California poet, Robinson Jeffers
via wikiquote on Jeffers:
Something utterly wild had crept into his mind. The seabeaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, possessed and spoke through him. It was one of the most uncanny and compete relationships between a man and his natural background that I know in literature.
Did root causes precede massive narco corporations? Ponder poor and drugs. Fuse two words and think. Add Taliban and war and think again.
Add Mexico!!
La Familia has a solid base, a growing presence in other states and in several US cities.
It is also innovative: it has a spiritual leader called Nazario Moreno González, nicknamed El Más Loco, the Craziest One.
The “latest sinister developments in Mexico” cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of the war on drugs.
In order to strike a hard point, think again. Trumping Pakistan’s recent attacks, the Taliban have revived land reform first proposed by democratic liberals thirty years ago to quickly renew ‘a vested community of support’.
“There we have it. Pakistan’s political system is wholly founded on the rule of the country’s narrow, landowning and industrial class.”
Yes, there we have it. Class. Landowning. Industrial. Poor. Drugs. War. The passing of Robert McNamara reminds us of great error, expensive folly and deadly mistakes. Will we learn to develop policies that are worth what they cost?
Can we reach poverty before poverty reaches war? We are enabled for battle. Testing that is no betrayal. Some say a ragged underground will gain symmetry to blow up a bus or hack a blackout or attack our water or gas.
Some are able and many are willing.
But what shrewd thing does a Taliban or will El Más Loco do if it’s not gather the poor? Will we learn to develop policies that are worth what they cost?
Battle Against Terrorism To Go Beyond Bombs and Bullets
boys in the field
Special Forces now journalist
The British like to say that Helmand Province is medieval, but I say the British give Helmand far too much credit. Medieval is space-aged compared to some of these places.
And never forget that forty years ago, a single middle-class income was enough to buy a house, feed a family, get the occasional new car and take a vacation. Things have, indeed, been going downhill for that long to where, in most areas, even two middle-class incomes (like husband and wife) are lucky to live such a life.
Naomi Klein:
A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we’ve been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it’s between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we’ve made a social contract to say, ‘That’s not a good place to have the profit motive govern.’ Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn’t something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don’t want a market for fire.
Tyler Cowen, What is a Conservative’s beliefs?
Contrary to popular assumption, stimulus spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [Obama] has been a very small factor in the expansion of the federal budget deficit in 2009.
Many policies that pre-date the Obama Administration, including Bush-era spending on the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, are key factors in the growing deficit.
“The Bush-era tax cuts are the largest contributors to this period of policy-induced increases to the federal budget deficit.”
The years between 2001 and 2007 saw a large deterioration in the budget balance, which was driven chiefly by legislated policy changes.
The Bush-era tax cuts are the largest contributors to this period of policy-induced increases to the federal budget deficit.
To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering: 15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year.
America’s prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico’s — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care. So why not repeal our drug laws? Because cops are making money off them, too.
free to dare,
free to speak,
free to wonder,
free to associate,
otherwise reason.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-FYyuvrRk&hl=en&fs=1&]
Trickle-down, i.e. protecting the wealthy as a means of improving economic outcomes for the middle class and poor, is “morally and economically indefensible” but we’ve bought this math since Reagan.
One million homeless schoolchildren.
Dana Blankenhorn: The birthers and the deathers and the secessionists and the liars have to be placed out of bounds…
For months now conservative politicians and their followers have acted like a street gang.
They have told a series of outright lies, each more outrageous than the last…
The summer of 2009 has become a summer of hate.
Jon Taplin:
How can we ever make a collective decision about the wisdom or folly of war if our news media decides its role is to protect us from the reality of war?
Reihan Salam on The Great He-Cession:
Manly men have been running the world forever. But the Great Recession is changing all that, and it will alter the course of history.
The era of male dominance is coming to an end.
Seriously.
For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.
The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look.
How long before costs come home?
…shipping two 20 pound packages by overnight air -the most energy-intensive delivery mode — still uses 40 percent less fuel than driving 20 miles round-trip to the mall or store or wherever you’re going;
…ground shipping — which is much more efficient than overnight air — checks in at just one-tenth the energy used driving yourself.
Well, did things with fangs that might injure babies lead women to evolve built-in fears?
“Bankers were excluded from communion by an ordinance of 1581, joining a list of other shady occupations—pawnbrokers, actors, jugglers, acrobats, quacks, and brothel keepers—that were disqualified from receiving God’s grace.
“Their wives were permitted to join the Lord’s Supper, but only on condition that they publicly declared their repugnance for their husband’s profession.
Of even greater concern for Palestinian families …the bodies of their loved ones were whisked off to the only institute in Israel that conducts such autopsies
…almost certainly at the center of a trade in organs.
“It is worth remembering in this context the constant refrain from Israel’s peace camp that the brutal, four-decade occupation of the Palestinians has profoundly corrupted Israeli society.”
George Bush and Laura have chosen James Glassman as executive director of their new think tank.
Glassman wrote a book in 2000 saying the Dow Jones would soon be around 36000.
“…both investors and official commentators have misperceived stocks as a risky investment.
“…anyone who gets in now and stays for the long haul can expect returns of around 300 per cent.
ut izs pcen dof hearing loss causeb earphoes?
I have a daily happy hour – a ritual I have imbued with an almost religious aura, in which the single daily drink is sufficient to put me in “the zone.” In spite of a literature that mostly says that a little booze is good for you, I still worry that I might be pickling more little gray cells than is desirable.
Thus a recent little gem from the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry is reassuring. A meta-analysis combining many studies concludes that compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent.
There are caveats.
Anger is to place greater weight on the welfare of the angry.
Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology.
The findings have implications…
Link to The Telegraph story: Men Lose Their Minds.
A new policy paper by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy shows a clear increase in the size and influence of noncommercial traders, or “speculators,” in the oil futures market since regulations were eased by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. [It’s time to fix what Texan Phil Gramm slipped in as a rider.]
Speculators now constitute about 50 percent of those holding outstanding positions in the U.S. oil futures market, compared with only about 20 percent prior to 2002.
Peak oil or not peak oil.
“The tremendous increase in the market presence of speculators by fifteenfold speaks for itself.”
33% of all workers under the age of 35 live with their parents:
the AFL-CIO released the results of a disturbing new Peter Hart survey, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade” that found that about a third of workers under 35 live at home with their parents, and they’re far less likely to have health care or job security than they were ten years ago.