Month: January 2011

The current situation in Egypt is, as they say, fluid. There is the remote possibility that the Egyptian people will achieve their apparent ends relatively peacefully, without further loss of life.

But while the power of authority arrayed against them—the police, internal security apparatus, and perhaps the army—relies for its ultimate effectiveness upon the credible threat of violence, the power of protest and resistance relies in the last instance upon a people’s willingness to die for their cause.

This is what it means to be courageous: to place yourself in the path of irresistible force, certain of your own destruction, for a cause higher than yourself and your petty concerns. Flesh arrayed against bullets, bodies against tanks. Lives willingly offered for beliefs and aspirations.

Without sacrifice or the threat of sacrifice, there is no courage.

Succinct is always nice. Succinct that says it all is dynamite.

I can’t say I was surprised by a single Wikileak … they all seemed so deja vu and utterly timeless, as if they could have been intercepted letters, hand-written by Napoleon-in-exile to his cohorts on the mainland.

Humorzo noticed this great line by Sylvia Paull.

Oh, if we had goals and targets too.

[link]

So why isn’t there more agreement? Certainly some smart people out there must have figured out the “right way” or the “best solution”… right? Well, NO.

See, that’s the problem that so many of us make, and definitely one that the legislators and zealots make A LOT. There is no single right way, no single best solution. Each of us has different goals, different skills, different resources, and different motivations; and that doesn’t even take into account different cash flow and different climates and different environments. Given all the unique factors that an individual must take into account, how can we expect to have a single right answer? We simply can’t, it’s just not realistic. We each need to figure out what we need to do for our desired situation and then determine how to best achieve it based on our individual parameters.

Charles Sullivan:

Corporate power expanded.

Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets.

Money triumphed over people.

With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy eroding liberties and killing the planet.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public.

And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.

Democrat Congressman Frank Pallone read the natural born Citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor, Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution.

A woman seated in the front row of the public gallery shouted out, “Except Obama! Except Obama! Help us, Jesus!”

Unlawful conduct, disruption of Congress; processed and released by the Sergeant at Yarns.

Jeepers. This copy from the Washington Post’s Q&A with China’s Hu Jintao struck me as a laundry list of central government action, although merely a list, perhaps insufficient, perhaps better than nothing, yet definitely more assertive than the perpetual arguing in our politics. I threw in a numbered count while wondering if any US political party could manage the complexity on our plate.

Question #3;

What lessons do you think can be drawn from the 2008 international financial crisis? What effective measures did China adopt to counter the impact of the crisis?

Hu Jintao answers #3:

“Which makes one wonder: if it were transported back to 1787, would the Tea Party have rejected the Constitution that today it professes to love and defend? Most likely, yes.”

Satisfaction with Life?

Well being correlates most strongly with health, wealth, and basic education, yet some feel that managing economic pilfering will destroy American achievements.

Above the Sea of Fog.

He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect. He will hold to some laws but he will mostly violate both law and custom, and go beyond the established, inadequate norm. Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him. He will not be afraid of the destructive act: half the house will have to come down. This way he will grow virtuously into wisdom. —C.P. Cavafy

…a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions

…humanity hanging from a cross of iron

In less than 10 years, our military and security expenditures have increased by 119 percent.

Even after subtracting the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the budget has grown by 68 percent since 2001.

50 years later, we’re still ignoring Ike’s warning, by Susan Eisenhower:

I’ve always found it rather haunting to watch old footage of my grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, giving his televised farewell address to the nation on Jan. 17, 1961.

“There is a reoccurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties,” he warned.

Plundering our own ease ! So thus reports Economic Undertow:

Our grandchildren will harvest what, exactly?

Both Eisenhower and King grasped the same insolvency metaphors, acknowledging the possibility of a bankrupt notion of progress; that the human race and its embrace of the American-style ‘dream’ would soon enough harvest the bitter crop of its strip-mining, the use of which is vacant of any real possibility.

Thermodynamics is relentless and cannot be negotiated with.

And as Umair Haque says. “If there’s one phrase I might use to describe the global economy’s malaise, it’s ‘values of little worth‘, a criticism that might be applied to nearly every moribund industry under the sun.”