Month: March 2011

Oh yes, our society is worthy of celebration, our policies are thoughtful…

Americans, constituting only 4.6% of the world’s population, have been consuming 80% of the global opioid supply, and 99% of the global hydrocodone supply, as well as two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs. [link]

Don’t reply to your first thought. It’s likely opinionated and wrong. If we had a clue, these statistics wouldn’t reveal our errors. We know too little about this challenge.

In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages.

The biosphere: an entity, composed of all the earth’s life-forms, simple and complex, teem­ing with information, replicating and evolving, coding from one level of abstraction to the next.

Ideas!

Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go.

They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organ­isms.

The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable — units with staying power.

For fifty years, we have bombarded our children with commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation. We are nearly alone in the democratic world in not providing our candidates with public-service television time. Instead we make them buy it—and so money consumes and corrupts our political discourse.

As low-level employees crawl through waves of radiation, the execs and shareholders escape as usual. What would be different if our class system required personal consequences?

They are contract workers getting about 9,000 yen per day [$13.90 per hour]. They move from one nuclear plant to other in medium term contracts. They had probably looked upon assignment to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant as another routine job.

The 180 workers deployed in 2-hour shifts to get control over truant radioactivity in Fukushima’s 6 nuclear reactors have been battling for a week.

Combined with their previous work, they may well have become exposed to high radiation by now. Five have died so far from explosions, two are missing and 22 have been injured.

There are times when radiation soars, as on Tuesday, and the workers retreat into safe zones. Then they are back again.

The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.

It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.

Senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space.

Our society has age.

Stats from one embedded non-profit say:

There are nearly 15 million Alzheimer’s and dementia caregivers.

That’s 17 billion hours of unpaid care  valued at $202 billion.

Alzheimer’s and dementia caregivers had $7.9 billion in additional health care costs in 2010.

More than 60 percent of family caregivers report high levels of stress because of the prolonged duration of caregiving and 33 percent report symptoms of depression. Try Caregiver.com

One city. Grand jury names dozens of clergymen accused of paedophilia.
Bribes of billions uncounted. City after city, country after country, blood of abuse.

I shrink to my soul.

Utility bills got you down? Empathize a few moments with these off-grid kids in Alaska:

Last fall we put up several piles of firewood for the winter.

This system worked fairly well when 1) the snow on the trail wasn’t past the truck running boards, 2) we still had birch in the pile, and 3) the piles weren’t buried beneath 4 feet of snow and ice.

…chucking frozen 50 lb logs when it’s below freezing and… they honestly did not burn.

Seriously, we’re talking completely fire retardant wood. Even when we split it down into almost kindling size they never really made flame or produced any heat… leaving us cold and waiting 3+ hours for the kettle to boil…

“He was always talking about how much power he had,” she said, “how he liked being able to write someone a ticket just for looking at him funny.” Then, one day, he raped her.

Our prisons !

Incidents of sexual abuse may be as high as 25 per hour !

“Overall, most victims were abused not by other inmates but by corrections staff: agents of our government, paid with our taxes.”