Why do Deepwater explosion survivors struggle struggle struggle ? ? ?
families still dealing with the aftermath of the accident
Find the execs
Find the checks
Pull ’em away from lunch
Pull out the whole damn bunch
shock the economy
This is not an esoteric line of inquiry.
The United States is not broke.
We should laugh at the delusion that we are.
The potential for abundance is everywhere around us, but it stagnates for sheer lack of funding.
For Hire: Lobbyists or the 99 percent
Corporations have vast resources to pour into Congress.
Low or no taxes are paid thanks to rules they lobbied into law.
Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack of revenue.
30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.
A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
“It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
“True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.”
The New Propaganda All Over Again.
“Let them eat cake.
“I want a reality show where the Billionaires come on every day and talk about their troubles.
“It could be like the old TV show ‘Queen for a Day’. The 1 Percenter with the biggest sob story wins a brand new dishwasher.” —Jon Taplin
Neal Stephenson warns about ‘Innovation Starvation’
“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!”
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules.
It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments.
Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
“Hey, everybody, that’s our tree, not theirs.”
pulled by vowels
OK, here’s the weird part.
Vowels pull on our brains.
“I”s pull us differently than “O”s.
A curious pattern shows up.
Ice cream companies mix lots of “O”s and “A”s
Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut
But the cracker brands stick pretty much to “E”s and “I”s.
Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Chips, Biskit
But Why?
exploration, or exploitation
Destroying the Common Wealth is easy, abundant and cheap. It is what the vast majority of organizations do. Enhancing it, in contrast is the scarcest, rarest, and single most disruptive capability an organization can possess. –Umair Haque
The place to start is America’s executive suites, which should be cleared of mercenaries in order to encourage real leadership.
Contrast this with the America of bailouts, where the fat are considered “too big to fail.” In fact, many are too big – or at least too mismanaged – to succeed.
Public support should be shifted from protecting large established corporations to encouraging the growth of newer enterprises.
Armies of MBAs who have been trained to manage everything in general but nothing in particular are part of the problem, not the solution.
So are economists who study clouds without ever getting wet.
but banks deserve it
If only we could all borrow at 1% and lend at 
7%.
Finally we’ve found our Cadillac welfare queens.
dopamine and the bell curve
all of us in the headlights
When Google Street View becomes peer to peer,
we should push for that,
there won’t be the world we know.
We never run this type of image without discussions at the highest levels in the newsroom.
We understand that it is a tough image to look at, but we felt the news value of the photo made it worth publishing. We feel that we cannot hide important news from our readers, even when it is unpleasant.
The war in Afghanistan is an important and complicated story, and the violence seems to never end. In these attacks, the fact that it was sectarian violence adds yet another layer to the complexity of the situation.
The photo, while gut-wrenching, shows just how many innocents are being killed. The bodies of dead, maimed and wounded children breaks your heart but also lets you know how indiscriminate the killing has become.
peddling a pudgy pugilist
Reporters, listen up: Stop calling Newt Gingrich a “scholar.” In fact, spend some time learning about his real history.
Myra MacPherson has profiled Newt Gingrich for the Washington Post since 1989.
Reporters should examine candidate Newt’s so-called brilliant solutions, often vague or recycled from the 1994 Contract With America, which Gingrich co-authored. Detractors at the time nicknamed it Contract On America.
And his former pastor Rev. Bretley Harwell, was so disillusioned at Newt’s famous dumping of wife number one — bringing her divorce papers instead of flowers while she recuperated from a cancer operation — that he was willing to be quoted.
“You’re looking at an amoral person, that’s what you’re looking at.”
Seth Godin calls it the new lazy journalism
We don’t need paid professionals to do retweeting for us. They’re slicing up the attention pie thinner and thinner, giving us retreaded rehashes of warmed over news, all hoping for a bit of attention because the issue is trending. We can leave that to the unpaid, I think.
The hard part of professional journalism going forward is writing about what hasn’t been written about, directing attention where it hasn’t been, and saying something new.
the ‘wtf’ holiday greeting
Photo by Dawn Nelson at National Geographic
ye em-bubbled plutocrats
Following OWS, the Tea Party and the great global crash, you can bet if anyone takes the odds, there’s a billion now spent to re-frame the 1%.
I’d also wager any uptick in next waves of IMF GDPs will be driven by craftedly-proud bankers letting loose more billions they’ve accrued while world budgets argue austerity and plead urgent investment.
Thus, let’s bitch a little before smokes of propaganda dilute our rage.
Let’s write a letter to one of our Wall Street brigands. To begin:
In a nation bereft of royalty by virtue of its republican birth, the American people have done what any other resourceful people would do – we’ve created our own royalty and our royalty is the 1%. Not only do we not “hate the rich” as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them.
We worship our rich to the point of obsession.
We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.
So, no, we don’t hate the rich.
time to starve politicians
A 7-step guide to passing a city or town resolution to Get Money Out! of politics
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
The two dominant parties have fought each other to stalemate.
— the anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government wing of the Republican Party
— the raise-taxes-on-the-rich-but-don’t-touch-my-entitlement wing of the Democratic Party
Nothing really gets resolved, nobody wins, and the stalemate continues.
It is in your name, with your money, that this unproductive game is played.
One way or another, we are all enablers.
“The only way to change their behavior is to stop the flow of political cash to both parties. It’s the only currency that seems to matter to these guys, the only thing that will get their attention, the only message they are likely to understand.”
neurotoxins in the fog
Coastal fog importing mercury from the ocean on to the land.
There’s a ‘wash-out’ of methylmercury — a sort of invisible bathtub ring of fog.
These are unheard of levels…
EPA Will Finally Cut Coal Industry’s Toxic Mercury Pollution
1990 —amended Clean Air Act ordered standards for mercury and other toxic air pollution from power plants.
2000 —court decree mandate but the rules were repeatedly delayed.
2006 —Bush rules thrown out by the courts for failing to protect public health.
The health risks of mercury and arsenic are enormously well-documented. In the 21 years since the EPA was ordered to issue these rules, 17 states have independently acted to limit mercury emissions from power plants. Coal-fired power plants alone produce 772 million pounds of airborne toxins every year—2.5 pounds for every American.
Even with this finalized Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, power plants will have years to comply. Upgrading power plants to cut air toxics is expected to create 31,000 construction jobs to 158,000 jobs installing pollution controls.
let’s rethink our economy
The ebook is called Betterness.
Umair Haque argues that just as positive psychology revolutionized our understanding of mental health by recasting the field as more than just treating mental illness, we need to rethink our economic paradigm.
Why?
Because business as we know it has reached a state of diminishing returns—though we work harder and harder, we never seem to get anywhere. This has led to a diminishing of the common wealth: wage stagnation, widening economic inequality, the depletion of the natural world, and more.
To get out of this trap, we need to rethink the future of human exchange. In short, we need to get out of business and into betterness.
link to .pdf
link to kindle
link to iTunes
In a positive paradigm, the healthiest state isn’t just one that minimizes pathologies, but one that maximizes potential.
The terra incognita we’ve never explored is whether it’s possible for prosperity and human exchange not merely to go less wrong, but more right.
What if, just maybe, the economy is only living up to a fraction of its potential?
arresting the young
By age 23, up to 41 percent of Americans have been arrested at least once…. What?!
Although an arrest doesn’t necessarily mean a child, teen or young adult is a criminal, previous research has connected run-ins with the law with other problems — drug addiction, physical or emotional abuse and poverty, to name a few.
“We’re really asleep at the wheel right now when it comes to these problems with our young people.”
obeying its hacked pilot
DEBKAfile (Hebrew: תיק דבקה) is a Jerusalem-based English language Israeli open source military intelligence website.
Iranians not only unlocked the Sentinel’s secret software but also penetrated the command and control center running the drones from CIA Headquarters at Langley in McClean, Virginia.
Iranian electronic experts subsequently reprogrammed the directives guiding the satellite and the RQ-170 stealth drone by falsifying the images appearing on the screens at Langley.
As if Roy Rogers whistles to Trigger! As far as I’m concerned, secrets are secrets and propaganda is cheap. More likely this story is an interception of news that’s fed to Iranian locals.
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But let’s not be complacent folks.
Technology requires democracy’s whip.
December 10, 2011
Reporting from Washington — Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.
Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.
do we know what we want?
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A Song that Says It’s Naughty To Magnify the Small
Seeking authoritive morality
To lead us to our vision
To live less fallibly,
To stop failure’s incision,
Is our repetitive dream
Just beneath the known,
Stitched each day like a seam
That binds us to the hope we’re shown.
For we all know of our yearning
And the imperative of our need,
We all see reality’s turning
Love in the face of greed.
Yet horror is left unsaid,
Caustic blame that’s never fair,
Graphic agony that fuel our dread,
Encumber our want to care.
So we leave what’s worst alone.
We delegate our shores:
Join weakly to intone
Our dream, as if we’re whores
Who curb the rhythm of life,
Weak contending under threats.
Do we believe, reviewing strife,
We’ll see the instant violent nets
Closing in to disrupt our plan?
Whether passionate or tame
Each within our animate race,
We have a duty that drives the whole
From which a few prognosticate.
We walk from mountain to shoal
Where too few will legislate
Our vision and leaning to need.
And here our souls, our surety,
Our governance written by the freed
Shall carry our will and purity.
It must, it seems, be still recalled
Each finds no place to hide,
Nor fails work when called
To liberty never denied,
Not lost in conformity, hidden in nerves,
Nor lost to cult or loosely tied
In populist slogan that swerves
And sways through our dangerous day.
When trouble cloaks, becomes persistent,
When fears annoy, won’t go away,
When emptiness become consistent,
When hopes are lost in perplexities
Or controlled by causes remote,
The curious seek the complexities,
Others entrench in the rote.
Many seek comfort in diversion,
Ostensibly relaxing, secured
In claims of light reversion
To simpler things, like what’s inured
To lifting the self, distinct from the rest:
Pursuing, demanding to keep
Preserving and lofting the best,
‘Til our better efforts must leap
Away from ideas that heal.
This is the price denial must keep.
Is this the ache tired citizens feel?
Confronted by fear and by threat,
Bent in the forum of civic concern,
Impotent sketches of slow defeat, and yet
Is there no other way for people to learn
That when most of the world is worried
And agony’s millions alert;
challenge dramatic and flurried,
Our future either gentle or curt,
Ambitious roam in and through,
Peace still rough and tumble,
Tomorrow is squeezed on me or on you,
No practical plan to escape the rumble,
If cosmic, natural, or imperial;
These caustic options are revealed,
Will we retreat to the ethereal?
Instead we forge and we hammer a shield,
Our victory is long before battle!
Improve our goals, real and chattel,
Our humane gifts, compassion curled
In strength we have found here together,
Not towers of rare and inspired,
Not magic stoked with mystic feather,
Not experts endorsed when hired
To mimic hope until we’ve agreed
We’re merely tokens, opinions in court,
Gleaned response, polled queries of need:
How wise is this answer? “Sell it out short:
Gluttony must keep us invisible
To hope no one sees what we’ve gained.”
Is our best so rare, indivisible?
Is common the safest, in truth or if feigned?
Is purpose hiding in cranky abstract
Giving too little and too little great?
Each day we give lies to this pertinent fact,
“We cannot ignore conspiring fate.
If you will use us, Abuse us, All Right,
As long as the pay is on time,
We’re better here, far from the worst.
We comply to the game, call it sublime,
Knowing those lessor are cursed.”
Please notice it’s we paying the bill
And drawing us to face it.
In all our lives: We’re able to fill
Our needs, our dreams, if we chase it.
Our world is huge not the smaller it’s claimed.
We seek and find cooperative deals,
Partners help the small and the great;
Break risk to join in repeals
Of all but continued good fate.
Unhook from the habits that lock us to loss.
Unhook from the stories invented for wars.
Be part of the ideas we toss
To each other to pry open doors
To industry, commerce and governing fair;
With leadership to guide our plans
Bring us tools, not threats and high tare.
Like our ancients, our families, our clans,
We clock blood for this day to endure,
Progress made by ignoring patter
And keeping from trouble or cur.
Why should the trivial matter?
Why stay for only approval?
We each have deeper concerns than that.
Why justify, scorn, force removal,
Instead of solution, fair and democrat?
Why plan or plot any false hope,
Or prop goals in mutual rigidity,
Leaving us detached and static,
Tied to life’s constant turbidity?
Find the gate through strife’s erratic!
Why sell dreams, or myth or song
In automat lyric airwaves?
Why tune to hawking that’s wrong,
Mere drama, politics, close shaves?
When as clear as the sky that’s curving the light
Our beckoning insists to us all,
And annoys as strong as the great that we see?
It’s our promise shadowed on history’s wall:
The past we’re from and the hopes of the free.
It’s initiative growing in faith’s provocation
That fear and diversion won’t bury.
There’s no reason to leave the care of this nation
To sponsoring, to agents, nor hustle nor hurry;
Not sly, nor secrets hid in the back
as grief is alliance with less.
We win when we work on our lack,
Joined in our plans for the best
Becoming our lives every day.
Choose the highest, the moral, the true.
Let each of our lives find this way.
Let forums see the eagle flew;
Has never left grace to defeat,
Is never blind in bright sun
Nor bent in cataclyst’s heat.
We nest in the innocents’ life,
Soar in the query of truth,
Stillness above the strife.
We signal bright justice, temper our youth,
Always for better and always the part
To secure our contentment to peace,
We bring to the gates of our heart,
Our symbol’s strength in the fleece
That’s soft in the depth of this land.
No empire or keeper of keys
Can know better than any
That motive and hope is our way:
The insistent calls of the many,
Bringing our best to the day.
Needs lots of work!! – 1985 Brian Hayes
We human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell. —Kafka
cult of promo
Focusing on personal instead of structural failings is a problem that is endemic to modern, mainstream journalism.
Some of these allegations are true; some I know to be false.
I know that attacking individuals makes sexier journalism (and is often appropriate), but the truth is that America’s industrial cities got into deep trouble because of decades of federal and state policies that deprived minorities of good jobs and homes, encouraged the building of the suburbs at the expense of the cities, encouraged big industry to abandon urban communities and concentrated the poor and unemployed in the cities.
Especially now, when technology has given virtually everyone the ability to publish to large audiences, we have an obligation to use that ability to find and tell stories that advance our common understanding of the truth as well as our common welfare…
do we know we’re doomed?
Has there ever been an era so bleak?
There is an ever louder babble of apocalypse-predicting subcultures, amplified and partly sustained by the internet: peak-oil doomers, who believe the world’s energy supplies will collapse and mass famine will follow; Christians who anticipate an imminent day of rapture when believers will ascend to heaven and non-believers will perish; interpreters of the ancient Maya calendar who, contrary to mainstream scholarship, are convinced that the world will end on 21 December 2012; and traditional survivalists, stockpiling tinned goods and constructing rural “survival retreats” to sit out armageddon….
Václav Havel: “Politics and Conscience”
To me, personally, the smokestack soiling the heavens is not just a regrettable lapse of a technology that failed to include “the ecological factor” in its calculation, one which can be easily corrected with the appropriate filter.
To me it is more, the symbol of an age which seeks to transcend the boundaries of the natural world and its norms and to make it into a merely private concern, a matter of subjective preference and private feeling, of the illusions, prejudices, and whims of a “mere” individual.
It is a symbol of an epoch which denies the binding importance of personal experience including the experience of mystery and of the absolute and displaces the personally experienced absolute as the measure of the world with a new, man-made absolute, devoid of mystery, free of the “whims” of subjectivity and, as such, impersonal and inhuman. It is the absolute of so-called objectivity: the objective, rational cognition of the scientific model of the world.
Modern science, constructing its universally valid image of the world, thus crashes through the bounds of the natural world, which it can understand only as a prison of prejudices from which we must break out into the light of objectively verified truth.
The natural world appears to it as no more than an unfortunate leftover from our backward ancestors, a fantasy of their childish immaturity.
sampling women
this abusive trend
1) Turning our markets into playpens for predatory behavior didn’t happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight.
2) But until we have public servants strongly focused on justice for all, we can expect the crime spree to go on.
3) After all, what we’re all learning is that, at least for large banks, crime pays.
are we infinitely stupid??
We’re being domesticated, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.
Einstein was once asked about his intelligence and he said, “I’m no more intelligent than the next guy. I’m just more curious.” Now, we can grant Einstein that little indulgence, because we think he was a pretty clever guy.
Maybe Einstein’s ideas were just as random as everybody else’s, but he kept persisting at them.
And if we say that everybody has some tiny probability of being the next Einstein, and we look at a billion people, there will be somebody who just by chance is the next Einstein.
But it might even be the case that that small number of innovators just got lucky.
And this is something that I think very few people will accept …the possibility that we are infinitely stupid.
the power to limit
Nor shall the First Amendment be construed to vest in any non-natural person any unalienable constitutional rights.
SOPA is bad bad law
Dear Congress,
It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works
We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence that tuned in to yesterday’s Congressional mark-up of SOPA, the legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works, you kind of just looked like a bunch of jack-asses.
If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA.
Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors deregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the “content” business a hollow victory for the ages. v
We don’t need SOPA. What we do need is for Congress — along with lawmakers and regulators everywhere, right down to public utilities commissions and town councils — to at least begin to understand what the Internet is, and what it does for everybody, before it starts making laws protecting one business at the expense of all the rest.
Time to make a call to your representatives.
technocrat #fail
oh why are boots law?
Bubbling under the surface of politics is the foreclosure crisis — where the power of big finance is brushing up against the rule of law. The party leaders seem to have decided it is essentially a giant — but unavoidable — tragedy. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said foreclosures have to clear for the housing market to reset. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has spent only about $2 billion of the $75 billion authorized for the Home Affordable Modification Program.
But the foreclosure crisis is not only a few million personal tragedies.
It is a few million crime scenes.
“Until we focus on justice, we can expect the crime spree to go on. After all, what we’re all learning is that for large banks, crime pays.” —Matthew Stoller
one bully less
Arrogance makes news.
Shutting down ignorance, not so much.
Release Date: December 15, 2011
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).
Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust.
DHS will not be a party to such practices.
Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program.
DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities.
The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.”