Author: Brian

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pray away charlatans?

Silly and true:

The clinic, which Bachmann co-owns with his wife Michele, was exposed last summer for practicing a form of discredited ‘pray away the gay‘ therapy by a Truth Wins Out hidden-camera investigation – a charge both Bachmanns had previously denied.

Ex-gay therapy is rejected by every respected medical and mental health organization in the nation, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association.

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outside ‘the system’

“All the definitions of our economic system are developed by the people in power.”

It’s astounding we’re not arguing only incompetence.

Today, only elites have the power to build large scale rule-creating institutions, to access modern networks of dispute resolution and arbitration, and to operate under good commercial law.

We can see what this has done by looking at the informal sector: elites have shaped the rules and institutions to their benefit and marginalized the majority of humanity in the process.

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manchurian facebook

A) Your Facebook profile is your biography.
B) Your preferences are a product.
C) This man is not your friend.

Four months after Mark Zuckerberg first introduced it to the media, Facebook’s Timeline feature was rolled out in early December in New Zealand. Why New Zealand?

Perhaps because the country makes for a relatively small control group and is marginal enough not to become an international center of outrage once it becomes clear that the company’s innovations, as is so often the case, are destined to kill your privacy.

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right wing wrecks this country

Why will anyone support Republicans?

Based on the long-term historical record, by pretty much any economic measure, it’s progressive policies that deliver superior growth, prosperity, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, individual liberty, and a vibrant, robust economy and society.

How can that be? Aren’t Republicans the ‘party of growth’? NO !

→ Progressives deliver more prosperity.
→ They deliver it to more people.
→ And they do it without busting the budget.

1) Wisdom of the Crowds. Democrats’ dispersed government spending — education, health care, infrastructure, and social support — puts money (hence power) in the hands of individuals, instead of delivering concentrated streams to big entities…

2) Money that goes to millions of individuals is much less subject to ‘capture’ by powerful players…

3) Social programs since the New Deal serve as automatic stabilizers for the economy, providing the kind of anti-cyclical fiscal policy…

4) When people feel they won’t end up on the streets, they feel free to move to a different job that better fits their talents — better allocating labor resources.

5) With a stable platform beneath them, people strike out on their own to develop the kind of innovative, entrepreneurial ventures that are the true engine of long-term growth and prosperity.

6) Education to infrastructure to scientific research have been demonstrated to pay off many times over in widespread public prosperity.

7) Dispersal of income and wealth provides the widespread demand (read: sales) that producers need to succeed, to expand, and to take risks…

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stop censoring the web

 

Congressional anti-piracy bills could cripple the Internet.

Stop their corporate-funded votes. Complain.

Tim O’Reilly said the following about SOPA and PROTECT IP Act:

We’re in one of the greatest periods of social and business transformation since the Industrial Revolution, a transformation driven by the open architecture of the Internet. We’re still in early stages of that revolution. New technologies, new companies, and new business models appear every day, creating new benefits to society and the economy.

But now, fundamental elements of that Internet architecture are under attack.

These legislative attacks are not motivated by clear thinking about the future of the Internet or the global economy, but instead are motivated by the desire to protect large, entrenched companies with outdated business models that are threatened by the Internet. Rather than adapting, and competing with new and better services, they are going to Congress asking for protection.

If they succeed, they will vitiate [clobber] the Internet economy.

Corporate dominance is out of control, folks.

Real pirates are multinational companies that falsely claim ownership.

Some music royalty firms have claimed infringements in ‘silent movies’ !

For cryin’ out loud, our values are upside down.

Keep The Web Open.

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managing our last days alive

There are things we can do to make our own situations better at the end of life.

Let’s get real about our last days alive.

“We use healthcare resources far out of proportion to any other country on the planet.”

It’s understandable. Nobody wants to think in advance about life ending.

In our satisfied state of denial, we want to believe medical advances will keep us healthy until we die in our sleep at a ripe old age.

But death doesn’t always come on our terms, and failing to face up to other possibilities can put crushing burdens on loved ones — not to mention that soaring end-of-life medical costs are at the center of the national budget crisis.

 

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changing half our planet

Global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost 50% of Earth’s land surface.

“While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it’s the ecological consequences that matter most.”

Nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems will shift from one major ecological community type to another. For example, forest to grassland, tundra to grassland…

NASA’s projections paint a portrait of increasing ecological change and stress in Earth’s biosphere.

Many plant and animal species face increasing competition for survival, as well as significant species turnover, as some species invade areas occupied by other species.

Most of Earth’s land that is not covered by ice or desert is projected to undergo at least a 30 percent change in plant cover – changes that will require humans and animals to adapt and often relocate.

Reclaiming a desert into a forest by Atul Kulkarni

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peerage of plutocrats

Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

Alan Greenspan made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.”

In the wake of the recession, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly.

Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.

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mattress graves

“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

“Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”

…he used a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

…Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd.

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

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stripped wages

1 in 4 earn less than $9 per hour.

I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents.

He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families.

Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.

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our country cracking up

Jon Taplin:

I awoke this morning to read that a candidate for the Presidency (Newt Gingrich) believes we should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and Iran because he fears they are about to launch a nuclear missile to be “detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, (which) would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity.

Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones.

Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States.

Most scientists regard this as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic even if these two pygmy powers had such a rocket, and yet this man could seriously be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. This is like Ron Hubbard running for President on the Scientology ticket.

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wealth defense industry

via Huffington Post:

Jeffrey Winters, author of the 2011 book Oligarchy.

Winters coined the term “wealth defense industry” to describe this veritable army that serves the super-rich, and in a recent article in the American Interest he explained that it “is comprised of lawyers, accountants, wealth management consultants, revolving-door lobbyists, think-tank debate framers and even key segments of the insurance industry whose sole purpose is income defense for America’s oligarchs. “

It’s “a multi-billion dollar industry per year, and it feeds completely on the need of wealthy people to defend their wealth,” Winters says in an interview.

The paramount goal is simple and specific: “To not pay taxes and to keep as much of their fortunes as they possibly can across generations.”

The means are extremely complicated and expensive, typically involving individually tailored, painstakingly crafted techniques — or “structured tax products”– based on arcane interpretations of the nation’s 70,000-page tax code.

Those schemes often involve moving money through offshore tax havens and anonymous shell corporations — generally with the goal of sheltering the money and creating paper losses that can be applied to the client’s tax bill.

“The wealth defense industry arose as part of the demand on the part of wealthy people, but it’s now taken on a life of its own and is proactive.”

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falsity astounds me

Our culture’s support for Republican errors via NYTimes:

this point is worth emphasizing once again. As Krugman notes:

…the GOP is not now, and never has been (at least not since the 1970s) concerned about the deficit.

All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.

The entire debate has been fake.

If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.

“So the idea that those at the very top, who now are richer than anybody has ever been; we now have people who are richer than any people have ever been in the history of the world; why they can’t pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes in crazy.

“Five days after George W. Bush became president, [five days!!] Alan Greenspan testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and said ‘we are in danger of paying off our national debt too fast. We have a projected $5 trillion surplus going into the next ten years and we very well may pay off the debt too fast, the federal government is in danger of having too much money.

“Then as soon as we started losing jobs and we’re in a recession, Bush said, ‘well we’re in a recession, we need to cut taxes because the economy’s bad.’ So in addition to ‘every time you cut taxes you increase revenue’ and ‘every time you cut taxes you decrease revenue’, there was also, ‘every time the economy’s doing well you have to cut taxes’, and ‘every time the economy is doing bad you have to cut taxes.’

“And then, when it needed one more element to become absolutely dangerous, and Dick Cheney provided that. Cheney said, ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’. So Bush takes the biggest surplus in history and turns it into the biggest deficit in history, hands off a $1.2 trillion projected deficit to Obama, and an economy, here it is, I’ve done my job, we’re shedding 750,000 jobs a month.

“This is the most incomprehensible economic theory I’ve ever heard.”

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stacked against

“We overestimated capitalism’s ability to function properly without strong democratic checks.”

Gary Segura:

Elected officials and university administrators have felt no compunction about using force to prevent political dissent….

Contrast these actions with how our nation has dealt with the investment bankers, mortgage lenders, and hedge fund managers who wrecked the world economy.

It is hard not to conclude that the fix is in.

The degree to which our political and legal systems favor the wealthy and powerful is breathtaking in scope and arrogance.

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so it’s slow and slower

Tumors are not industrial.

The panel decided that men who have PSAs of 10 or less and Gleason scores 6 or less “should no longer be told they have cancer”.

Men with these criteria are not candidates for treatment, but for active monitoring, if you can find it.

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that thing that grave

My experience, my recovering:

There’s cancer to care for.
What’s good for me is she died in our bed,
sleeping delighted,
stunned day to day in our love.

And also, there’s Hitchens:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span.

However …