big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”
“Confrontation with words, some debate, some understanding, goes so much further.”
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change is what conservatism is all about: changing everything so things, hierarchy in particular, can stay as they are.”
Said another way by Ann Coulter:
“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks. To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it.”
Elliot Loh
I used to laugh at those Cialis ads until I realized they’d become the most romantic thing on television.
The Food and Drug Administration says that any honey that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey.
• 76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed.
• 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores had no pollen.
• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores had the pollen filtered out.
• 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual poly-paks had the pollen removed.
“Removal of all pollen from honey makes no sense and is completely contrary to marketing the highest quality product possible.” —Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association
“This is the most damning report ever on the status of a country’s nuclear program.”
—International Atomic Energy Agency
Unusual for the normally understated organization, the report was explicit in pointing out where Iran had failed to convince the agency that it was not developing weapons, and implicit in allowing people to conclude that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear arsenal.
“Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good.” —Chesterton
Prepare thine purposes.
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” —Orwell
“As the power of the scientific method has encroached further than its applicability warrants into fields such as economics and business, its predictions of the future become ever more erroneous.”
[my bold]
The toxic top 10:
Notably, groundwater arsenic is the only naturally occurring pollution problem—and it is in ninth place.
“…the flourishing of humans, the only value that cannot be denied.”
Steven Pinker has written a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Pinker’s first task is to convince us that there is less violence in the world today than in the past.
He knows people don’t want to believe this.
We want to fit in, we want people to like us, we want more stuff.
Are we sustainable?
“Sustainability is a word without a clearcut meaning. It means different things to different people. It can’t be reduced to one single meaning.
“And I think that is exactly why the word is so powerful. It inspires us to imagine better ways of living our lives, organizing our societies, and relating to the environment. To me, sustainability means living within your local ecosystem, coevolving with the other plants, animals, insects, fungi, and bacteria, in a way that perpetuates the functioning of the whole biotic system.
Chris Anderson is the curator of TED.
“Here are seven ideas that can make powerful, positive and measurable differences in how we create the future.”
Here’s a slideshow published at Forbes.
Just 20% of brands have a positive impact on human lives.
A majority of people don’t care if 70% of brands disappear tomorrow.
“The survey notes that most consumers don’t trust companies, think their efforts to be responsible are largely spin, and that they don’t work hard to fix big problems.”
Existing approaches to building and measuring brand value are out of date.
George Mondbiot:
The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen.
Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths.
That’s why we’re nearly bankrupt.
“The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.”
Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky. Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin.
consequence of our own inventiveness:
In ‘less-civilized’, healthy societies the culture of the people rarely interferes to compel its members to act against their cells’ and organs’ interests. Individuals in such societies are trusted to make their own decisions, without coercion; the purpose of the culture is to provide objective knowledge through stories, not to advise.
So what’s wrong with our ‘civilized’ culture, that it has so overstepped its bounds of helpfulness, and now tries to control ‘us’ to the point we are mostly ill, disconnected, imprisoned, and dysfunctional?
“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.” ~Camus
“The arms, held tightly to his sides,
are as expressive of emotion as the sound
we imagine we hear coming from his mouth.”
Tom Ferguson, professor at UMass-Boston, spells out the damaging effects of big money.
“Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees.
“You want it — you buy it… !
“They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down….”
I’m as worried that this matter is not, has not been, in every newspaper every day. That’s corruption too.
Strength by love.
Tears by error.
Alive by gift.
Headline says it all:
Fatty Foods Addictive as Cocaine in Growing Body of Science
By Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford – Nov 1, 2011
Crisis has a feature I enjoy. More speak their mind.
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund:
‘We Are Looking Straight Into The Face Of A Great Depression‘
“We have built a dangerous financial system in the United States and Europe. We must step back and reform the system.”
David Frum, another example.
Libertarians For Oligarchy?
How long can an economic oligarchy remain a political democracy? Why would it? Wouldn’t the oligarchs be reckless to permit it?
I’m not suggesting here that anyone will overthrow the Constitution or anything like that. … We’ll still have elections, just as the British have royal weddings.
…the distribution of power tends to follow the distribution of wealth. If only a comparative few own, then only a comparative few will rule.
What will Bill Moyers be saying?
…not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else.
Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.
The political parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.
Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.
Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking, “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country.
Barry Ritholtz clearly, clearly spells out what caused the financial crisis.
The Big Lie goes viral.
Our economy is a complex and intricate system. What caused the crisis?
Why are people trying to rewrite the history of the crisis? Some are simply trying to save face. Interest groups who advocate for deregulation of the finance sector would prefer that deregulation not receive any blame for the crisis.
Some stand to profit from the status quo: Banks present a systemic risk to the economy, and reducing that risk by lowering their leverage and increasing capital requirements also lowers profitability. Others are hired guns, doing the bidding of bosses on Wall Street.
Mike Mayo told the Senate Banking Committee in 2002 that financial analysts “are on the front lines of holding corporations accountable.” However…
Wall Street Can’t Handle the Truth
Analysts are supposed to be a check on the financial system—people who can wade through a company’s financials and tell investors what’s really going on. There are about 5,000 so-called sell-side analysts, about 5% of whom track the financial sector, serving as watchdogs over U.S. companies with combined market value of more than $15 trillion.
Unfortunately, some are little more than cheerleaders—afraid of rocking the boat at their firms, afraid of alienating the companies they cover and drawing the wrath of their superiors.
The approval rate for Congress is just 9%, with 84% disapproving. [link]
“There still are plenty of corrupt lobbying practices that are perfectly legal”, warns Jack Abramoff. out of jail, earning restitution with a book: “Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist”
Slake:
To abate;
To add water;
To become relaxed;
To become less decided.
I no longer want to tell you stories. You’ll do that. You survive on stories. Few your own. You won’t be helped with mine because you won’t be helped with more. Trading stories and suffering stories is the era you are. And. You are not good at it.
Damn you.
There’s easy things we can do. Waking things. Slaking things. You do not use the word slake. You do not try to satisfy. Lost what the word means. You don’t know still. You don’t know safe.
Calm is not important. Sweet singing is forgotten. Civility is cheap. Abrasion is your story. We cannot raise this barn.
Damn you.
You pilfer pageant. Trammel honor. Waste tears. Elevate trite. That’s an insult. Check things over. Look back a few years. Tell me when wisdom is what you’re looking for. Cite sacrifice.
Damn you.
Tell me when tenderness, tolerance, shelter, warmth, love and celebration is on your mind. Make these news.
I’ll tell you this. Sinking is a story you enjoy. Your politics proves it.
Candidates will tell you a story.
Damn you.
Let’s be as disobedient as protest is required and as civil as progress is necessary !
Ornery is important and calm is crucial. Ben Franklin used people skills and social powers. All else denied. A talker, a schemer. Guile. Cunning. Persuasion.
But in England. So in England let’s look:
After riots spread across England in August, Cameron briefly raised the idea of giving British authorities greater power to disrupt the use of cell phone services or social networking tools during civil unrest.
The prime minister frets.
After the riots, Cameron summoned executives from Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry for crisis talks to disrupt cell phone services and social networks during disorder.
Police accuse young criminals of using Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry.
Governments “cannot leave cyberspace open to the criminals and the terrorists that threaten our security and our prosperity but at the same time we cannot just go down the heavy-handed route. The balance we have got to strike is between freedom and a free-for-all.”
The debate continues.
Foreign Secretary William Hague said the fact that criminals and terrorists can exploit digital networks is not “justification for states to censor their citizens.”
He asserts Britain must reject “the view that government suppression of the Internet, phone networks and social media at times of unrest is acceptable.”
The Internet. Let’s look at the Internet:
Russia and China are asking for tighter regulation of the Internet through binding international treaties.
America?
Yes. Let’s know what America is doing:
“What citizens do online should not, as some have suggested, be decreed solely by groups of governments making decisions for them somewhere on high,” said U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.
Will government seek new powers to shut down the web in times of crisis?
So many of us want to say OWS is behaving poorly. Of course they are.
Frustration isn’t organized, it’s marched.
I was criticizing our America one night and I remember my mother scolding me.
“Oh Brian. Don’t say that. Think a little bit. America isn’t a bad country unless you say every country is a bad country. If you want to say that. But look back. Every time the world is in trouble, Americans go right there and try to fix it. What other country does that?
“Clumsy. Wrong sometimes. But when you count how many times these people put themselves on the line for everybody, you have to see you’re living in a great country.
“Why shouldn’t Americans worry about themselves if they want to make a few repairs?”
Geesh. Years go by. I can’t get away w’ nuthin’.
Here it is. The works.
Everything.
• paved and unpaved roads • railways • transmission lines • cables • pipelines • shipping lanes • air traffic • cities & lighting.
Felix Pharand-Deschenes calls it cartography of the anthropocene.
The Big Food business model:
“After all, these executives and their companies have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo.“
Q. On your blog you say, “confusion is one of the tried and true tools of the processed foods industry.”
A. I think one of the main ways the processed food industry is trying to grow and defend their business is by funding self-serving research.
The Shadow Superpower
Forget China.
The $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy !