big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
the impact of reality is hitting you… hoping you are adventuring new life rather than lamenting old life…
sometimes just sipping a coffee on the sidewalk is renewing… pondering is a stepping stone…
I like poking around running water… sorta like a poultice for the brain.
Gorbachev’s Archive Contains Thousands of Documents
The official papers from his almost six years in office were preserved. Gorbachev took them with him when he announced his resignation as the Soviet president at the end of the year, and donated them to the foundation that bears his name.
Since then, about 10,000 documents have been in storage at the foundation’s headquarters on Leningrad Prospect 39 in Moscow. They include the personal archives of his foreign policy advisers, Vadim Zagladin and Anatoly Chernyaev.
The papers illustrate the end period of the communist experiment.
They include the minutes of negotiations with foreign leaders, the handwritten recommendations of advisers to Gorbachev, speaker’s notes for telephone conversations and recordings of those conversations, confidential notes by ambassadors and shorthand records of debates in the politburo.
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
Convinced that everything you buy these days has a Made-in- China label?
Then you aren’t paying attention. Things made in the U.S.A. still dominate the American marketplace, according to a new study by economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve.
Goods and services from China accounted for only 2.7% of U.S. personal consumption. About 88.5% of U.S. spending last year was on American-made products and services.
Services – dry cleaner, accountant, mechanic and manicurist – account for about two-thirds of spending. Then there’s groceries and gasoline.
Bloomberg article that’s a must read for biz owners:
If you have a personal bank account, yes, your money is safe from online banking fraud. Federal regulations compel banks to make good on losses to personal accounts, however they occur. But the same is not true of commercial accounts that are accessed online.
\roar\ ≠ /roar/
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What is America?
Company playground?
Time Warner CEO says internet porn eating our profits.
When adult goes down, it’s hard to find another area of your business that might go up.
But perhaps one ought to remember just how much cable companies tried to make out of man’s susceptibility to the filmic acts of the nubile and naked.
[sic]
Had we not suppressed drugs?
According to Komisaruk, learning to better understand and control the part of the brain that produces pleasurable sensations could make a difference in the treatment of depression, anxiety, addiction or even obesity.
“It was systemic; it was pervasive.”
None of the nearly 3,000 test reports that prosecutors seized from the company contained legitimate results, according to one person briefed on the investigation. Among other projects for which tests results were falsified were: the Lincoln Tunnel, the air traffic control tower at La Guardia Airport, the Javits Convention Center; a building at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Intrepid Sea, air and Space Museum.
The Economist, for example, says:
“There is no denying that for some middle-class Americans, the past few years have indeed been a struggle. What is missing from Mr Obama’s speeches is any hint that this is not the whole story: that globalisation brings down prices and increases consumer choice; that unemployment is low by historical standards; that American companies are still the world’s most dynamic and creative; and that Americans still, on the whole, live lives of astonishing affluence.”
This is yesterday’s orthodox argument. And most serious economists take this story less and less seriously.
Why not? Because…ummm…the global economy is in a state of shock. If this story was true, we wouldn’t be melting down.
A much more plausible story is this – one that forward-thinking economists are beginning to take very, very seriously.
Real wages have stagnated for decades. But corporate profits are at their highest. That means the net effect of global price competition is just to transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest.
We are a group of faculty and students in the Sociology department at the University of New Brunswick. As humans, we observe the multitude of problems facing humanity — globalization, climate change, economic growth and collapse, pollution, wars, population increase and international migration, peak oil — and wonder what the future will bring. As sociologists, we question the utility of current sociological theory for understanding the relationship between the natural and social systems that underpins many of these problems.
There are two basic explanations for the recent global financial collapse. The first, the Marxist account, emphasizes the role of capitalist accumulation and, in particular, the ability of the financial classes to profit from asset bubbles. The second account emphasizes complexity and uncertainty. According to this account, lax regulation was a major contributing factor. In light of these competing accounts it is interesting to look at the information below, identifying banks in Singapore and Canada as the world’s strongest. Both locations came through the crisis comparatively unscathed and both are noted for their relatively high level of bank regulation.
House Republican freshmen caught engineering hometown pork even as they vow to slash the federal budget for the supposed good of the nation.
The House Republican freshmen are rich in hypocrisy as they quietly push hometown projects that are worth billions.
ok, go ahead, explain this to your kids, what’s a weekend for?
A million dollar fender bender?
Yes, a one million dollar fender bender at the Monte Carlo Casino.
Making jobs for everyone!?
Call me a heretic, fire up the kindling and ready the stake, but I’d say this particular item — which I’ll readily hold up my hands and admit hit a nerve — is a peculiarly apt metaphor for what’s gone wrong with the economy today: the super-rich, whose gains reflect little social value creation, have gotten richer — and are hyperconsuming the stuff of idle, yawning luxury with an appetite that makes Caligula look like a blushing bride. – Umair Haque: How Our Economy Was Overrun by Monsters and What to Do About It
Related to bacteria. …kinda makes birth records and ancestry seem comic.
Duty under the 14th Amendment to pay the nation’s bills.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
via Slate’s Andrew Leonard:
“On Sunday, the New York Times published a chart demonstrating the relative contributions to the deficit made by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Short version: The total cost of new policies initiated during the administration of George Bush: $5.07 trillion.”
Barack Obama: $1.44 trillion. Most of that cleaning up the Bush disaster.
Vince Cable has launched an extraordinary attack on “rightwing nutters” in America who are trying to block the raising of the US government’s debt ceiling and who are, he said, a bigger threat to the world economy than problems in the eurozone.
Vince Cable is Britain’s business secretary. He said:
“The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening tomorrow morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few rightwing nutters in the American Congress rather than the eurozone.”
Chort.
the difficult craftsmanship seems to fail a wee bit,
nevertheless,
here’s a dinner table to drive toddlers bananas.
It is the most dangerous natural disaster.
More people die from the heat in this country than all the other natural disasters combined.
“Core body temperature of somebody raises too high, and they die.”
These are the times for a meditation on one trillion dollars.
With a little help from www.wtfnoway.com
Los Angeles Times on Nancy Grace:
Anyone who had occasion to watch her relentless coverage of the recently completed Casey Anthony murder trial witnessed something quite new to the American news media: a mainstream news organization giving one of its commentators a nightly forum from which to campaign for the conviction of a criminal defendant.
to put it politely…
Our money…
“It doesn’t measure how good of a human being you are, but it does measure, in most cases, how much value you have provided to your fellow man. How is this true? Because your fellow men have chosen to give you their money for your service.”
Well…
This ain’t necessarily so. Rentiers collect, but they need not contribute. They exalt themselves, and devalue labor.
In the past 30 years, nearly all the increase in surplus has been skimmed off by the top few percent in wealth. The top 1% used to control 7% of the nation’s personal income. They now control over 21%. Has their contribution to the rest of society tripled? Not so. They have manipulated the system, toforce labor to hand over its share of the increase in surplus.
Their contribution to the rest of society has not changed. Their contribution to themselves has tripled.
If labor’s share of the nation’s output had remained constant, (and the top 1%’s) the middle and working class would all be about 15% better off than they are now.
