Category: interesting

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

A science teacher says, “I think anyone who has even an iota of a chance to get involved in weaponry capable of destroying lives needs to know Keats, to know Blake. I’m not playing here. Who made the technologists, the politicians, the money class the gods?”

Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

The Economic Policy Institute shows subprime lenders targeted racially segregated metropolitan areas.

In Britain, there are no long lines of people seeking swine flu vaccine. Doctor’s offices aren’t swamped with desperate calls. And there are no cries of injustice that the vaccine is going to wealthy corporations or healthy people who don’t really need it.

In North America, swine flu vaccination has largely been a free-for-all.

Saskia Sassen:

International economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes…

Smart meters can also reveal intimate details about customers’ habits such as when they eat, what time they go to sleep or how much television they watch.

Arrogance produced from narcissism, the Republican ‘Contract With America’:

A number of economists, economic policymakers, regulators, and central bankers have attempted to explain away their failure to both foresee and mitigate the current financial crisis by asserting that no one saw it coming. The inference is that they cannot be held accountable for something so unusual, so extraordinary, and so unforecastable that that no one saw it coming.

Naked Capitalism:
Nobody Saw It Coming or Everybody Who Saw It Coming Was a Nobody?

Fred Pearce:

Most of the man-made nitrogen fertilizer ever produced has been applied to fields in the last quarter-century.

Artificial nitrogen washes in drainage water from almost every field in the world. It is as ubiquitous in water as man-made carbon dioxide is in the air. It is accumulating in the world’s rivers and underground water reserves, choking waterways with algae and making water reserves unfit to drink without expensive clean-up.

Of 80 million tons spread onto fields in fertilizer each year, only 17 million tons gets into food. The rest goes missing, washing into ecosystems. This is partly because the fertilizer is wastefully applied, and partly because the new green-revolution crops developed to grow fat on nitrogen fertilizer are also wasteful of the nutrient. The nitrogen efficiency of the world’s cereals has fallen from 80 percent in 1960 to just 30 percent today.

odograph:

The bottom line for me is that while we have an economic nature, it isn’t all of our human nature. What economics offers, in the best of times, is a perspective. If we choose to look at some decision economically, it gives us the tools. That’s a really good thing, but we can’t (or shouldn’t) reverse the perspective and try to look at all of human nature as economic.

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

Jon Taplin:

I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America. Glenn Beck has no solutions but to retreat to a fantasy world of the 1950’s. The truth is that for more than half a century Republicans and Democrats alike have been prisoners of the conventional wisdom propounded by Wall Street bankers, military contractors, the Chamber of Commerce and their academic neoclassical economics enablers. The result is a hollowed out economy with no manufacturing base for exports except in making weapons of mass destruction, dependent on financial bubbles to keep the party going.

Well, the party is over.

Anyone who thought that just electing Barack Obama was the solution to our problems, misunderstood the institutional power of the Establishment and their conventional wisdom.

Curitiba, Brazil:
“You have to keep things simple, and just start working … You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper,” said the 70-year-old former mayor of Curitiba, the world’s most environmentally friendly city.

Netherlands ‘among lowest cannabis users’.

Here’s the relevant bit:

In Sri Lanka, where farmers grew some 2 ,000 traditional varieties of rice as recently as 1959, only five principal varieties are grown today. In India, which once had 30,000 varieties of rice, more than 75 percent of total production comes from fewer than ten varieties.

What kind of world do we want to live in?

Chickens have always lived in groups, and in the modern egg production industry they are crammed inhumanely into cages usually containing nine to twelve hens. [Biologist William Muir] wanted to increase egg production by selective breeding, and he tried to do it in two ways. The first method involved selecting the most productive hen from each of a number of cages to breed the next generation of hens. The second method involved selecting all the hens from the most productive cages to breed the next generation of hens.

When Bill presented his results at a scientific conference that I attended several years ago, he showed a slide of hens selected by the first method after six generations.

The audience gasped.

Inside the cage were only three hens, not nine, because the other six hens had been murdered. The three survivors had plucked each other during their incessant attacks and were now nearly featherless… What happened? The most productive individuals had achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of their cagemates.

Half are comfortable spreading H1N1 to you.

Miami Herald:

Forty-seven percent say they aren’t likely to get vaccinated: 30 percent say they aren’t at all likely to get vaccinated and 17 percent say they aren’t very likely to do it.

Just 52 percent of Americans say they’re likely to get the vaccine: 33 percent say they’re very likely to get it and 19 percent who say they’re somewhat likely.

Myth and ignorance is a huge problem these days. Brain sclerosis.

Dave Pollard:
Because of our horrific overpopulation and exhaustion of our planet and its resources, we have entered into a period of chronic, massive, global stress, and it’s made us all crazy, like rats in a lab fighting over the last few scraps of food.

We’ve stopped listening to ourselves and started looking for saviors — ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ to show us and tell us what to do.

The so-called ‘leaders’ and ‘experts’ I’ve met are mostly very intelligent people, but they haven’t a clue. They’re buoyed by their own press and by sycophants fighting their way up from the bottom or desperate to believe that someone is in charge, in control, and knows what needs to be done. These ‘leaders’ hang out with other people just like themselves, and their groupthink persuades them that they’re right, they’re important, that what they say and do and decide really matters.

We need to stop listening to these know-nothing, cowardly ‘leaders’. We need to stop paying them. We need to stop working for them. We need to stop investing in them. We need to stop trusting them, and stop believing the nonsense they are telling us. We need to stop voting for them, and paying taxes to finance their backroom deals. We need to stop buying overpriced crap from their fat, mismanaged organizations. We need to send some of them to jail for criminal fraud and the rest out to pasture, and take back our society, our economy, our Earth from these thieves, these self-deluded con men.

No more leaders.

We could start, one community at a time, to know, again, what it means to live responsibly, meaningfully, modestly, sufficiently, sustainably.

Way back when, in 1988, the world seemed a simpler place. Guns N’ Roses topped the charts with “Sweet Child ‘O Mine.” The Soviets, our archenemies, withdrew from Afghanistan in flaming defeat.

And yes. We elected Dan Quayle vice president.This is what John McCain said at the time: “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t have some impact.”

Ed Harrison:

Let me introduce the main characters: First, the banks which are veering out of control (again!). Next, our central bankers and regulators who are doing a better job than broadly perceived; however, they lack the political support to tackle a financial system which thrives on excesses. And, just to complete the picture, we are up against a political system which is institutionally corrupt and politicians who are hopelessly narrow-minded and unable to look beyond the next election.

Paul Volker:

Consumer spending accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. economy before last year’s economic meltdown, a level that Volcker said was sustained only by “the magic of financial engineering.”

We cannot rebuild the economy to the tune of 70 percent consumption or housing booms. It will just break down again.

The alternatives to help bolster future economic growth include boosting exports, applying innovative technology to green issues and improving the nation’s infrastructure.

Socializing 101:

The best time to socialize your pup is between the ages of three and 14 weeks. At this time, their brain is very open to new experiences, and they’re better able to learn appropriate responses to the world around them.

By exposing our dogs to different kinds of people, animals and environments, especially when they are young — from dog obedience school and vet visits to dinner parties and neighborhood walks — we can foster confidence and an easy-going manner. This goes a long way in helping them cope with new and potentially unsettling situations.

Best of all, socialization doesn’t end when puppyhood does. No matter what age your pooch is when you adopt him, you can still help shape him into a more stable, happy and trustworthy companion.

Charlie Gasparino’s account of the financial crisis and its roots: “They were just so drunk on their own euphoria on making money.

“So I wanted to write a book that basically said Wall Street’s embrace of this business model, risk, got itself in the position it’s in now, and what the position was, in 2008, was a severely damaged securities industry, and foreign investors basically owning chunks of U.S. security firms, and the U.S. losing our global dominance. And that was the story, and I thought that was a good story.

“Listen, I’ve been an investigative reporter my whole life. Generally, when you have a story of magnitude, like a Watergate or something like this, you have someone on the inside that knows something is wrong, that there’s something wrong with the balance sheet. What’s interesting about everything that I’ve uncovered about this is that there was almost nobody on the inside that thought anything was wrong, that anybody was wrong…They all thought AAA was AAA and that’s the scary part.”

Americans in the bottom 90% saw their average incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007.

Yes, back then in 1974, we certainly did face injustice at every turn. But we were living, thanks to years of struggle—and success—by our activist forebears, in a society where politics actually revolved around confronting those injustices and making change that could really help average working people.

Why ignore evidence?

World Health Organisation study shows that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

via Mind Hacks

Send no soldier to die for these folks:

“This land is Israel. We are in Israel. God gave this land to the Jews. The Torah tells us so. You want war? Declare war on God, not on us…”

ex² Governor Eliot Spitzer:

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy?