big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Why do you want to change the way things work when Jesus Christ said we’re the best country in the universe?
One day — this was ten years ago — an African American lady lectured me for almost an hour about the greatness of America (relative to the rest of the world). She told me that in America people enjoy things that foreigners don’t have. I asked for an example.
“Like freedom,” she said.
Few Americans seem to realize just how good many people have it in other countries.
They are happy to rely on bullying, scare tactics, and brutality, and seem to feel that they can crush people at will.
Stephen Downes on fixing 21st Century learning:
First, it isn’t impossible to teach people facts. Quite the opposite is the case – we understand, and can prove (and have proved, over and over) that we can teach facts very simply and easily, through repetition, rote, memorization, practice examples, worked examples, and more.
Second, it isn’t wrong to teach facts. Or (perhaps more accurately) to learn facts. Having an easy memory recall of a body of facts will serve a person well in life.
Third, we need facts to do stuff. We need to know about psychology, about Freud and Jung and maybe Erikson and Arens, in order to do the job. We need to know about navigation and aerodynamics and where the brake lever is in order to fly an airplane.
But do we need these specific facts?
When you teach children facts as facts, and when you do it through a process of study and drill, it doesn’t occur to children to question whether or not those facts are true, or appropriate, or moral, or legal, or anything else.
We know now – and, indeed, have probably always known – that an education based strictly and solely in facts is insufficient.
Paul Volker, chairman of the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, suggested banks should be restricted to trading on their client’s behalf instead of making bets through internal units that often act like hedge funds.
Congressional hearings this week.
The U.S. government delivered more than twice as many federal dollars to programs benefiting fossil fuels than it supplied to renewable energy from 2002 to 2008. This Administration? I’ve found no wrap up.
In most other countries, people who carried on like that would never be considered as spokesmen for a major political party. Hugo Chavez is the only current foreign leader who talks like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
Can’t the right do better than that?
“So, let me get this straight. Bush inherited a $7 Trillion surplus, turned it into a deficit by funding an illegal war, fought by murderous private contractors, but Obama is the bad guy because he wants healthcare the entire rest of the developed world has had since the early 1950s?”
As development and infrastructure penetrates the bottom of the pyramid, we’ll see potential we’ve never considered. I often try to evaluate that.
Politics makes people believe the strangest things – so let’s try make money from their stupidity.
I know someone that made billions (yes billions) of dollars betting that subprime lending would end in a crisis – and they only had to risk tens of millions of dollars to make that money.
Stupid ideology gave huge profit potential.
That stupid ideology came from the right because at the moment there is (much) more stupid ideology on the right – but again it was not always that way and will not always remain that way.
Just so people know the round numbers, total spending this year is about $3.6 trillion. At most, $200 billion of that represents stimulus spending, so even if there had been no stimulus bill and the economy had done as well as it has done, we would be looking at a $3.4 trillion budget.
Revenues are only about $2.1 trillion, so we would be looking at a substantial deficit even if the stimulus package was never enacted.
Revenues would be even lower if Republicans had gotten their wish and the stimulus consisted entirely of tax cuts.
How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is.
Looking at last year’s budget, only 38% was classified as discretionary; that is, under Congress’s control… All the rest was mandatory: entitlements and interest on the debt. Within the discretionary category, 54% went to national defense. Just $37.5 billion, 3.3% of the discretionary budget, went for international affairs including foreign aid. Over the years I have encountered many conservatives who thought that abolishing foreign aid was just about the only thing needed to balance the budget. Obviously, that’s nonsense.
Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance. That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.
This means that it is impossible to get control of spending without cutting entitlement programs. Many Republicans agree, but they never make any serious effort to do so. On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.
Last year, we spent $456 billion on Medicare, and it is the fastest growing major government program. How likely is it that the people protesting Obama’s Medicare cuts will stand with Republicans if they propose cutting that program even more to balance the budget? They will switch sides in an instant. The elderly will fight anyone who tries to cut their benefits even as they hypocritically demand fiscal responsibility and rant about the national debt. The elderly are the reason why we have a national debt. Unfortunately, the ranks of the elderly are rising. … Furthermore, the elderly are a rising portion of the electorate. …
When I raised these facts with a prominent Republican recently he recounted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn’t. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.) …
In short, there is no evidence that it is politically possible to cut spending enough to make more than a trivial difference in our nation’s fiscal problems. The votes aren’t there and never will be. Those who continue to insist otherwise are living in a dream world and deserve no attention from serious people.
$2.1 trillion revenue. $3.6 trillion budget.
Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio:
Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.
a fat out racist
Poll: News media’s credibility plunges to all-time low.
Americans believe news coverage is inaccurate and biased.
I would argue that mainstream newspapers haven’t just lost readers because of the Internet as an abstract new medium, but that they lost readers because they became – with some exceptions – nothing but official stenographers for the powers-that-be. No wonder people have lost all faith in them.
It takes three years, minimum, just to make each barrel that’s used for aging cognac.
David Lebovitz reports, “From the selection of oak, mostly from France (with some from the US), the wood that these men get needs to be cured for a minimum of two years with an alternating system of watering, then drying, during which time it changes color and becomes less porous, and starts its journey to becoming a barrel.
“There’s machines to cut the wood, but the finishing and banding is all done by hand.
“The long curing of the barrels reduces their humidity so when the distilled liqueur is stored in there, only 3 to 4% evaporates every year, which is called the Part des anges, the part the angels take.”
jonny I miss you
I walked four miles in sun and snow. Sun and snow is worth that.
jonny you gone 6 months
I walked into an eight foot cabin old enough to fall.
jonny you son of a bitch
I read her note.
Oh what will they do for algae fuel? But nobody wants our fat.
Barely Imagined Beings Department: In the latest move in Japan’s war on giant jellyfish, high school students in the town of Obama have developed a new type of caramel candy made from the enormous sea creatures. Yes, the town of Obama. Near Wakasa Bay. What’s so unbelievable about that?
Phytogeography – the geographic distribution of plants.
In contrast to American introducers, Trabut, a very well-educated taxonomist, phytogeographer and evolutionist, delved deeply into the selection of species and genera.
He created an important botanical garden, where a worldwide tropical and subtropical flora is concentrated.
There he gathered what was most valuable.
The fame of Trabut is immortal. His methods are used not only in different countries along the shores of the Mediterranean; they are also employed in the subtropical areas of the Soviet Union.
Harry Potter, at some point in his interminable journey to becoming increasingly annoying, is apparently stalked by a big black dog called “the Grim,” which for my money would’ve been far more terrifying had it been a tiny manic spazzball Jack Russell Terrier that never shuts the hell up, refuses to sit still for more than three seconds and tears around Hogwarts biting off everyone’s kneecaps.
Were we marching not for superstition and lies, our rage would build this nation.
David Adams:
Applied Materials is a US company that makes the machinery that produces microchips and another silicon product: solar panels. All 14 solar panels factories built by Applied Materials in the past two years were constructed in Europe, Asia, and …even Abu Dhabi. Revenues in the last 12 months alone were $1.3 billion.
Germany, for example, generates nearly 50% of the world’s solar power and in doing so is a world leader in solar research, engineering, manufacturing, and installations, generating 50,000 new solar industry jobs.
I would add that US solar, by contrast, has yet to equal the kWh output of ONE typical coal-fired power plant.
Farmers’ markets are a simple but major ingredient in solving access issues in many communities.
We know that when we start coming out to these markets, we’re going to start talking to each other. We’re going to talk about, where’d you get those peaches, and which stand, and let me try them, and what’s fresh.
We talk to each other in different ways.
So this market is not just about food. It’s about our community.
And this is just the beginning of the discussion.
(Applause)
OKLAHOMA CITY — Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States.
Yes, one in four.
I’ve been waiting to see this.
181 investors collectively managing more than $13 trillion
An eloquent essay. A searing essay.
I showed up at the shop to get my mane trimmed, and took notice of another customer already in the chair.
He was about 80 years old, very thin and dark, face almost like a skull, hardly a tooth in his head, and a few wisps of white hair on a mostly bald head–which, for some reason, he was having trimmed.
At the end of his haircut, of course, the near-toothless farmer grinned and paid his 50 baht, plus a generous tip.