big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
“Why Sarah Palin decided to get in the race is beyond me.”
“I don’t know why she feels compelled to get into primaries all over the country. … Well, yes, I wish she [would butt out] because what she is doing is dividing the Republican Party at a time when we don’t need to be divided.” – Jack Kingston (R-GA)
Republican support for Palin has fallen to 12 points placing her bid for the presidency well behind Huckabee and Newt Gingrich.
Highlights here of Beth Noveck’s “Transparent Government”, the Long Now Foundation’s Seminars about Long-Term Thinking.
We have to look at the ways we can reengineer our institutions…
We have been concentrating decision-making power in the hands of too few people – whether legislatures, or cabinet officials, or bureaucrats and agencies like the patent office. We construct our institutional practices around the notion that this is the best way that we have to make decisions.
Even though we do not have a system of monarchy or aristocracy, we still believe in the notion of political expertise, and the notion that we have to rest power at the center.
What exacerbates this problem is that we are making long-term decisions that affect the fate of our planet.
The fate of our economy, and of major systems of health care and education and environment, are being decided by people who are in short-term political positions. We have a disconnect between the long-term effect of what we do, and short-term electoral cycles.
Palin: I’m honored to meet you, I really am. And, no we both agree on the freedom of speech and the-
Kathleen: Yes we do.
Palin: you know – the protection of that. So, um, no I and, you know… best of everything to you too and Yeah.
Kathleen: Thank you for coming over.
Kathleen resides in Homer, Alaska where she interacted with Sarah Palin filming for Discovery Channel. Kathleen had made a sign in her shed. She took the 30 foot by 3 foot banner out to the boat harbor. It said ‘WORST GOVERNOR EVER’.
Kathleen Gustafson is a teacher married to a local commercial fisherman. She felt like Sarah Palin had let the state down by becoming a dollar-chasing celebrity and ignoring the oath of office she’d sworn on a Bible.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKflKzmfRCw Kathleen never dreamed she’d get the chance to say to her face, “You’re not a leader, you’re a climber!” Palin’s daughter snorts, “You’re just jealous.”
Todd Palin and Sarah’s security block the camera. Her entourage tore down the sign. Palin’s daughter snorts, “You’re an A-hole.”
Sarah Palin’s Un-Rights in Un-Alaska at YouTube.
Transcript of the video can be found here.
Russian Wildfire News: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday took part in extinguishing forest fires on board an amphibious firefighting airplane. Russia’s head of government was the co-pilot for half an hour aboard a Be-200 firefighter plane.
Scooping up water from the nearby Oka River and dumping it on raging forest fires some 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow, he dumped 12 tons of water on each of two fires, extinguishing both completely.
Fire costs now at $15 billion.
Russian Meterological Center confirms heat wave and fires worst in at least a thousand years.
“We have an ‘archive’ of abnormal weather situations stretching over a thousand years, based on ancient weather conditions by exploring lake deposits… It is possible to say there was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat,” Alexander Frolov said.
Russia’s grain crop may decrease at least 30%.
🙂 A friend just sent this pic.
So what if Putin flies water bombers. Our Bush pilots Segways:
Extra tidbits on extortion at the City of Bell – population 38,000, average income $40,000.
The city manager’s full salary comes out to more than $1.5 million after a benefits package of more than 20 weeks of paid vacation and sick time per year !
Annual time off as well as retirement, medical and other insurance cost the city $386,786 on top of his base salary and is not accounting State of California retirement accrual.
Base salaries in the news tell only part of the story.
City Manager Robert Rizzo base pay – $787,637
Police Chief Randy Adams – $457,000
Assistant City Manager Spaccia – $376,000
Director of Administrative Services Lourdes Garcia – $422,707
Director of General services Eric Eggena – $421,402
Director of Community Services Annette Peretz – $273,542
Deputy City Engineer – $247,573
Business Development Coordinator – $295,627
Police Captain – $238,075
Police Lieutenant – $229,992.
Merely 700 Bell residents turned out for the vote that authorized council members to set salaries. Among other perks for attending few meetings, the city council set their pay at $100,000 per year.
Attorney General Jerry Brown is livid. Generally, $400 per month is the stipend paid to city council while an average city administrator is paid about $225,000.
Oh, our inability to choose adequate representatives.
Setting the stage to become president, Newt Gingrich admits to cheating on his first and second wives. Constantly espousing family values as he carried on an affair, Gingrich was then leading the impeachment against Clinton.
A tidbit to add to bellyaching at the coffee shop: Their taxes come in, but the cash doesn’t go out.
Illegal immigrants as a group are contributing more than most Americans to keeping Social Security afloat, NYTimes:
While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of taxes, the extent of their contributions to Social Security is striking: the money added up to about 10 percent of last year’s surplus – the difference between what the system currently receives in payroll taxes and what it doles out in pension benefits.
The issue is not that Palin, thrust upon the national stage with little warning, still doesn’t know all the details. That’s understandable. The issue is that she rarely appears to have the slightest grasp of what she’s talking about.
Newsweek’s Palinism 101:
“It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia”); when she expresses two or more of them in combination (“God’s will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that”); or when she says anything at all in her imitable my sentence went on the Tilt-A-Whirl and got nauseous way…
…the best Palinisms of all result when the huntress encounters something she wasn’t hunting for—that is, when Palin comes into contact with most anything to do with domestic, foreign, or economic policy.
let me tap-dance and also sing for you a little song
Bushisms, which I collected for many years, often hinged on a single grammatical or factual error. Palinisms, by contrast, consist of a unitary stream of patriotic, populist blather. It’s like Fox News without the punctuation.
America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease.
…
The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.
…
But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down?
…
And so they make their moves, manipulate this issue and that, and keep things at a high boil. And this at a time when people are already in about as much hot water as they can take.
Snippet at Jon Taplin’s On The Way Forward:
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe. – Edward Luce
Jonathan Bernstein at Salon:
The media’s real bias: Caring about itself too much.
Among the many real biases of the press (as opposed to the ideological and partisan fantasies of both sides) is a bias in favor of overestimating the importance of press coverage. Not that the press is unimportant, of course … but it isn’t as important as one would think from reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV.
“I saw at close range the failure of the US war on drugs with its absurd sentences, including 20 years for marijuana, although 42 per cent of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.” – Conrad Black
Sarah Palin is to Barack Obama as The Monkees are to The Beatles.
Cormully caught that from the Department of Painfully Obvious Promotion and knows what we know: “I was an adolescent and cynicism was transparent to me.”
“Who is the better band?”
In 1965, Don Kirshner, music producer extraordinaire, signed onto a project capitalizing on the Beatles’ fabulous success not merely as musicians but as movie stars.
Seeking to exploit that year’s A Hard Day’s Night, aspiring filmmakers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider proposed to Kirshner an American television show approximating the movie.
From a pool of 400 applicants were selected four eminently qualified, talented, perfectly lovely young men.
They were to mature from commercial enterprise to self-propelled artists – whose quality of work is a judgment call – to be pitted against their inspiration.
Do you see?
The fact remains: Obama/The Beatles created themselves.
The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tennessee.
The 50 most popular websites are 40% of the Web. You’re enjoying that, an audience applauding. Are you nuts America? The top 50 sites are inserting 3,180 tracking files into one computer.
Fix it. You gave them your economy and now you’re stoned at their parade. Privacy has long been a priority for billionaires. Turn that around. Your forefathers could.
Stop being vulnerable America. Ponder. Pull up your pants. Power is the use of means and you let that go on and on. Turn that around by insisting your marketplace is better than free and unregulated but is also level and fair.
Faking Reagan’s tan for the popular vote, candidates skew issues against rule making. The result is pilfered pockets and phooey on your future. We’re vulnerable enough under media’s wrap. Stop secret data-mining.
Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam War public [a terribly unpopular thing], we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.
What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed.
What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.
Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them.
President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the agendas are local—be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of military blackmail.
The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.
Taiwan’s Next Media Animation is the largest 3D animation studio in Asia providing clips-to-order to the world’s top entertainment and news providers.
What’s their spin for Sarah Palin’s campaign? The Alaska Dispatch is lost for words:
There’s really no good way to introduce this baffling computer-animated short….
“We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time.
“All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction.”
[BBC, July 2010] The UN’s former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix:
“Some people maintain that Iraq was legal. I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war. There can be cases where it is doubtful, maybe it was permissible to go to war, but Iraq was, in my view, not one of those.”
“What I question was the good judgment, particularly of President Bush but also in Tony Blair’s judgment.”
“They thought they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable to do so.”
Of course, getting away with it goes both ways. Blix said he never excluded the prospect that Iraq had begun to revive some form of chemical and biological capabilities.
What’s our agenda?
It’s not:
‘We carry on as if nothing much is wrong and as if everything in our unsustainable and doomed culture somehow makes sense, and will somehow continue, and things will just get better.’
When I’m out in public I often listen to conversations, and what I hear is nothing but
- vapid time-wasting,
- echo-chamber reassurances,
- regurgitated propaganda,
- sob stories,
- unactionable rhetoric,
- appalling misinformation,
- self-aggrandizement,
- gossip,
- manipulation and denigration of others.
I hear no new ideas or insights, no cogent discussion of how we can prepare for and increase our resilience in the face of the impending sixth great extinction and the economic, energy and ecological collapse that will push extinction into overdrive and bring down the most expansive and least sustainable civilization in our species’ short history.
I no longer believe anything I read in the mainstream media.
I no longer relate to what the entertainment industry.
I have given up watching movies.
I no longer relate to what most people do with ‘leisure’ time.
I no longer have anything to talk about with most people.
Nostalgia trips manifest themselves in all sorts of curious places.
Conservative politicians in the US — and elsewhere — get a lot of mileage from appeals to false nostalgia, to a yearning for a time when things were simpler, everyone was sturdily self-sufficient or knew their place (or both), and government was small (sometimes small enough to drown in a bathtub).
Outside [that], we have the peculiarly rustic aspirations of the green fringe, who’d like to see a world of five million or so pre-industrial humans living in harmony with nature.
I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.
The politics of the next decade will be dominated by a battle over public spending and taxes between the generations.
Will politics degenerate into a conflict between the dwindling number of voters with children, who care about education and the future, and the massive power of pensioners?
Here is a modest proposal to avert this awful outcome. Since children under 18 are not allowed to vote, perhaps pensioners could be deprived of the right to vote after 75 or 80. An equally effective alternative would be to give mothers an extra vote for every child under voting age.
Secrecy so massive since 9/11 that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
10,000 locations across the United States.
1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies.
The group that is skeptical of man-made global warming comprises 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise.
Jonathan Kay, managing editor of the National Post, Canada’s conservative newspaper, scolds fellow conservatives:
Most climate-change deniers (or skeptics or whatever term one prefers) tend to inhabit militantly right-wing blogs and other Internet echo chambers populated entirely by other deniers. In these electronic enclaves — where a smattering of citations to legitimate scientific authorities typically is larded up with heaps of add-on commentary from pundits, economists and YouTube jesters who haven’t any formal training in climate sciences — it becomes easy to swallow the fallacy that the whole world, including the respected scientific community, is jumping on the denier bandwagon.
This is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also conservatives themselves…
Conservatives often pride themselves on their hard-headed approach to public-policy — in contradistinction to liberals, who generally are typecast as fuzzy-headed utopians. Yet when it comes to climate change, many conservatives I know will assign credibility to any stray piece of junk science that lands in their inbox … so long as it happens to support their own desired conclusion.
In simpler words, too many of us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live.
At the state’s tourism convention, the Arizona Republic newspaper worries that Governor Jan Brewer mistakenly gave a speech on terrorism:
The border is “out of control,” shrieks Brewer. There are beheaded corpses and body parts in the desert, Brewer cries. The state is overrun by smuggling cartels and the majority of those crossing the border are drug mules, wails the governor.
Phoenix is second to Mexico City for kidnappings, shouts McCain. These ridiculous political rants range from wild exaggeration to complete myth, but fearmongering … has put both Brewer and McCain way ahead in the polls.
Not allowing honest people with clean records in search of honest work across the border in broad daylight at checkpoints simply pushes them into the desert…
People have been crossing that border for thousands of years until honky man came along…
Rigorous enforcement of labor laws on wages, hours and overtime, and of worker safety laws, would sharply reduce employer incentives to hire and exploit illegal immigrants.
Strengthening the border leads to more illegal immigration.
Cue the sad trombone: A Missouri farmer put up a billboard stating “Are you a Producer or Parasite? Democrats – Party of the Parasites.” Public records reveal this farmer received well over $1,000,000 in subsidy checks since 1995. Crop subsidies are different, he said.
Ed rightly snarks:
This, to use an overused phrase, is what is wrong with America.
The country is just riddled with people like this.
Anything the government does that benefits me is necessary and right. Anything that does not benefit me is pork, waste, unconstitutional. Hoard the firearms and threaten revolution. The logic really is that simple, which is to say it really is that stupid.
The persistence of political baloney remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air.”
Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.
Facts often do not cure misinformation.
Facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
In the presence of correct information, people making decisions about how the country runs react very, very differently than the merely uninformed.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong.” Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.