big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Dozens of new cities are required !
Why would we fail to build them well? Perhaps these days good technology will bring good living?
So many projects. It sometimes seems there’s more $$$ behind big than there is behind new.
After all, exponential horror is not a secret.
The worried cow would have lived till now
If she had saved her breath;
But she found her hay wouldn’t last all day,
And she mooed herself to death.
Bishop Taylor Smith [link]
“The wolf researchers now studying in the wild say the alphas are simply the ones who can do whatever they want, but they don’t drag others down to maintain dominance.”
“A lot of what we believe about aggressive alpha dominance comes from old studies of wolves in captivity.” —Jennifer Arnold
Discipline-based approaches like those followed by Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan are popular but misguided, because they are based on faulty assumptions of wolf pack behavior.
In the wild, wolves are known to lead benevolently. Researchers have noted male wolf leaders sharing chicken with children and mates before eating.
Superb PBS film online: Through a Dog’s Eyes.
Snippet:
What’s attacked? Check out academics, elites, bureaucrats, scientists, the ivory tower, advocates, radicals, muckrakers, ‘community organizers’…. And please note that they are only under attack if they are seeing and warning of hazards to the people.
Where’s Our Billions of dollars going? And when spent?
2000 —371,000,000,000
2001 —393,000,000,000
2002 —430,000,000,000
2003 —498,000,000,000
2004 —551,000,000,000
2005 —589,000,000,000
2006 —625,000,000,000
2007 —662,000,000,000
2008 —737,000,000,000
2009 —772,000,000,000
Stunning no matter how familiar.
When God arranges votes, what arrogance appears!
Friends implored Reed—the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and one of the key architects of the GOP congressional takeover in 1994—to get back in the game.
As Reed tells his audience at the Mayflower, a phone call from Sean Hannity persuaded him. “I wanted to know that this was not me,” Reed says, “that this was not any ambition of mine. I wanted to know that this was the Lord.” Reed breaks into a sly grin as he recounts Sean Hannity’s bargaining: “Ralph, God is speaking through this phone line right now and he’s using me to deliver the message.”
[link] Note: Hannity is a premier news anchor; never revealed as a political operator; merely characterized as a ‘journalist’.
Shameful Days,
more critical than budgets or war,
because we let lies arrive.
Most of the headlines about Stuxnet are conjecture.
Virus Bulletin Conference provided the first detailed public analysis of the worm’s inner workings to an audience of some of the world’s top computer virus experts showing how the virus could cause infected hardware to run out of control.
Researchers uncovered an obscure date in the worm’s code, May 9, 1979, the date on which a prominent Iranian Jew, Habib Elghanian, was executed by the new Islamic government shortly after the revolution.
Thus the story that it’s military. Pretty slim evidence.
One guy reacts:
So the entire idea of the “Israel created this to attack Iran” idea is based on finding the date May 9, 1979 hidden in the code – and that because it’s the first day the current theocratic asshats running Iran beheaded the first Jew of their despotic regime? Really?
This is like playing Nostradamus. Pluck something vague, go hunting, and see what you can say.
For instance, in Eastern bloc countries, May 9 1945 is Victory Day. I’m sure some prominent politician somewhere also died on May 9, 1979. A google search for that date came back with 196,000 results just on the precise phrase “May 9, 1979”.
Ridiculous.
Too polite:
…constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities…
Hedge-fund gazillionaires pay less than half the top tax rate paid by most middle and upper-middle class Americans.
Matt Taibbi:
• Constituencies with the means and the bureaucratic endurance to get what they want slowly hack away at the government over time, carving out exemptions to their civic responsibilities while ordinary people suck the proverbial egg.
• A 100% or 200% tax break for hedge fund and private equity billionaires is not the sort of thing that one passes instantly, by standing up in front of big campaign crowds and urging on a mob; it takes a long time and a lot of behind-the-scenes baby steps.
• Once upon a time, we didn’t make very many distinctions about taxable income. Whether you made your money driving trucks or buying and selling stocks, you made what you made and you paid the rate outlined in your bracket.
• Then a movement coalesced behind the idea that the government should give a tax break to those persons who made their money investing…
Get a look at one of Hunter Thompson’s letters requesting a job. The year was 1958. Seattle Weekly says it’s the greatest cover letter ever written.
Hint:
“I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.
“Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
“I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
“I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.”
Oops. Republican debt will be $1.5 trillion higher than under the president’s budget.
Details. Details. Details.
The deficit would be $200 billion larger under the ‘Pledge to America’ than it would be with Barack Obama.
The ‘Pledge to America’ accrues $11.1 trillion. By 2020, their federal deficit would be 6% of GDP, the federal debt would exceed 93% of GDP, and interest payments on the debt would be $1 trillion per year.
“The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP.
[It] will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. [Rolling Stone]
It is one of the most deplorable traits of our strange civilization that we are still discovering truths that are commonplace even among peoples much less advanced than we.
This is because we have never moved in concert with the other peoples.
We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.
Look around you. Everyone seems to have one foot in the air. One would think that we are all in transit.
That is but a natural consequence of a culture that consists entirely of imports and imitation.
Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church.
What will future generations condemn us for?
!
“The direct cost of this imprisonment boom, in dollars, has been staggering: state correctional costs quadrupled over the past two decades and now top $50 billion a year, consuming 1 in every 15 general fund dollars.”
“Dear, I think I’ll go out to be scorned today.”
“I believe – these gentlemen believe – that this planet is being visited by beings from another world, who, for whatever reason, have taken an interest in the nuclear arms race which began at the end of World War II,” said Hastings, noting that the last incident occurred as recently as 2003.
Talking in the succinct manner you’d expect from life-long military personnel, the airmen looked more like grandfathers than conspiracy theorists.
“This is real. It’s not science fiction. It’s not movie theater stuff,” Capt. Robert Salas told Discovery News.
YouTube coverage here
120 ex-servicemen in the group. Wha??
Fundamentally, the mama-grizzly phenomenon is not really a movement or even a political term that represents a fully coherent set of ideas.
It’s mostly a marketing tool, meant to draw attention to Americans’ broad dissatisfaction with the way things are. Fair enough. Many people are dissatisfied, and they want to vent and they want to change Washington. But in the wild, real mama grizzlies are known to be aggressive, irrational, and mean. The issues facing the country are complex, and bears are not.
The conversation stretched on for nearly an hour and a quarter.
The president began by complimenting my multi-colored striped socks. “If I wasn’t president,” he laughed, “I could wear socks like that.”
You’ve passed more progressive legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Yet your base does not seem nearly as fired up as the opposition, and you don’t seem to be getting the credit for those legislative victories.
When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, “Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable.”
When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?
“Well, I’ll tell you that given the state of the economy during my transition, between my election and being sworn in, our working assumption was that everybody was going to want to pull together, because there was a sizable chance that we could have a financial meltdown and the entire country could plunge into a depression. So we had to work very rapidly to try to create a combination of measures that would stop the free-fall and cauterize the job loss.”
Well, of course. In keeping with this odd era:
Atheists and agnostics are the most knowledgeable about religion.
Who would have thought otherwise?!
PEW: http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/
Dammit.
Karl Rove is virtually entirely funded by billionaires. 91%
Their manipulation of attack advertising is…?
Double Dammit.
With the exception of Mitt Romney, Murdoch has all of the major potential Republican candidates for the presidency are on Fox channel’s payroll.
Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and, of course, Sarah Palin are on exclusive contractual strings that prevent its stable of Republican stars from being interviewed on any other channel.
Triple super-duper dammit.
Top 20% took 85% of America’s wealth.
Top 1% take 23.5 % of all reported income.
Is trickery really so difficult to understand?
What bugs me more than gaggles of political phonies
is the very poor results of the wealthy.
Oh the poverty of wealth in this era.
sloppy sloppy sloppy.
Robert Reich:
Republican Economics as Social Darwinism:
John Boehner, the Republican House leader who will become Speaker if Democrats lose control of the House in the upcoming midterms, recently offered his solution to the current economic crisis: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.”
Actually, those weren’t Boehner’s words. They were uttered by Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, millionaire industrialist Andrew Mellon, after the Great Crash of 1929. But they might as well have been Boehner’s because Hoover’s and Mellon’s means of purging the rottenness was by doing exactly what Boehner and his colleagues are now calling for: shrink government, cut the federal deficit, reduce the national debt, and balance the budget. And we all know what happened after 1929, at least until FDR reversed course.
Boehner and other Republicans would even like to roll back the New Deal and get rid of Barack Obama’s smaller deal health-care law. The issue isn’t just economic. We’re back to tough love. The basic idea is force people to live with the consequences of whatever happens to them. In the late 19th century it was called Social Darwinism. Only the fittest should survive, and any effort to save the less fit will undermine the moral fiber of society.
Republicans have wanted to destroy Social Security since it was invented in 1935… Republicans also hate unemployment insurance. … Finally, like Hoover and Mellon, Republicans want to cut the deficit and balance the budget at a time when a large portion of the workforce is idle.
This defies economic logic. When consumers aren’t spending, businesses aren’t investing and exports can’t possibly fill the gap, and when state governments are slashing their budgets, the federal government has to spend more. Otherwise, the Great Recession will turn into exactly what Hoover and Mellon ushered in – a seemingly endless Great Depression.
It’s also cruel. Cutting the deficit and balancing the budget any time soon will subject tens of millions of American families to unnecessary hardship and throw even more into poverty.
Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon thought their economic policies would purge the rottenness out of the system and lead to a more moral life. Instead, it purged morality out of the system and lead to a more rotten life for millions of Americans.
And that’s exactly what Republicans are offering yet again.
Why Tax The Rich?
Why $250k? That number didn’t come from the Bible, it is the income level that accounts for about 50% of the income tax revenue.
Fortunately, it is also only about 2% of the population, so you only have to piss off 750,000 people. That’s democracy. Eat it.
So Socialism Is The Answer?
To what? You don’t even know what the question is.
“Your BA is not a ticket to a job. Your loan is an anchor not a sail.” —Robert Paterson
Here’s the impassioned conclusion to his post:
How far does this have to go ladies and gentlemen, before you’ve had enough? Before you simply refuse to submit? How much of your money – both present and future earnings – has to be stolen before you will rise and say “no more”?
How much?
Do you need to be reduced to living under a freeway overpass? Eating scraps from a garbage bin? Is not having your retirement and income security destroyed not once, but twice in ten years enough for you to demand that this crap stop, and for you to refuse to labor and thus create more wealth that these crooks can steal until you obtain effective redress and the people responsible are held to account?
These events were not accidents folks.
They were premeditated and intentional, undertaken with the full knowledge of what would – and did – happen.
The truth has been covered up, whitewashed and papered over by both major political parties, neither of which is willing to stand and demand that all of these void agreements be rescinded, that the funds stolen be returned and that everyone involved in this tawdry mess go straight to prison.
No, instead all you’ve heard is “irrational exuberance”.
There was nothing irrational about it folks.
It was intentional, mendacious theft !
The anarchist fortunes of Koch, all the odder as co-founders of John Birch Society and Top 10 polluters in the USA, are insider Fiorina backers — the buy is is is offshore drilling, pipeline oversight, clean tech roll back.
The midterm election is largely being financed by a small corps of wealthy individuals and corporations whose names may never be known to the public. The full brunt of that spending is going to Republican candidates.
During my sophomore year, 1992, 1,500 scientists, including more than half the living Nobel laureates, admonished in their Warning to Humanity: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”
So what have we done? Not much.
From 1992 to 2007, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels rose 38 percent. Emissions in 2008 rose a full 2 percent despite a global economic slump. Honeybees are dying by the billions, amphibians by the millions, and shallow Caribbean reefs are mostly dead already. Our soil is disappearing faster than ever before, half of all mammals are in decline, and a recent climate change model predicts that the Arctic could have ice-free summers by 2013. Unchecked, carbon emissions from China alone will probably match the current global level by 2030.
“The god thou servest,” Marlowe wrote in Dr. Faustus, almost four hundred years before the invention of internet shopping, “is thine own appetite.” Was he wrong?
Once, after connecting his nerves to an array of electrodes in 2002, he let his wife use her brainwaves to take control of his body.
It was the first time the nervous systems of two humans had communicated electronically.
“It was quite an intimate feeling,” he says.
This isn’t just for fun. He is certain that without upgrading, we humans will someday fall behind the advances of the robots we’re building — or worse.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain
Torrid argument does not good policy make. Republicans are setting up an across-the-board 20 percent cut in non-security discretionary spending. There is management required to get government fit, but raw bullies have not the wit to do it.
A. Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.
B. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic.
C. The only way to balance the budget by 2020 while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut (c) is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government.
Tax cuts & Republican donations.
Bush tax cuts cost us $2.7 trillion in the first eight years.
The 25 top speculators average $1 billion each given tax rate of 17%.
People earning over $200,000 but paying no tax skyrocketed under Bush.
Twice before so much is held by so few—the late 1920s and the robber barons in the 1880s.
We a nation not ours.
“On the economy, you said earlier this is going to take an ‘enormous amount of time.’ How long?”
“Well, I think it’s going to take several years from–I think getting through a recession as deep as the one that we were faced with, the sheer amount of job loss, the shock to the system, shock to our financial system, the change in our housing market. We’re dealing with, in many ways, if you look at what happened and what cascaded downward all at a certain period of time, you’re dealing with sort of the perfect storm.”
