We must be urgent. I’m not saying quick.
We are a good day. Or we are not.
There is a nation waiting.
tsunami of weight
Australia reports that obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness. “What we have done about obesity is not working. This issue needs concentrated and determined action,” via the Council of Australian Governments.
Similar to the US, more than 60 per cent of Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese.
child abuse
Sales of sexual misconduct liability insurance reveal that Catholic churches are not higher risk than other congregations.
High school locker rooms? At least 36 swimming coaches have been banned for life by the USA Swimming organization over the last 10 years because of sexual misconduct with teenagers
the self-proclaimed
Conservatives and libertarians who claim early years of American independence as golden age of liberty can only do so by ignoring slavery.
I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery.
people are contagious
Obesity is contagious and can spread like a pox from one friend to another, and then another, and then to one more. Both cooperation and selfishness can spread like a virus. Poor sleep and pot smoking are contagious among teens.
Dave Johns:
Not until midcentury did economists, sociologists, and psychologists begin to study contagion with rigor.
One strand of research has examined the spread of relatively simple behaviors: things like coughing, applause, and face-rubbing. Another strand has looked at more complex contagions—speeding, baby-making, and suicide.
A newer area of interest is emotional contagion, which has gotten a boost from the discovery of so-called “mirror neurons”—contagion receptors in the brain that supposedly facilitate the transmission of contagious anxiety, satisfaction and fear.
rapid-fire nonsense
Glenn Beck as a fraud: A man who only embraces conservatism and the tea party movement as a means to furthering his significant personal wealth and career as a successful TV goon.
My reoccurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he’s exhausting to watch because just as I’m wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I’m faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection?
But to underestimate Glenn Beck as just some sort of random extra from Cuckoo’s Nest, as I admittedly have done, is a mistake as it barely scratches the surface of what his scam is all about. A schizoid raving street loon tends to command attention purely for the freak show curiosity of passers by, yet the nonsense is rarely taken seriously. This isn’t the case with Glenn Beck.
Several million people every day take his word for it. They’re suckered into buying the ruse. And it’s bad for America.
digital and real worlds
Steve Puma:
Young gamers spend approximately 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they reach age 21.
While this number may not seem significant, at first, it happens to be about the same number of hours a child will spend in school between 5th grade and high school graduation.
Game designer Jane McGonigal asks, “Exactly what skills are these gamers getting good at?”
industrial thirst
Annual water extraction is about 50% of the flow of our three largest rivers.
Little information is available on supply chain or indirect water use for the production of goods and services in the United States. Carnegie Mellon’s study noticed that it takes:
— 270 gallons of water to produce $1 worth of sugar
— 200 gallons of water to make $1 worth of pet food
— 140 gallons of water to make $1 worth of milk
Residential or domestic water use is 6.4% of total withdrawals. Irrigation, 34% of our total water usage, and power generation account for 90% of direct water withdrawals, the overwhelming majority.
fracture drilling
Cornell researcher Robert Howarth calculates that, when methane leakage from hydraulic fracturing is included, along with secondary contributions from forest clearance and water transport are included, the carbon footprint of shale gas is slightly worse than coal.
ripoff sans
Diane Blohowiak, IT director at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, switched the font on the campus e-mail systems because Century Gothic uses 30% less printer ink than Arial.
net net kvetch
Feels like rich uncles have moved into our master bedrooms.
ExxonMobile paid $36 billion in taxes last year. None to the USA.
Out of Chevron’s $19 billion paid out for income tax, just $200 million were paid to the USA. With sales of $157 billion, GE arranged an income tax loss of $1.1 billion. BofA took writedowns to show a $2 billion loss on $4.4 billion of taxable income. Hewlett Packard paid the USA $1.75 billion on its $115 billion sales.
Forbes’ Corporate Taxes in Pictures. I wonder if we will ever truly know if our costs to keep these companies is greater than what they provide?
we
A lonely path.
Not lonely at all.
inspiratoria
addicted police and army
Ronald Reagan’s covert war budgeteering:
Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan’s opium production grew 10-fold – from 250 tonnes to 2,000 tonnes. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the US attorney general announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply.
The Bush and Cheney follow through:
After five years of the US occupation, Afghanistan’s drug production had swollen to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the UN reported that the country’s record opium crop covered almost 20,000 hectares, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tonnes at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tonnes of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.
Afghanistan: a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords. Let’s war.
dazzle makeup
A wee bit of Adam’s thesis on how to confuse face-recognition cameras.
entrenched
Six of the ten richest counties are around Washington DC.
— 500 tycoons each worth about a billion;
— 7,200 really rich between 100 – 500 million;
— 24,887 worth a measly ten to fifty million;
— 183,900 worth $2 million to $10 million.
Thomas Jefferson warned that our capitol should be moved every generation or so. You didn’t know that?
He worried that an ’embedded class’ would infiltrate every office and hallway, every politician and bureaucrat, a perpetual Versailles. To prevent incrustation, Jefferson suggested the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court must occasionally re-locate, build new facilities, hire new staff, and repel all followers. Now that’s a jobs engine!
time in traffic is torture
Jonah Lehrer, on commuting:
A person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.
giving is receiving
Results from logistic regression analyses indicated that mortality was significantly reduced for individuals who reported providing instrumental support to friends, relatives, and neighbors, and individuals who reported providing emotional support to their spouse. Receiving support had no effect on mortality….
news gathering
Oh see how we gather the news, gather the news, oh how we gather the news…
it took me aback
After Reagan’s 80s, public accounting has become an epic disaster !
But what if I was to tell you that I knew of a way to pay for health care, and more, without raising taxes or making any cuts at all?
Recall when Donald Rumsfeld told the world, September 8 2001, that the DOD couldn’t account for $2.3 Trillion?
That is much much more serious than the budget of our Healthcare.
It’s not that DOD flunks audits, it’s that DOD’s books cannot be audited. DOD aspires for the position where it flunks an audit. – Winslow T. Wheeler, Center for Defense Information
Payments that should not have been made, improper payments, were $100 billion in fiscal year 2009 alone.
“They have to cover it up,” he said. “That’s where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can’t do the job.”
As this graph explains our debt on defense, please note the institutions that gain the greater share.
how it rained 60s
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love figured it could turn the entire world on to the mystical power of LSD.
One of the largest drug cartels in America, they distributed Orange Sunshine, arguably the most popular ‘brand’ of LSD in history; created the strain of pot known as Maui Wowie; and were the first to bring Afghan hash to the U.S.
So, Nick, what gave you the idea to write this book?
Basically, we ran a story in 1999 or 2000, “Laguna on Acid” by Bob Emmers, about a big Christmas concert, and deep in the article it mentioned this little-known group of surfers dropped acid onto the show from a plane.
That led to the idea to track those people down for a feature story. But no one from the Brotherhood talked to me until I was writing the book.
And this solves one of the last remaining mysteries of the 1960s: Who were they, and what were they trying to do?
“We were experiencing a whole new viewpoint of life that was so beautiful and loving and caring of others and the whole world. We felt connected to the source of all life.”
Nicholas Schou, an Orange County Weekly writer, tracked down members and associates of the Orange County counterculture group who spoke for the first time in decades about what seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.
Tell me more about what younger readers might get from this.
It will just blow their minds. I think young people today think America is still very divided, the two Americas that is still talked about all the time. But in the ’60s, it was way more divided than the way it is now.
pragmatism gone wild
Marketers manipulate our cortical setup.
- Our prefrontal cortex gets most excited when the cost is lower than normal.
- Our cautious insula is most active when prices are higher than normal.
- Our brain then compares pleasure versus pain to tell us what to purchase.
Costco is the ninth largest retailer in the world, and last year their annual revenue was more than $70 billion. The function of our brain has much to do with that.
Jonah Lehrer on Costco:
I walk in for some toilet paper and leave with a new television, a tub of cashews and a lifetime supply of chapstick.
The bare bones warehouse aesthetic, the discounted house brand, the constant reassurance that we’re paying “wholesale” prices – it’s all an effective means of convincing us to not worry so much about the price tag. As a result, we’re able to focus entirely on our anticipated pleasures, which is why I walk out of the store with all this stuff I don’t need.
We don’t look at the electric grill or box of chocolates and perform an explicit cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we outsource much of this calculation to our emotional brain, and rely on relative amounts of pleasure versus pain to tell us what to purchase.
ending democracy
So the latest troubling sighting is efforts to turn ‘democracy’ into a suspect word. While it may seem loopy to raise this as a concern, ‘liberal’ was not all that long ago seen in the US as a positive, or at worst, descriptive term.
Now liberal is so discredited that The Position Formerly Known As Liberal has either crept with its tail between its legs to the center, but still maintains that it is liberal, or is now called ‘progressive’, but that too is rapidly losing positive brand association, since pretty much everyone has figured out that Progressive = The Position Formerly Known As Liberal. So don’t kid yourself that cherished concepts like democracy are immune to reimaging.
Alexander Hamilton:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.
“The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.
“The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the Second….
“Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy…. It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan.”
giant financial fraud
We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over.
In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71. But that was before the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
As Matt Taibbi puts it in Rolling Stone, before they turned shit into pork under a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes.
Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
Four megabanks hold about $7.4 trillion in assets, according to the most recent regulatory filings with the Federal Reserve. That’s grabbing about 52 percent of the nation’s total output last year alone.
pass the pills
grabbing federal handouts
Lies and Hypocrisy Alert.
Red states receive more subsidies from the federal government than they pay in taxes. It is the other way around with blue states.
Red States, Blue States and the Distribution of Federal Spending, by Jeffrey Frankel:
The top ten feeders are Republican: New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska, Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Alabama, South Dakota, Kentucky and Virginia.
Republican ‘fiscal conservatives’ took the most farm subsidies to Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Texas.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska is number one in per capita federal dole, and by far the most indebted of any state [chart].
