8/12/11

Somebody's Got It Right

Setting cities free? « « Beyond Green Beyond Green: "What we need isn’t enterprise zones or HS2: it’s a shift in the public and policy mindset towards the creation of compact, concentrated, efficient and empowered cities beyond the commuter belt."

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Guadalajara is in trouble - car trouble

Guadalajara is in a state of emergency | Carfree MX: "It is unfortunate that the Guadalajara Metropolitan Zone, with a population of more than 4 million 600 thousand according to INEGI, currently has a higher index of cars per inhabitants than Mexico City."

Everyone who sees cars as the future should visit and try breathing for a day.


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The lethal automobile circa 1920

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City – Carbusters: "“The automobile as a death dealing instrument was unanimously decided upon as the greatest present day menace to public safety.” These words were not written in 1960s Holland or 1970s New York City but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1920."

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You thought the Georgia-Russia situation is calm?

Georgia-Russia: Learn to Live like Neighbours - International Crisis Group: "Three years after their August 2008 war over the South Ossetia region, tension is growing again between Russia and Georgia, and talks are needed to restore stability and create positive momentum in a situation that is fragile and potentially explosive."

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Cameron on the wrong track

Cameron’s Plan to Limit Social Networking Access Unwise | Human Rights First: "Washington, DC – U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron says his government is “working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” Human Rights First today called British Prime Minister David Cameron’s suggestion the wrong antidote to cure social unrest. "

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Guatemala Courage in The Face of Death Threats

Expert witnesses receive death threats after Guatemala massacre trial | Amnesty International: "Four staff members of a forensic anthropology team in Guatemala have received death threats after testifying at a recent high-profile trial over a 1982 army massacre that left 250 villagers dead. ... The threat came after a judge in Guatemala City sentenced four former soldiers from an elite army unit to 6,060 years in prison on 2 August for their role in a 1982 massacre in Dos Erres village in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. "
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Peirce's understanding of logic is similar to the core ideas in the Socratic dialectic

Joseph Ransdell, "Peirce and the Socratic Tradition" at ARISBE: THE PEIRCE GATEWAY: "Had it not been for the formal work of Aristotle, the Stoic logicians, Kant, Boole, and DeMorgan, Peirce doubtless could not have reconceived and generalized the principles of logic as he did and been able to arrive finally at his own conception of logic as semiotic. But there is a core of ideas in Peirce's understanding of what logic is which is similar to the core ideas implicit in the practice of Socratic dialectic, and these ideas are not available in Aristotle or in the thinking of any of the other formalists who developed logic after Socrates and Plato, as far as I can see."

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Yes and last I heard Joran van der Sloot was in jail in Peru

Robyn Gardner: American Woman Missing in Aruba Parallel’s Natalee Holloway Case - The Daily Beast: "Six years after Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba, another blonde American woman has vanished from the same beach. Barbie Latza Nadeau on the cases’ chilling parallels."

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Peirce's understanding of science goes back to Socrates

Joseph Ransdell, "Peirce and the Socratic Tradition" at ARISBE: THE PEIRCE GATEWAY: "Peirce was a radical thinker, attempting to re-think and re-establish logic at the most fundamental level, and it is appropriate to go back to the beginnings of logic in the West to understand what this means. The Aristotelian account of the syllogism, important as it is, does not provide the basic problematics needed to understand Peirce's enterprise nor, in my opinion, is this to be found in Aristotle's conception of science, but must be sought earlier."

A key step toward understanding C. S. Peirce, an effort that is underway but hardly complete.

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Ken Wilber's Color Coding

Integral Racism — The Characterizing Colors of Ken Wilber, et al. | Stephen C. Rose: "Here is an interesting post on Integral thinking and one of its favored modes, known as spiral dynamics. I must confess that in reading it I had a chuckle. The phrase “integral racism” leaped into my jaundiced mind."

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A clear eyed view of Lolita

I Blame The Patriarchy: "Nabokov was totally a perv or he couldn’t have written this huge and convincing paean to pervy desire. He would have made Lolita a person rather than a voiceless toilet, and he would have skipped the gratuitous erotica."

Better you go there and read it than that I paraphrase.



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Karl Rove is taking a leaf from Lee Atwater

Rove’s Crossroads GPS unveils Spanish-language campaign | The Washington Independent: "She adds that there is higher unemployment, Medicare benefits will be reduced, we have an enormous national debt and Obama wants to increase taxes and spend more. She concludes there has to be a way to stop Obama from writing more blank checks."

Karl is doing the nasty again. This time lying in Spanish with money from the GOP rich. Just in the above paragraph is the biggest lie of all - who is responsible for the conditions noted? Obama has worked to deal with all the above and the GOP has refused to compromise. It's that simple and the public will see it by 2012 and reward the GOP with walking papers. Rove is the one with the blank check from anonymous donors who resonate to the big oil vibe. That's what this is all about.


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JFranken no-brainer languishes

Joe Conason: Franken Calls for Oversight of Ratings Agencies - Truthdig: "In an exclusive Monday interview for The National Memo, the Minnesota Democrat said that the misconduct of the ratings agencies led directly to the economic catastrophe that S&P’s rating decision has made even worse. Franken wondered aloud why his proposed reforms of the ratings industry should still be subject to “study” rather than action by the Securities and Exchange Commission."

I am fantasizing about sane government starting in January 2012 with Obama loyalists replacing prissy Democrats who betray the President and diminishing the ranks of the GOP Obama haters. Sensible people appreciate the President's reticence in the face of shameful provocation. The binary dualists of today's Congress know no other way to behave.

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FOX far outclasses CNN on Rep debate front

The Morning After: Fox Shows Teeth in Debate - Tuned In - TIME.com

Hey, even inveterate FOX-disser me noticed. Be nice if it signaled a change.

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Finally some light at the end of the tunnel

Congressional Democrats On The Comeback In The Polls | TPMDC: "Both polls showed Democrats taking the lead in the Generic Congressional Ballot, a metric showing who voters generally feel they want to control the House and Senate. Gallup consistently measures it, and Democrats held a healthy lead throughout 2007 to the end of 2009, when the GOP started making gains and eventually led. The Republican high water mark was around election time in 2010, but it didn't last very long:"

Damned right. I hope 2012 proves definitively that 2010 was a temporary electoral aberration by and that this last period is a nightmare we are not condemned to repeat until we have no more democracy whatsoever.

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China More Than Just A Glitch

China Recalls Bullet Trains - The Daily Beast: "A manufacturer has recalled 54 bullet trains in China due to faulty sensors that cause them to stall. The trains have reportedly stalled 40 times since July, sometimes because a door was left ajar or someone smoked in the bathroom. The recall comes just a month after a deadly bullet-train crash killed 40 people and sparked widespread accusations that the trains had been developed too quickly."

Speed is inherently lethal and would not be necessary in a world better able to think before planning and executing its ideas.

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This is the tip of the iceberg

Law Students Sue Their Schools - The Daily Beast: "Maybe they'll get their tuition's worth after all. Lawsuits were filed against Michigan's Thomas Cooley Law School and New York Law School. The lawsuits, which seek class-action status, allege that the schools inflated their post-graduate job prospects by advertising the percentage of graduates who get any kind of job within nine months of graduation—even jobs that don't have anything to do with the law."

The entire apparatus of education is terminal because it is built on the false American dream which only worked for people making over 100K. As that dream crumbles so will every institution that employees the highly-paid and generously pensioned. Those who remake society at the community level will win the ultimate reward. Those who capture the vision of future walkable cyber cities will own the economy of the future.


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Only in California but universal now (Video)


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Growth lies in remaking society


Definable communities of up to 10k in walkable areas off limits to automobiles
(Reduce and phase out oil use by means of recalibrating communities)
Ending zoning as we know it and creating a mix of residence, work spaces, public amenities, kiosk shops, services
(We are past the industrial age and entering the cyber-age)
Recast manufacturing to center on the creation of mass produced "spaces" to be the lego-like units of construction in four-level max walkable communities
(To enable creation of a giant skeleton to which spaces are attached in order to enable all functions that are currently the costly elements of individual houses and everything needed for eco-sustainability)
Concede that to resuscitate dying education and dying families we will benefit from the creation of intentional communities where pioneers of cyber society can live according to values of tolerance, helpfulness, democracy and non-idolatry

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California is coddling 700 deficient doctors

As Side Effect of Fiscal Constraints, Dangerous Docs Go Undisciplined in California - ProPublica

When Pro Publica is on the case, I believe it. Jerry Brown will no doubt do whatever he can. The cause of this danger is fiscal constraint and that can be laid at the door of the wingnut GOP. This is GOP-Care.

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Imperatives don't work with Syria

UN: Syria Escalates Repression After Security Council Statement | Human Rights Watch: "(New York) – The United Nations Security Council should press Syria to comply with the council’s demand to end attacks against peaceful protesters, Human Rights Watch said today. Syria should comply with the Security Council’s August 3, 2011 statement, which also called on Syria to cooperate fully with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which has been investigating the abuses in Syria."

Syria is proving intractable and immune to every mechanism of international persuasion. This bumps up against the reality of the democratic revolution in progress. In such a test of wills, the only way to help is to spread word of Syria's acts which are criminal and deserve punishment at the Hague. When the word becomes impossible to ignore, the tide will turn and the defeat of Assad and his minions will be merely a matter of time.

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Read this and weep

Giant tent to go up over Japan nuclear reactor - World news - Asia-Pacific - msnbc.com: "Officials hope the cover will keep radioactive materials that have already leaked from spreading, prevent rainwater seepage and offer a barrier from possible leaks or blasts in the future."

Another squib to build a wall high enough to enable the world to say no more to nuke power. Would you feel safe if you lived nearby?


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Hey Rick this man is out to stop you

N.C. man launches effort to thwart Rick Perry's 2012 run | McClatchy: "'Perry is just a Republican version of LBJ who's made a fortune in office based on connections,' Harris said."

I would say he is a carbon of W. I see and hear him in everything Rock Perry says and does. He is already stopped in my mind for that reason.

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What did this sea lion do to deserve to be shot?

Reward offered in fatal sea lion shooting: "SM BAY — A $5,000 reward was offered Wednesday for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever fatally shot a sea lion in the Santa Monica Bay a week ago."

Cap tip Digby.

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Tiger meltdown at pga

Woods looks like just another duffer - NYPOST.com: "“I’m not down. I’m really angry right now,” Woods said. “There’s a lot of words I could use beyond that.”"

From three under to seven over.

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China UK Blame Facebook and Twitter

China: Tweets Didn’t Start the Fire · Global Voices: "Chinese state broadcaster CCTV has followed up its attack last week on microblogs with another one set against the backdrop of riots in London and English cities, putting the blame squarely on social networking sites (SNS) such as Twitter and Facebook. Or was that British Prime Minister David Cameron?"

The plot thickens.

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Rochester some darker echoes of Springsteen (Video)


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RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press