10/3/11

The Tea Party Should Censure the Koch Brothers

In new bombshell story, "Bloomberg Markets" reveals that Koch Industries sold petrochemical equipment to Iran and paid bribes in six countries ~ Politicalgates: "- The story also covers in great detail over several pages earlier violations of Koch Industries: The company in the past "rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada"

Hold your nose.
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Much more Koch criminality

In new bombshell story, "Bloomberg Markets" reveals that Koch Industries sold petrochemical equipment to Iran and paid bribes in six countries ~ Politicalgates: "- Koch Industries used the European offices of their subsidiary Koch-Glitsch to sell millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran in an apparent violation of the US-Iran trade embargo, as recently as 2007"

More, more more. These guys profess to be Americans. I would think they might at least have multiple allegiances to multiple flags. I hope the Justice Department will dispense with its ordinary timidity.

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Disgusting Koch Behavior

Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales - Bloomberg: "Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination."

Lovely people these billionaires. Fire the whistle blower who saves your company from a worse fate by flagging wrongdoing. These are the people who want to buy the country cheap by rigging the next Presidential election for their ilk. They already own a good deal of it. They should be brought down by the global democratic revolution in progress. Don't worry guys, we do not do violence. That is for the likes of you to do.

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Actually it is Nietzsche's Moment Now

ShortFormContent at Blogger: How could Nietzsche the scourge of democracy become its advocate?:

If you have the patience to scope out the post at the link above, you will catch a bit of a prevision of what is happening in earnest now not far from where I live. The neighborhood that saw panic and trauma ten years ago is seeing peaceful revolution in the making now. It is clear that the President cannot achieve any objective without the people and now the people are rising. And it will not stop. And when it is over the Tea Party will be revealed as a nativist backwater funded by billionaires. And the people will be seen as the 99 percent who are being squeezed by a corporate culture that cares not for the general welfare. Nietzsche anticipated a revaluation of values and that is what this revolution is about. It is a global values revolution to save the world from permanent repetition of the 20th century and its tragedies and wars.It is a war against stratification, reification and the mindlessness that exists when elementary fairness is subordinated to authoritarianism and bureaucracy, not to mention the profit motive. During this century sprawl overtook the planet and oil dominated and automobiles became the driving force of the economy. The revolution will help give more heft to .the universal values of non-idolatry, tolerance, democracy and helpfulness.


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The President has entered the ring

ShortFormContent at Blogger: Time for President to declare war on GOP:

Since the above has been written the President has begun revving up. He will dance with the Republicans at a distance, waiting to see if they crack. When they don't he will press harder and harder. He will be backed by a movement of the wound, the poor and the working poor in a movement that will grow into the millions. Eventually it is the people and not the Pesident who will lead the nation to greater fairness and greater justice. The President need only respond.

Till mercy like a mighty river flows

Winning The War Within Collected Sonnets:

"Till mercy like a mighty river flows
Till only reciprocity holds sway
If we but pray this prayer and understand
We shall not fail when Abba holds our hand"

More at the link above.

A reality on this planet

Till Earth and Heaven Are the Same - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "The prayer states that the realm of heaven where Abba's will is done is to be made a reality on this planet "

More at the link above

We need to evolve into a world of intelligible neighborhoods

Evolving a Neighborhood Society - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "Scale is the key. Current metrosprawl densities are impossible economically. We need to evolve into a world of intelligible neighborhoods. "

More at the link aboce

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Farmer’s Almanac Presses On

Farmer’s Almanac more ‘weed-dating’ than game-changing | Pop Culture | Ampersand | National Post: "A pillar of continuity, The Old Farmer’s Almanac has already lasted an eon and doesn’t see why it shouldn’t continue for eternity. It may be thinner than it once was but so is The New Yorker. Certainly it doesn’t indulge in the whiny defeatism that imagines print being drowned in an ocean of digital chatter."



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Human Rights Endangered in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan: Opposition activists sentenced over peaceful protests | Amnesty International: "The Azerbaijani authorities must immediately release three leading opposition activists imprisoned for organizing and taking part in peaceful protests, Amnesty International said today after a court in Baku sentenced them to two and a half years each in prison on Monday."

'via Blog this'

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Dumb Homes

GE & Nissan Partner to Plug EVs into More Homes | GreenBiz.com: "General Electric has just announced the next step in its Smart Home concept: An expanded partnership with Nissan that is aimed at using your electric vehicle to power your home and vice versa."

I will make no friends suggesting that the electric car is a false hope when it comes to creating a decent future. The electric car will simply make people feel a little better as the world goes to hell in an eco-disaster-basket. BTW the homes are also obsolete. As designed they cannot be improved.

The issue is not the journalist's POV as author of the typical, binary he said, she said story

3quarksdaily: What is objectivity?:

The issue is not the journalist's POV as author of the typical, binary he said, she said story. The issue is how one is thinking in the first place. If one thinks binary then the sides are always in balance no matter what may be true of not. An unfair attack is fifty fifty in terms of representation, even when it is a blatent lie. The person who engages in triadic thinking knows that the story begins with a First and that it encounters a Second. Whereas the binary thinker stops with there, the triadic thinker relates the First and the Second and propounds a Third which advances beyond the binary into the realm of action or resolution or creative experiment or proposed solution or hypothesis which will be attempted. The aim is something concrete that moves beyond First and Second. The journalist who works this way will tend to make the Third the story and subordinate the conflict accordingly, evaluating it from the POV of the Third.


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Willie Horton Politics is Going National Courtesy of Supreme Court and Billionaires in Tandem

Art Pope, Citizens United, and North Carolina Politics : The New Yorker:

The attacks on the President are orchestrated in the same way that the attacks described in this chilling New Yorker investigation are orchestrated. Lying allegations turned into wall to wall mailings and advertisements. This is the fruit of the Supreme Courts Citizens United verdict and even more the fruit of our economic imbalance which makes the rich super rich and bleeds the rest of us. We do not even consider options which for the rich are default and standard. We are going to bring these people down, starting this week.

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Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic

Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic. 
A definition of a sign will be given which no more refers to human thought 
than does the definition of a line as the place which a particle occupies, 
part by part, during a lapse of time.
Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, 
B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, 
into the same sort of correspondence with something, 
C, its object, 
as that in which itself stands to C. 
It is from this definition, together with a definition of "formal", 
that I deduce mathematically the principles of logic.
I also make a historical review of 
all the definitions and conceptions of logic, and show, 
not merely that my definition is no novelty, 
but that my non-psychological conception of logic 
has virtually been quite generally held, 
though not generally recognized. 
(C.S. Peirce, NEM 4, 20–21).

- Charles Sanders Peirce

Worth your attention

3 Anti-Authoritarian TV Shows that Grapple with America's Security State | | AlterNet: "The fact that the DOJ has secretly prepared legislation that would fundamentally alter the protections afforded Americans by the Constitution is, by any measure, a huge story. The first USA Patriot Act was rushed through Congress in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with very little media coverage or public debate. ("

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A small step toward a model for a cyber-city space

Solar Decathlon has winner as Chu defends loans | Green Tech - CNET News: "The Department of Energy announced Saturday that Maryland won the DOE-sponsored university competition to build the most compelling solar-powered house. Each of the 20 team participants is judged on 10 different factors, including architecture, affordability, and market appeal. (See Solar Decathlon coverage from 2009 and 2007.)"



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New Reformation is a bit of a stretch

C. Peter Wagner, A Leading Figure In The New Apostolic Reformation : NPR: "The international "apostolic and prophetic" movement has been dubbed the New Apostolic Reformation by C. Peter Wagner, who has become one of its leaders. He describes himself as the first person who noticed the movement, gave a name to it and started writing books about it. He was, until recently retiring, the president of Global Harvest Ministries. For 30 years, he was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Missions."

I give this anticipation about the same credibility I would give to any religious movement in the US in the last fifty years or so. All have been less than their putative founders claimed. This notion of end times and political domination is hardly new. And to claim a movement, on the basis of what is the most speculative of notions, is not quite salient in the 21st Century.

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A first hand positive review

We are the 99 per cent | Mark Ruffalo | Comment is free | The Guardian: "I have spent the last two days at the Occupy Wall Street gathering. It was a beautiful display of peaceful action: so much kindness and gentleness in the camp, so much belief in our world and democracy. And so many different kinds of people all looking for a chance at the dream that America had promised them."

'via Blog this'

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Posthumous Prize Winner

Nobel winner died days before award announced - CNN.com: ""He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design," the university said."

'via Blog this'

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Except as a study of semiotic

"Know that from the day when at the age of 12 or 13 I took up, in my elder brother's room a copy of Whately's "Logic," and asked him what Logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anything, -- mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic." - C. S. Peirce

Cap Tip Irving

Note to a Peircean friend

In a sense I think everything on my blog is Peircean at least in spirit. He wanted us to build forward which I sense is what both you and I do in our ways. Politically I think Peirce was brought up with some serious blinders but that hardly kept him from what I would see as a more or less Jesus (Mark)-based critique of things which I share. What I will come up with over time I hope is an agenda for a global democratic revolution. Abetted by a theory of ontological values which I feel no philosophy has adequately done. Cheers, S

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A message from a crypt in suburban Dallas

poster.jpg

Received via email from a friend.

Everything points to Eternity

Everything points to Eternity
And to a time of all Beauty – The Ginkos arms
Are raised in Obeisance this morning –
And the maple behind my studio is full of dreaming
The wet dark limbs holding a multitude of color – not color
Just ephemeral shades of indescribable Thereness
of what we call color – the muted shades are pinks and flesh
and chartreuse and all is perfectly still on the ground
is a soft circle of even more muted shades - Emily Mason Rose (1909-2011)

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Do we really want the Debt Committee to work?

Debt Committee's Failsafe Might Already Be Undone : NPR: "The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – also known as the supercommittee – created by Congress this summer has just seven weeks to agree on a plan reducing projected deficits by more than a trillion dollars.

If that panel of six Democrats and six Republicans deadlocks, or if Congress rejects its work, by law automatic across-the-board budget cuts — half of them from defense spending — will be triggered. Already, talk is growing of undoing that trigger."

Evidently Congress is frightened? That is hardly new. The power elite rules. Congress obeys.

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More Ivy League Bitching

Meet the New Super People - NYTimes.com: "Even the most brilliant students have to work harder now to make their nut. The competition for places in the upper tier of higher education is a lot tougher than it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when having good grades and SAT scores in the high 1200s was generally sufficient to get you into a respectable college. My contemporaries love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today. This is no illusion: 19 percent of applicants were admitted to my Ivy League school for the class of ’71; 6 percent were admitted for the class of ’15."

'via Blog this'

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Is Maureen Dowd Turning into Arianna Huffington

Cooperation in Evil - NYTimes.com:

I swear I could not read the column. I was transfixed by the picture. I saw a younger Arianna Huffington. Am I seeing things. I have never thought Maureen was as great as her NYT handlers did. She scores about one column in five. That is more or less on a par with Ms. H. All I need to do is hear Maureen's voice to be disabused of this odd disjuncture. Getting my cataracts removed should help.

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Big Stupid Deal

Tupac Sex Tape Surfaces | TMZ.com:

Let everyone who has not done things they would rather not have spread before the world raise their hands. I see. Everyone. Then what is the meaning of scratching the surface of every celebrity life for what everyone knows about as part of the spectrum of their own life? It is tacky power. It is J. Edgar Hoover titillation power. It is evidently the bulk of the Web's hit-generating power. It is in the process of passing away as the values of time immemorial get a makeover as people around the world wake up to more important things. Being a spectrum means we're all X-rated some of the time.

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Show Time on Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street Begins Third Week With Greatest Numbers Yet, Aims Still Uncertain | TPM Idea Lab: "And with reporters from large mainstream media outlets including New York 1, The Associated Press, CNN, The Guardian and Fox News descending upon the park armed to cover the day’s events, with all manner of cameras, microphones and recording equipment, protesters were encouraged that they had finally “broken through” what some had initially deemed was a media blockade or blackout on their efforts."

'via Blog this'

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Tea Party's Imbalance Problem

Professional tea party cashes in - Kenneth P. Vogel - POLITICO.com: "The imbalance is worrisome to some grassroots tea party activists, who warn that the movement is at risk of becoming dependent on the type of centralized, top-down political structure that contributed to tea partiers’ distaste for both political parties, as well as Washington’s conservative establishment."

'via Blog this'

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This story is not going away

Perry’s Link to N-Word Place Name Puts Campaign on Defensive - NYTimes.com: "The campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas found itself on the defensive on Sunday over a report that he had hunted at and taken guests to a West Texas camp with a racially charged name that his father, and later Mr. Perry, had leased."

'via Blog this'

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Veterans will protect protesters from cops?

FreakOutNation » The Marines are coming to #OccupyWallStreet to Protect the Protesters: "Dressed in uniform 16 or more marines so far and Army troops will be headed to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration to protect the protesters against the police crackdown. “We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing” wrote Reddit user ‘theenemywasme’ calling all Military Veterans in the popular social site to join him."

This is becoming a drama of sorts but the real issue is whether it will be binary (bad) or triadic (good). Triadic is when, as Anonymous suggests, we are indeed one, looking for a way beyond that improves the lot of the whole community. As binaries, most demonstrations suck. The Civil Rights movement was largely triadic. As was Tahrir. As Wall Street can/is/will be, I trust and hope.


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Video Wall Street=Anonymous=Network=Tahrir=Big

A message from Anonymous to Wall street, New York and the protestors. - Digg:

We are edging toward a definition of Gen X. Arrived just in time to provide some gumption to our too-early President. Maybe a penitent Term Two.

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You can demonstrate Wednesday wherever you are

MoveOn.org Civic Action: Virtual March on Wall Street: "Join us on Wednesday to create a huge show of support for anti-Wall Street actions nationwide. Together, we'll add hundreds of thousands of voices expressing our solidarity with the protests at Occupy Wall Street and across the country targeting the bankers who wrecked our economy."

'via Blog this'

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Way to go, Rick

Perry bet big on tax grants to subprime lenders - Boston.com: "WASHINGTON—As Texas governor, Rick Perry spent tens of millions in taxpayer money to lure some of the nation's leading mortgage companies to expand their business in his state, calling it a national model for creating jobs. But the plan backfired."

'via Blog this'

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No we will not drive your prisoners

TWU blasts city for putting handcuffed Occupy Wall Street protesters on buses: "The union, whose leaders voted last week to support the protesters, said police brass commandeered three MTA buses to transport many of the 700 demonstrators arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday."

Suggests a new verse to the old Miner's Life union song.

No we will not drive your prisoners
We don't live by Wall Street rules
We will fight to save our Main Streets
And to end the rule of fools

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