10/5/11

Zimbabwe Denies Schooling To Thousands of Kids

Forced evictions in Zimbabwe leave thousands of children without access to education | Amnesty International: "Left behind: The impact of Zimbabwe’s mass forced evictions on the right to education shows how thousands of children and young people forced from their homes during Operation Murambatsvina are unlikely to access adequate schooling. "

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Global Online Privacy

No O This Time

Van Jones on America's Uprising: It's Going To Be an Epic Battle | Activism & Vision | AlterNet:

Left takes leaf from right.

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Green: Buses beat all other modes of human transport

The greener way to get there [infographic] - Holy Kaw!:

We need an evolution of the bus until it is the most prevalent thing on the highway. I believe evolved buses could be paid for by corporations (brands) and operated with strict regulations in terms of safety. Buses (their next generations) would connect cyber-communities that would be built on safe (nor tornado alleys or ocean front) sites on pattern language principles.

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No GPS without probable cause and a warrant

Tracked: The Supreme Court Shouldn't Let Technology Trump the Constitution » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union: "Yesterday we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in United States v. Jones, which Adam Liptak at The New York Times called "the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade." We are asking the Supreme Court to hold that the government needs to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car and tracking their every move."

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St. Paul Was A Pretty Good Lyricist

Abba's Way - Music - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "Courtesy of St. Paul. Recorded in the 70s on my album Stranger Named Peace with Billy Horwitz on vocal and guitar and Rick Tiven playing mandolin."

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A good piece on Christopher Lasch

Family Man: Christopher Lasch and the Populist Imperative: "Where others saw progress, Lasch saw destruction. His own interpretation of the nation’s past, according to Miller, “was centered not on grand, heroic movement from authoritarian control to freedom, as most Americans supposed, but rather on the shift from one form of overweening social control to another.” A nefarious collaboration between market and state was transforming citizens into consumers, while intruding into the most intimate spheres of human existence. Rootlessness and chronic anxiety increasingly defined everyday American life, and individuals sought to fill the resulting void through compulsive efforts to satisfy unappeasable appetites. The marketplace proffered an array of solutions, usually chemical or technological, to “age-old discontents” such as “loneliness, sickness, weariness, [and] lack of sexual satisfaction.” Others pursued a different route of escape, attaching themselves, however tenuously or even vicariously, “to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma.”"

I remember CL when I was in Chicago during the 1960s. He was a friend-colleague of my brother in law George Fredrickson. We used to sit outside in an Evanston back yard and talk. Morose is the word that comes t mind. But even then making a mark as a young social critic. The above suggests that he saw more than many at the time. He was hardly alone but the critique got drowned out or rather bulldozed by the legions of sprawl and the sheer force of consumerism.


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How real Is Sesame Street?

Sesame Street to Debut Impoverished Muppet: "The recession has come to Sesame Street, as the show plans to introduce us to a new Muppet named Lily, a little girl whose family struggles to afford food. She's only scheduled right now to appear in a one-hour special airing next week, but who knows, maybe like Archie's gay character she'll be made a regular."

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A truth the President had to learn

“Confidence Men” and Barack Obama’s White House : The New Yorker: "For the highest economic posts Obama picked Geithner and Summers, who were implicated in the deregulatory status quo and wary of fundamental reform—Team B, Suskind calls them—while passing over Team A, the heterodox skeptics, such as Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee, who had guided him through the campaign, when his prescience about the coming crisis and his sureness when it struck had sealed his November victory. Team B underestimated the severity of the economic debacle. For that reason—and also to woo conservative congressional Democrats and, futilely, Republicans—Obama’s stimulus proposal was too small and too larded with relatively ineffectual tax cuts. Had he demanded more but still got only what he ended up with, he might have received more credit for forestalling a depression and less blame for the feebleness of the jobless “recovery.”"

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A good example of binary thinking that goes nowhere

Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto - Reason Magazine:

This snide piece is a perfect example of stereotyping but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that some of the points are valid inferences, pointing to the difficulty of achieving goals that might be humane but are most unlikely to materialize. The best thing about the current global democratic revolution is its vagueness, an admission that the problems we face are less cannot be solved without some agreement on the premises. If the goal of the demonstrations is greater democracy, more tolerance, enabling all who need assistance and affirming the rights of all to their opinions and thoughts, the ground is laid for experimental solutions. To see, as the President never tires of saying, what works. Once this values-based effort is shelved, we tend to go back to the binary trap this writer is apparently in.

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Just in case you thought GOP was winning over Hispanics

5 GOP candidates agree to Univision boycott over ethics allegation – CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs: "Univision Tuesday denied allegations that it told Rubio it might not broadcast a story about his brother-in-law's 24-year-old drug conviction if the freshman senator appeared on "Al Punto," one of the network's news programs. Univision has called the allegations "absurd" and says its July story of the drug bust was reported fairly and accurately."

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For once Ailes tells the truth

Fox News Boss: I Hired Palin Because She Was ‘Hot And Got Ratings’ | Election 2012: "In a rare interview with a non-Fox reporter, Roger Ailes made a shocking declaration while defending himself from accusations that his Fox News network was anything but “fair and balanced.”

Speaking to The Associated Press, Ailes argued that he hired Sarah Palin not to promote a political agenda, but “because she was hot and got ratings.”"

And if Sarah is hot, the Arctic is not melting after all.

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Thanks for small favors

Opposition to Obama grows — strongly - The Washington Post: "The Post-ABC poll does suggest, however, that Obama’s jobs plan could well help him repair relations with his party base. More than eight in 10 Democrats — and 81 percent of liberals — support it."

GOP benefits from the fact that people want to believe they are part of the top one way or another, so they vote for GOP gobbledegook and lies.

Democrats know better. It is charitable of the polls to feed us the above scrap. It is the task of Democrats to become small d democrats and articulate what that value means. It cuts through the GOP crap and to the chase.


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Tea Party Founder Hearts Hank Williams, Jr.

Newsvine - Tea Party Founder Stands By Hank Williams' 'Hitler' Comment About President Obama: "Most Americans were shocked by the disgusting comments made by the radical Williams but not everyone was. The Founder of the Tea Party, Judson Philips, has commented that he stands by Williams and if ESPN keeps Williams off of the opening permanently he will not watch ESPN any longer."

And Hank, daddy's in his grave too blue to cry.



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Read This for a Top One Percent Roadmap

5 Facts You Should Know About the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans | Economy | AlterNet: " As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Sociologist William Domhoff illustrates this wealth disparity using 2007 figures where the top 1 percent owned 42 percent of the country’s financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home). How much does the bottom 80 percent own? Only 7 percent."

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Panflick: Father’d he is, and yet he’s fatherless

The Complete History of Adam Panflick:

"Melchizedek’s infancy was marked by almost endemic ill health. He spent most of his first three years in bed. After this, health returned. His face was square and handsome and had some of the look of his beautiful departed mother. He did not remember her. His maternal grandparents, the Andersons, entrusted his care to a bulky woman named Edith. Edith’s basic attribute was an almost Trappist adherence to silence. She supervised the Panflick wardrobe and saw that Adam was where he needed to be. After four grades in a local elementary school, he moved to the University School. Edith drove him there and back in the Anderson’s Cleveland Tourneau, purchased with the funds provided by the absent Martin.

As Lady McDuff had said:

Father’d he is, and yet he’s fatherless."

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The traditional description of the Church's threefold ministry

The Grass Roots Church:

"The traditional description of the Church's threefold ministry is summed up in the Greek words diakonia, koininia, and kerygma. Diakonia refers to the obligation of the Church to be a servant people, but we have made the deacons in our local congregations into what is, at best, an internal service organization. Koininia signifies the imperative that the Church be a community of love, but it implies nothing about the structure of this community. Kerygma refers to the central task of the Church, which is the proclamation or preaching of the Good News of the Gospel. However, the very notion of kerygma has been subverted by the Church's inability to provide a context in which genuine preaching is possible."

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Even Satan quotes scripture in the Temptations story

Windows on The Bible:

"Liberal Christians who read the Bible selectively and apply basically secular understandings to interpreting it, are rightly criticized for avoiding the harder understandings of the faith.

Liberals, in turn, rightly criticize their ultra-conservative
brethren when they are over-selective on the other side! They point out that the Pharisees and scribes also knew Scripture, but that they felt the lash of God's (Jesus's) righteous anger for their religious hypocrisy.

Even Satan quotes scripture in the Temptations story.

It's time to say to both sides of this dispute: Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone!"

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Winning The War Within Collected Sonnets: Thirty-Two Thy kingdom come harks back to royalty

Winning The War Within Collected Sonnets: Thirty-Two Thy kingdom come harks back to royalty:

"Thy kingdom come harks back to royalty
Perhaps we think the phrase can be skipped o’er
We might say progress look democracy
Must we go back to monarchy once more"

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The Global in Global Democratic Revolution


The global in global democratic revolution means
What it says
This will be happening this century from pole to pole and around the entire planet
In every country
Why
Because we are at a watershed
Inherited values are toast
Based as they are on the honor of power and domination
And the hypocrisy of hierarchical power
The enduring values are ontological
Central to the semiotic whole
They are evolving continuous
Iconoclastic nonviolent
Tolerant strong
Democratic universal
Same rights for all
Helpful enabling teaching educating learning sharing
 Beyond sclerotic binary
To liberating Third
Why global
The very same sameness is in every psyche on the globe
Either buried and denied 
Or being born


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Ah But China It's Coming Your Way (Again)

China’s delight at Wall Street Revolution | The World | International affairs blog from the FT – FT.com: "At least one newspaper in China has finally come out in strong support of pro-democracy demonstrations and mass sit-ins. An opinion piece in the official China Daily objected to what it called a “blackout imposed by major news media” of the growing protest movement.

The country being so criticised is not, of course, China.

Rather, it is the US, the latest leg of the global revolution, where news of the Occupy Wall Street movement has allegedly been suppressed."

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The baby steps we need to evolve toward a future that is sustainable

There is a key work which does not, if I remember correctly, note Peirce. It is Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community which builds on Tonnies and others to advance the notion that sans community as face to face and self-giving we are more or less toast. This book was laid on me my Fred Schumann at Williams in the 50s. I mention this only to underline that the binary back and forth politics of the present is now beginning to morph into an understanding of a third which is neither conservative nor liberal, right nor left - and it is the power of community that is presently rightly vague, which embraces the excitation (widespread discontent), the blunt truth (a sclerotic and somewhat greed-inclined socio-political system) and relates these two things to the daily experimental efforts that are being made - the baby steps we need to evolve toward a future that is sustainable.

Peirce like Nietzsche is a posthumous author and I do not believe he will come to full flower save possibly in this century. When he does it will most certainly be because he influenced the thinking behind the global democratic revolution. 

The Working of Peirce's Threes

Oddly enough it was Brent, whose biography of Peirce I am not in love with because it is, in a word, binary, who explained to my initial satisfaction the working of Threes which I must assume to be the basic structure of semiosis or semiotics at least for Peirce. To condense, the First as excitation the Second as Blunt Truth and the Third as experimental hypothesis or theory of how one might practically move forward beyond One and Two. I thought I have actually been operating and thinking this way in my own life and that I got into trouble mainly when I reverted to the binary. I thought that most of the back and forth in Congress resulted from being caught in the binary. I thought Obama is a Peircean either consciously or not.


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RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

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