Large population of unemployed men under age 25 = a formula for revolution
Feb 042012
Ritalin Gone Wrong
By L. ALAN SROUFE
THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.
But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
Read the New York Times article
Feb 032012
3 ways good design makes you happy
- Re-localization
- Re-ruralization
- Recycling (salvage) economy
- End of consumerism
- De-population
Feb 012012
The fight for control starts with businesses and ends with armies.
12 companies join German commodity alliance
Interesting read:
America’s “take-off” in the 19th century wasn’t in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself.
The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities — those who would soon be called “capitalists” — rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and speculated in new financial instruments.
This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry.
Jan 292012
Read the article, “Why I’m Suing Barack Obama“, by Chris Hedges.
According to an article signed by 16 scientists in the WSJ, global warming isn’t something to worry about. In fact, some go as far as to say global warming is a ‘hoax’:
So is global warming a hoax or were the 16 scientists paid shills? Here’s a Q&A on global warming provided by the Australian Academy of Science. The data certainly looks like things are heating up.
According to NASA, 2011 was the 9th hottest year since 1880.
According to Elizabeth Grossman of Yale University, acidification of the oceans has already begun and suggests that CO2 levels are rising.
Now, I haven’t studied the phenomenon intently so I am the farthest thing from an expert on global warming. But for an issue of such colossal and potentially catastrophic proportions I really do wish people would get off their dogmatic perch and consider all sides of the argument.
Jan 282012
ANIMA (2011) from Dominoes Falling Productions, is a feature length documentary using a collaboration of various material. The film examines our relationships with ourselves, others and the environment around us. Other themes include our creativity and our power as individuals and as a collective to manifest our own reality.
an·i·ma [an´ĭ-mә]
The Latin translation of the Greek word ‘psyche’.
1. The inner self of an individual (soul); a relationship with ‘that which is greater than self.’
2. Expressions of the unconscious or true inner self of an individual (Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology).
Don’t let someone who gave up on their dreams talk you out of going after yours
Scientists in Europe and the US have created a highly transmissible form of the potentially deadly H5N1 bird flu virus. Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health on the Council on Foreign Relations, talks about the implications of this research.
Jan 262012
Behind the scenes:
How bad does it have to be to think this is the answer?
Jan 232012
Jan 222012
…in a toned down form. 16-hour days, $0.70/hr. What else would you call it?
Jan 222012
Great article from the WSJ:
America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”
Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.
