Six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans.

We awake each day to give our labor to a new feudalism. Nuts.

…democracy cannot endure in a society designed by and operated almost solely for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Boys do not carry babies.
Moral condemnation is silly.

Well? This is THE question of the era.

The financial system is like an organ in the body of the economy. But is it the heart or the appendix?

It appears likely that official statistics overstate the financial sector’s contribution to GDP, and we now have evidence that this is indeed the case.

Once returns due to term and credit risk are removed, banks look like the average for all US firms.

In fact, banks appear to generate slightly lower returns than average firms !

Boy o’ boy. Have we been hustled.

Here, I Plead
Each Hold A Key,
A Part To Guarantee
Our Great Liberty.

Never Let It Be Said
We Are Succumbed By Dread.
Speak, “Don’t Tread!”
Shriek, “I’m Led
By Liberty’s Forum,
Our People’s Quorum!
Reason Is Our Day!
Justice Is Our Way,

Whistles On The Eagle’s Wing.
This Is What We Dream And Sing!”

Of All We’ve Seen Or Ever Knew
It Rests On What We Say And Do,
Regardless The State Of Style,
The Yard Of Cloth, The Mile Of Smile.

Face The Trouble!
Burst The Bubble!
Dissolve Our Pain.
Achieve Our Gain.

Each Can Reach,
So Reach To Each,
The Best Restitution
For Any Institution.

Network From Matrix,
Matrix From Node,
To Coin A Modern Ode.

“There are certain levels of acceptable risk in society.”

That’s the policy position of ALEC, a right-wing group that pre-writes legislation introduced by many Republicans.

A top representative said ‘kids eating rat poison is an acceptable risk’ that does not justify government intervention.

From rat poison to weed killer:

Women who drink water contaminated with low levels of the weed-killer atrazine may be more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles and low estrogen levels.

These findings, published in the journal Environmental Research, were based on municipal tap water tested in 2005.

From rat poison to weed killer to toxic sewers:

Traces of pharmaceutical compounds commonly present in wastewater are interacting with bacteria during the treatment process to transform them from non-toxic to toxic.

The anti-inflammatory drug naproxen is altered by wastewater bacteria into a similar compound known to be highly toxic to the liver.

 
Jimmy Greer sez, “It’s knackered industries…”

Meanwhile,

“Most Americans pay more in debt service than Scandinavians pay for the welfare state.” (tweet)

Meanwhile,

The true US federal costs of Iraq & Afghan wars is estimated at $3.6 trillion, and rising.

Dave Pollard:

To inure is “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection” or acculturation. If you are subjected to something long enough and often enough (e.g. spending time in slaughterhouses or jails or emergency wards or factory farms or “old age” homes or street gangs or torture prisons or refugee camps or ghettos or the armed forces or police forces, or living with an abuser, or watching violent “entertainment”) you become habituated to it. You become unable to feel the strong negative emotions and visceral revulsion that you would if this were a rare or brief event. You cannot. You emotionally detach, disengage, dissociate. No one can sustain that intensity of emotion indefinitely. The emotion gets suppressed, turned inward, and eventually the chemical reaction that occurs no longer has the same effect. You become emotionally flattened, numbed.

From the perspective of a massive human culture that is trying to get all seven billion of its members to work hard without anger, grief, outrage, or complaint, such emotional flattening provides a huge evolutionary advantage.

If you can be inured to not care, or to not care to know, you can be made to do anything.

Or, in the face of continued cultural atrocities, to do nothing.

1/4 of Americans have no emergency savings

• US to link foreign aid to gay rights

  Obama administration to weigh up how countries treat gay and lesbian citizens when allocating aid

Hillary Clinton at the United Nations unabashedly arguing to the world that LGBT rights are human rights.

In most cases, this progress was not easily won. People fought and organized and campaigned in public squares and private spaces to change not only laws, but hearts and minds. And thanks to that work of generations, for millions of individuals whose lives were once narrowed by injustice, they are now able to live more freely and to participate more fully in the political, economic, and social lives of their communities.

Now, there is still, as you all know, much more to be done to secure that commitment, that reality, and progress for all people. Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.

I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.

I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.

So, in 2006, a bill passed requiring the U.S. Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of its pensions over a 10-year span. This is a requirement that applies to no other federal agency.

Congress is killing the Post Office.

…was told, in other words, to act like a business.

But the politicians never really let it.

The Postal Service doesn’t receive any taxpayer dollars, funding itself entirely through customer revenue. But it still has to deal with Congress as a micromanager.

If you could go back in time to impart one piece of advice to your 18 year old self, what would it be?

short but good sum up of how recycling waste is still darn sloppy

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/12/scaling-a-mountain-of-trash/

Two examples.

1) …public gatherings of 10 or more persons require a government permit, and police have the authority to stop an unofficial assembly of five or more persons deemed likely to cause a disturbance of the peace.

2) …four or more people must obtain permits for all activity and displays in state buildings and apply for those permits at least 72 hours in advance.

Which is Brunei and which is the USA?

USA broadband is sloppy. It’s better in urban centers where profits are dense, but overall, coverage and quality is generally poor.