Ralph Nader at his best, and worth a listen.
“Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win”

Coronal aurora over Fairbanks, Alaska (January 22, 2012)

January 25, 2012
Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP

X-47B, not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but with no pilot at all.

[Many] believe that autonomous armed robots should force the kind of dialogue that followed the introduction of mustard gas in World War I and the development of atomic weapons in World War II.

While other rivals to Romney struggle for cash, Gingrich does not.

Sheldon Adelson, America’s eighth richest man, is pumping millions of dollars into Newt Gingrich.

The donations are among the largest from individuals in US political history.

Sheldon Adelson, a man who has given scores of millions of dollars to Republican and Jewish causes over the years but who only now – by backing Gingrich – is becoming known to the wider public. [shame on our media!]

“It is an arms race of money. You can imagine a world where you can’t get elected without the backing of a billionaire.”

1) A view which is very common among mainlanders is that “without China’s economic support, Hong Kong would have been dead long ago.” But many Hong Kongers now think that the “mainland invasion” has done more harm than good to Hong Kong.

2) There is also a fear of the erosion of traditional Hong Kong values like the rule of law.

3) Hong Kong has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.

4) Hong Kong people could realize the fact that they, like most mainlanders, live in an unjust political system under which the rich and the powerful collude. They share the same destiny, that is, to end this injustice.

Make free 1Mbps broadband for every citizen.

Or, we will be corporate forever.

Semper Fee.

Social Security is not insolvent and can never be insolvent. With no changes whatsoever it can pay future benefits that are adequate by today’s standards, benefits which will be in fact greater in real value than today’s benefits.

NYTimes:

…a leather case for the Kindle Fire was receiving the sort of acclaim once reserved for the likes of Kim Jong-il. [!]

Hundreds of reviewers proclaimed the case a marvel, a delight, exactly what they needed to achieve bliss. And definitely worth five stars.

Reviewers are paid for?! Yuck.

When the package arrived it included a letter extending an invitation “to write a product review for the Amazon community.”

“In return for writing the review, we will refund your order so you will have received the product for free,” it said.

The dark, dirty secret you learn when you run the program at Davos is that the vast majority of CEOs have nothing to say.

From the original statement of purpose of The Alaska Advocate, a weekly newspaper published in Anchorage, AK from 1976—1979.

“We are against all lies, and their more vicious step-children, the half-truths.

We are against shadow in the conduct of public business, secure in our belief that there is no public affair best handled in the dark.

We are against that which is dull or stifling. We oppose any limit or barrier to the exercise of talent.

We believe that in the honest, unimpeded exchange of ideas the best course is to be found. We believe we can play a part in that process.”

Go see Howard Weaver.

Changes in the Wealth and Income of Those at the Bottom Over the Past 30 Years

warmth and intelligence that kindled everyone’s best nature.

Certain people just shone as exemplars of wholeness, intensity, virtue, achievement, and delight; Maslow was left wondering what an entire society led by such men and women might achieve. This astonishment at the most remarkable human beings stoked his intellectual fires as nothing had before.

It would become Maslow’s life’s work to describe such people, to explain their excellence, and to spread the word to the multitudes that this richness was in fact an inborn human possession, lost to most by dint of social malfeasance and emotional attrition, recoverable on a wide scale by overthrowing the diminished and oppressive view of mankind that had passed for wisdom down the millennia. There are superb possibilities that men are intended to realize, and neither behaviorism nor Freudianism pointed anywhere near them. Maslow became confident that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed, not only in the scientific description of what man is, but in the moral prescription for the best that man can become.

Birnbaum: He wasn’t a predator.

Russel Banks: No—a dumb kid. Sexually confused. Alienated. Lots of things. Not angry. Basically an honest kid. Trying to figure out how to be a good person. Not very well equipped to do that. An abandoned kid, essentially. Benignly neglected. The mother takes credit for provided him with shelter, food, and an iguana. He’s a feral child in a way. You have an awful lot of them out there. Latchkey kids we used to call them. One parent—she’s working all day. Comes home then goes out at night, and she’s still a child herself in some ways. It’s a country that has fewer and fewer adults in it.