From inspectors who abandoned the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it succumbed to disaster to a delay in disclosing radiation leaks, Japan’s response to the nuclear accident caused by the March tsunami fell tragically short, a government-appointed investigative panel said on Monday….
The panel attacked the use of the term “soteigai,” which translates to “unforeseen,” by plant and government officials to describe the unprecedented scale of the disaster and to explain why they were unable to stop it. Running a nuclear power plant required officials to foresee the unforeseen, said the panel’s chairman, Yotaro Hatamura, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of Tokyo.
“There was a lot of talk of soteigai, but that only bred perceptions among the public that officials were shirking their responsibilities,” Mr. Hatamura said.
Mr. Kendricks, who never married and has no children, is the unofficial mayor of his church-laden neighborhood, which is Gospel Central on Sunday mornings. Tourists often outnumber congregants in local churches, even at Metropolitan Baptist.
On Sundays, Mr. Kendricks sweeps in at the last minute for noon services. He is greeted and fussed over by the women, in white uniforms, who serve as ushers, and then makes his way past his (long since assembled) band to the organ, just in time to lead the assembled through opening hymns. “I don’t think there’s a church in Harlem that I haven’t been in,” said Mr. Kendricks, who turned 69 last Sunday. “This has been my life for 40 years.”
Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.
That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.
Austin NAACP President Nelson Linder, who has known Ron Paul for 20 years, unequivocally dismissed charges that the Congressman was a racist in light of recent smear attempts, and said the reason for him being attacked was that he was a threat to the establishment.
Linder joined Alex Jones for two segments on his KLBJ Sunday show this evening, during which he commented on the controversy created by media hit pieces that attempted to tarnish Paul as a racist by making him culpable for decades old newsletter articles written by other people.
“Knowing Ron Paul’s intent, I think he is trying to improve this country but I think also, when you talk about the Constitution and you constantly criticize the federal government versus state I think a lot of folks are going to misconstrue that….so I think it’s very easy for folks who want to to take his position out of context and that’s what I’m hearing,” said Linder.
“Knowing Ron Paul and having talked to him, I think he’s a very fair guy I just think that a lot of folks do not understand the Libertarian platform,” he added.
When you see this short clip, you may say to yourself “Cute kid, but what’s the big deal?”
Well, the big deal isn’t the clip per se, but the story of how an 8 year old gained the easy confidence to pick up a gigantic horn and march around the back yard playing a song. This is symbolic of a very, very, big deal which is that every child has it in him or her to do the same.
It is widely recognized that music education — think performing, playing, and experimenting more than “Music Appreciation” — gives many skills to students, but it also improves thinking ability, which transfers over to all the other core studies such as math and science. Students with experience in music have higher SAT scores and lower instances of substance abuse. To put it another way, “The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone, style, rhythm, phrasing, and feeling — training the brain to become incredibly good at organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated practice of this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attentional skills, intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge and expression.” Ratey, John J., MD. A User’s Guide to the Brain. OK, enough – I could write volumes about this, and nobody is disputing the truth of it anyways. The puzzling thing is how music, and the arts in general, are underfunded and undervalued in our schools. We know music education will help students do better on math tests, but we cut the music program so there will be more time to study for the math tests, and everybody in education understands that this ultimately results in lower math scores. Kind of like eliminating soap, so everybody will have more time to wash their hands.
OK, back to the video. Ruslan isn’t worried about wrong notes, proper technique, marching “in time,” or his reputation as a performer. In other words, nothing has discouraged him from playing. Encouragement, enjoyment and participation are what he knows. Here’s how Charlie Keil, a key figure in this encouragment, describes it:
Put “Ruslan Sousaphone” in the google slot and click on the vid of the kid with the ‘phone beyond trombone in his big green backyard. Ruslan announces “This is how you play the — prompt from his older brother, ‘sousaphone’ — Sousaphone!”
He doesn’t know the name of the instrument for sure; he’s never played one before, unless he puffed on it a few times just before somebody said “let’s do a video of this,” but he is very confident that he can show you how it is played. Then he says “Let’s do ‘Peace is the Way’!” and off he goes with a horn generously barter’d to me from ethnomusicologist Steve Feld, once evaluated by trombone legend Ray Anderson, currently on loan to Ruslan’s father. May the gift circulate! Continue reading →
A New Paltz resident and Occupy movement member spoke up during the public comment period, saying, “I was an activist probably before many of my fellow members were even born.” That said, he felt “rejuvenated by these young people and the Occupy movement, which is born out of great darkness. Homes of working Americans are being foreclosed on; millions are without health insurance; those that are pay more than half their paycheck for the limited insurance they receive, which includes increasingly high co-pays and deductibles that they can’t afford. We’re seeing extreme layoffs, corporations paying off politicians to continue practices that endanger public health and our water and air. They are a ray of light shining into that darkness, and I support them.”
The swing-dance social world is an extremely fluid and democratic fellowship. Women ask men to dance and vice versa. Partners switch with every song. One might arrive with a significant other or alone. Just as older people dance with youngsters, one can expect to see same-sex as well as male-female couples. Markedly absent is the supremacy of the ultrabeautiful or the ultrathin. People who are plain while standing on the sidelines are often transformed into dynamos of charisma on the dance floor. Those who are heavy execute complicated moves with grace.
Buchanan called Paul “an honest, principled, courageous political leader,” but stressed that he won’t be making any endorsement in the GOP primary because of his MSNBC contract. While he doesn’t think Paul can actually win the nomination, he insists the GOP is slowly moving in his direction, with the price-tag that comes with a sustained overseas presence eventually wearing down the GOP’s hawkishness.
“What’s going to bring it down is these deficits,” he said. “I think Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are ahead of their time.”
Ron Paul represents the ideology that Republican insiders most fear: conservatism.
Not the corrupt, inside-the-beltway construct that goes by that name, but actual conservatism.
And if he wins the Iowa Republican Caucus vote on January 3—a real, though far from certain, prospect—the party bosses will have to do everything in their power to prevent Paul from reasserting the values of the “old-right” Republicans who once stood, steadily and without apology, in opposition to wars of whim and assaults on individual liberty.
Make no mistake, the party bosses are horrified at the notion that a genuine conservative might grab the Iowa headlines from the false prophets.
The anarchists’ way of operating was changing our very idea of what politics could be in the first place. This was exhilarating. Some occupiers told me they wanted to take it home with them, to organize assemblies in their own communities. It’s no accident, therefore, that when occupations spread around the country, the horizontal assemblies spread too.
At its core, anarchism isn’t simply a negative political philosophy, or an excuse for window-breaking, as most people tend to assume it is. Even while calling for an end to the rule of coercive states backed by military bases, prison industries and subjugation, anarchists and other autonomists try to build a culture in which people can take care of themselves and each other through healthy, sustainable communities. Many are resolutely nonviolent. Drawing on modes of organizing as radical as they are ancient, they insist on using forms of participatory direct democracy that naturally resist corruption by money, status and privilege. Everyone’s basic needs should take precedence over anyone’s greed.
Through the Occupy movement, these assemblies have helped open tremendous space in American political discourse. They’ve started new conversations about what people really want for their communities, conversations that amazingly still haven’t been hijacked, as they might otherwise might be, by charismatic celebrities or special interests.
Truth and Traditions 