I say let’s serenade the lady. Here’s the Weavers singing “Goodnight Irene” at their Carnegie Hall reunion concert.
Maybe the lady will here us, maybe she won’t. But we’ll feel better.
Still, get outa’ town if you’re living on low wet ground. Otherwise, lay in supplies and stay safe.
America’s four catastrophes: militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty:
Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.
via Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial – NYTimes.com.
This is a revised version of an article I originally published in Buffalo Report in March 2005.
In the immediate wake of the 2004 Presidential election there was a lot of earnest talk about the role of religion and morality in the election and more generally in contemporary American political life. The early word was that unless the Democrats get religion, they’re finished. While that talk has abated somewhat, the issue of religion in our political life remains with us.
What makes this particularly perplexing is that, while American culture is largely derived from Europe, Europeans are not nearly so religious. Thus a 1993 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans attended church weekly as compared to 14 percent for the British, 12 percent French, and 4 percent Swedes. Not only is America more religious than Europe, but revivalism has been important throughout American history from the Colonial period through the present.
This question interests me, in the first place, because, in some measure I am a standard issue secular humanist who finds the European situation more compatible with a simple, perhaps naive, belief that human progress involves the advance of reason. I find the question a pressing one because of the current political situation. It is not simply that fundamentalism has been on the rise for the past two or three decades, but that it seems captive to some of the most destructive forces in contemporary American politics. And yet . . .
West calls himself a libertarian, but he’s not the kind who mistakes selfishness for wisdom, the fool who knowingly declares “I got mine and tough luck for you if you don’t.” Libertarianism, in West’s view, is a collective affair. The chains that bind the slave also entrap the slave owner; the prison of poverty requires the affluent to act as wardens. We’re all locked in a box together—and that means that we can only win our freedom to be individuals together. Both slave and slave-owner must free one another and themselves from the framework of slavery, the rigid structures of thought—the matrix, a term present in West’s work long before the movies—that prevent us from imagining a better way of being.
Natural gas resource estimates like those produced by the federal Geological Survey and the Energy Information Administration have been criticized by market analysts and energy experts because they often give an overly optimistic and simplistic view of how useful natural gas will be as a source of fuel that can replace oil and coal. Resource estimates often include gas in pockets that are so small or so deep that it may never be drilled or produced at any price. The gas may also be in areas that are off limits or impractical to drill.
via U.S. Geologists Sharply Cut Estimate Of Shale Gas – NYTimes.com.
America the greedy, the mean-spirited, the hunting ground of the rich and super-rich:
The America that the Hershey’s workers have seen is surely not the one the J-1 visa was created to promote. But perhaps it is the America we have become. Hershey’s business strategy is a microcosm of the downsizing and subcontracting that so many American companies have pursued during the past few decades in search of ever cheaper labor.
Check it out.
As families move from Kenya to Finland or Brazil to Mexico or Viet Nam to California, books published in their native country or in their first language often must be left behind. In their new homelands, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to find children’s books from their cultures and in their mother tongue. Parents have little access to the books and stories from their youth to pass on to the next generation. Many children must grow up without knowledge of their family’s heritage and first language. A fundamental principle of the Foundation is that children and their families deserve to have access to the books of their culture, as well as the majority culture, regardless of where they live. According to a paper published in 2005 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in preparation for the second meeting on the World Summit on the Information Society, “Denial to access to information in one’s mother tongue is equivalent to a denial of a human right.” The report also concludes, “In terms of pedagogy, how do children learn best? In their mother tongue.”
The ICDL Foundation’s goal is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world.
via ICDL – Mission.
Economist her Gintis recently reviewed a favorite Tea-Party tract, Williard Skousen’s The Five Thousand Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World. Gintis concludes:
I was prepared to dislike this book, but was pleasantly surprised at how ecumenical a message Skousen has to offer. Moreover, the book is easy to read and hence will be accessible to the common citizen and voter who may, if lucky, get to read one or two books a year such deep subjects as the nature of American society.
Here’s some of those 28 great ideas:
(2) A Free People Cannot Survive Under a Republican Constitution Unless They Remain Virtuous and Morally Strong;
(6) All Men Are Created Equal;
(11) The Majority of the People may Alter or Abolish a Government Which has Become Tyrannical;
(14) Life and Liberty are Secure Only so Long as the Right to Property is Secure;
(16) The Government Should be Separated into Three Branches–Legislative, Executive, and Judicial;
(17) A System of Checks and Balances Should be Adopted to Prevent the Abuse of Power;
(19) Only Limited and Carefully Defined Powers Should be Delegated to Government, All Other Being Retained in the People; Continue reading
How many undiscovered species are we wiping out every day?
Scientists have named and cataloged 1.3 million species. How many more species there are left to discover is a question that has hovered like a cloud over the heads of taxonomists for two centuries.
“It’s astounding that we don’t know the most basic thing about life,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
On Tuesday, Dr. Worm, Dr. Mora and their colleagues presented the latest estimate of how many species there are, based on a new method they have developed. They estimate there are 8.7 million species on the planet, plus or minus 1.3 million.
Truth and Traditions 