February 2012
2 posts
“If you focus on the utilitarian value of human beings, you may find yourself at...”
– Corseted Minds: Does Fear of Irrelevance Send Conservative Men Fleeing to the Victorian Age? | | AlterNet
December 2011
3 posts
Is there a wild cat in all of us? →
Desk Experiment 2: Caught at the fade →
“We are facing an economic and spiritual crisis that threatens our survival and...”
– Turning to Instead of Against Each Other | Common Dreams
November 2011
2 posts
Leaves →
Fall in the holler →
October 2011
4 posts
“The biggest “theft” by the 1 percent has been of the primary source...”
– How the 99 Percent Really Lost Out - in Far Greater Ways Than the Occupy Protesters Imagine | Truthout
Raising Cain →
Links and blog posts on environmental, social, economic and racial justice.
Holler bouquets →
“America needs the media now more than ever. To find it absent, while the entire...”
– What the Media Aren’t Telling You About American Protests | Common Dreams
September 2011
2 posts
Common Whitetail Dragonfly (male) →
Green-headed Coneflower →
August 2011
3 posts
“Every CEO of every company that continues to squeeze payrolls (Verizon, are you...”
– How Wealthy CEOs Are Screwing Themselves Over by Squeezing Their Workers | | AlterNet
Want More Retweets? Always Tell People ‘What’s... →
In November 2009, Twitter went live with its controversial internal retweet functionality, which allowed uses to quickly share anything published to Twitter with one click of a button. However, this new mechanism didn’t allow any kind of annotation of tweets, which meant that users were unable to amend or add comments to retweets. This is still true today, and this has meant that Twitter’s...
A jewelweed bud with a huge dewdrop reflects its... →
July 2011
3 posts
Are Your Humanitarian Heartstrings Being Tugged in... →
The media effect of filling a newspaper with human rights atrocities from the developing world functions to distract the audience from strategic and mineral designs the US and its allies have going in those countries, and to dilute the news coverage when their true aims come to light. The takeaway is that empire is the domain of storytellers as much as it is of Air Force generals.
“When your heart is open, what’s that feel like? Physically, in your chest...”
– Rick Hanson, Ph.D.: Put No One Out of Your Heart
“The working and middle classes have been condemned to a new form of neoliberal...”
– Trickle-Down Cruelty and the Politics of Austerity | Truthout
June 2011
4 posts
““There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price...”
– Dr. Cornel West: Greetings From a 21st-Century Prophet | Truthout
“To be human, you must bear witness to justice,” West writes in his book,...”
– Dr. Cornel West: Greetings From a 21st-Century Prophet | Truthout
Orange Day Lily →
“Medicine has been derailed from its Hippocratic tradition, science has been...”
– Alliance for Human Research Protection - Commercially-Driven Medicine: Implant Device Sales Tactics
May 2011
11 posts
A sunlit pool on Hudson Branch →
“We focus on silly issues like birth certificates and White House poetry...”
– Dr. Boyce Watkins: Racial Injustice Causes Real Pain in the Lives of Black Americans
“There are two basic reasons we follow a spiritual path and look for liberation....”
– Snow Lion Publications
WVU Study Finds Poorer Health Near Mountaintop... →
A new study conducted by the West Virginia University School of Medicine finds poorer health in Appalachian counties where coal is mined, especially those with mountaintop mining operations. The study, “Health-Related Quality of Life Among Central Appalachian Residents in Mountaintop Mining Counties” appears in the May issue of the “American Journal of Public Health.”
Libyan youth find new voices in the media →
Benghazi is more than just the de facto capital of Libya’s rebel forces. It is the nerve center of the newspapers and magazines that are mushrooming here as a new generation of entrepreneurs enjoys the freedom of airing their voices long suppressed by Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.
“What I’m waiting for is the moment of redemption when, like the Democrats...”
– Deepak Chopra: Birthers and the Politics of the Shameless
“There is a truth in the term consumer, but, to be honest, consumers we are...”
– I, Consumer? | Truthout
History of Seventies Activism Debunks "Me... →
Dan Berger’s “The Hidden 1970s” recaptures some of the momentum that marked the decade. In 14 diverse essays, scholars and activists give lie to the idea of protest as static, with an easily defined beginning and endpoint. Instead, the collection proves the opposite, situating ongoing resistance on an always-turning wheel of political dissent.
“You cannot stay on the mountain forever. You have to come down again. So why...”
– http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/27327
“The intricate self-organizing structure of Earth’s biosphere is the product of...”
– Learning from the Biosphere to Create Living Economies by David Korten — Agenda for a New Economy
Learning from the Biosphere to Create Living... →
We humans, with our extraordinary capacity for choice, are a product of this wondrous process. In our species’ immaturity, however, our dominant cultures have forgotten that our individual and collective well-being depends on the well-being of the whole. We must now step to a new level of species maturity, redesign the culture and institutions of our economic system to mimic the structure...
April 2011
17 posts
“The body politic was mortally wounded during the long, slow strangulation of...”
– The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We’re Locked into a Permanent Underclass | | AlterNet
May apple flower →
“When birthers accuse President Obama of not having a “real” birth certificate,...”
– What the Birthers’ Obsessions Say About Identity in America | | AlterNet
Corbett’s Corporate War on Environmentalism -... →
When Tom Corbett assumed residency at the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s collective priority list became dramatically reordered. Values long upheld by citizens on both sides of the partisan divide were henceforth dismissed with shocking, unprecedented plutocratic abandon.
“We need to do the hard cutting so the tree can once again bear fruit,” said the freshman governor.
Only...
Women Struggle to Unite Fractured Bahrain - IPS... →
‘Women for Bahrain’ is an initiative that is working to unite Bahrainis once again. “Through the group we are trying to tell people that religion is for god, and the country is for all of us, and how sectarianism could lead to serious complications,” activist and member of the media committee Fawziya Al Khaja told IPS.
The recently formed women’s group of different walks of life...
How Your Tax Dollars Fuel the Hatred of Muslims |... →
A recently released report by the Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the right in America, puts the spotlight on how “public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat.” The report, titled, “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants, and the Threat to Rights and...
Free Markets, Externalities, and A Question of... →
Preface: ClimateEthics has frequently examined ethical problems with many economic arguments made in opposition to climate change policies. See, for example, Ethical Issues Entailed By Economic Arguments Against Climate Change Policies. Also see, Ethical Problems With Cost Arguments Against Climate Change Policies: Increased Costs May Not Justify Human Rights Violations. Economic arguments against...
Zebra Swallowtail Butterfly (photo) →
Obama Returns to his Moral Vision: Democrats Read... →
In short, progressives should look at this speech separating out the necessary budget details from the moral vision they all need to be expressing on every issue. In addition, all progressives need to start thinking and talking in terms of systems. The nature of systems is central to understanding what is going wrong in ecosystems, financial systems, social systems, educational systems and even in...
Earth Day Challenge: Help monitor nature's... →
Ultimately, we and all these other living beings are in this situation on Earth together. That’s why I’m putting out this Earth Day challenge to anyone reading this blog who hasn’t already signed up for the Nature’s Notebook project.
Earthbytes: In New Film, Gulf Residents talk about... →
Reports and stories about unresolved human and environmental health problems in the Gulf of Mexico continue to find their way to the surface of the daily news rush. Now Robert Redford announces a new film that documents the collective trauma that persists following the BP oil disaster
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science |... →
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with...
Deepak Chopra: Scientific Proof vs. Public... →
We live in a society saturated by science, and every year we hear alarming reports that unless we educate more scientists, America will lose its position as number one in research and technology (some experts believe we’ve slid out of first place already). Yet it’s not often observed that people suffer from “science shock,” a numbness to the flood of data that assaults us...
Robert Kuttner: Touch of Class →
President Obama did two things in his Wednesday address at George Washington University that he has been loath to do throughout his presidency. He spoke like a progressive partisan. And he spoke of that great unmentionable in centrist Democratic policies — the injuries of class.
Harry Potter and the Network of Neutrality |... →
Who knew Harry Potter’s magic powers were for real? Okay, excuse my Muggle-like ignorance, but I didn’t believe it until I attended a session at the recent National Conference on Media Reform in Boston, organized by the non-profit organization Free Press. This particular panel was headlined “Pop Culture Warriors: How Online Fan Communities Are Organizing to Save the...
For Young Environmental Activists, Obama Now the... →
Not so long ago Barack Obama and his campaign team might have masterminded the kind of conference that is unfolding in downtown Washington, D.C. Thousands of college students and idealistic young voters came in this weekend to learn organizing techniques aimed at pushing the country toward renewable energy. But in a measure of how much has changed since the “Yes We...