Welcome to the new Plutocracy!

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” -- Warren Buffett, currently the world's third richest person
Most Americans have the sense that something's wrong in our country, and most realize that it's intimately tied up with money and politics. Those who have not studied the issues deeply could be forgiven for thinking we have a foreclosure problem, or an unemployment problem, or a Democrat problem, or a Republican problem, or a problem with Congress as a whole, but the truth is more important than those symptomatic issues. The truth is that we are now living in a nakedly plutocratic state-- that is, a state which is run by, and for, the wealthy. Or perhaps a corporatocracy (a state run by, and for, corporations), but they are functionally the same thing.

Continue ReadingWelcome to the new Plutocracy!

Anti-communist propaganda alive and well

For some reason, our government and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, refuses to give up beating the dead horse that is Cuba. We've had it in for them ever since they went Commie, and we're not about to quit now! I just noticed this article from Newsweek entitled "Castro tells the truth about Cuba" which gives us the current bad news:

He has outlasted eight U.S. presidents, survived countless CIA efforts to do him in, and his communist regime has remained in power for a generation after the collapse of his Soviet sponsors. So what does the leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution think now of the system he created? Last week The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported Fidel Castro’s startlingly honest assessment: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Some observers suggest that the 84-year-old Castro’s unexpected honesty may be a belated attempt to throw himself on history’s mercy. After all, they say, Cuba is in tatters. According to Andy Gomez, assistant provost at the University of Miami, tourism on the island has declined 35 percent this year, and remittances are expected to drop to $250 million—far below the peak of $800 million earlier this decade. Cuba’s own National Statistics Office has reported that economic indicators, such as construction and agriculture, were down significantly in the first half of the year. And last month, President Raúl Castro began a process of dismissing or transferring some 20 percent of state employees—a major move, given that the government employs more than 90 percent of the country’s labor force. Says Gomez, “The Cuban economy is the worst it’s ever been.”
How dare Castro "survive countless CIA efforts to do him in", who does he think he is?? Anyway, some of these numbers are meaningless without comparison, so let's look at the good-old U.S. of A. [More . . .]

Continue ReadingAnti-communist propaganda alive and well

A question for President Obama

I wonder, which is a better recruitment tool for potential terrorists: the burning of a Koran or the following news items from the past month or so:

  • Civilian death toll in Afghanistan "soared" by more than 30% since 2009
  • Taliban asks for independent commission to investigate civilian deaths, insisting that they are not to blame. U.S. says they don't want to grant Taliban legitimacy by negotiating with them, stonewalls the issue.
  • 12 American soldiers on a secret "kill team" have been (allegedly) caught murdering Afghan civilians for sport. They then (allegedly) took pictures posing with the bodies, mutilated them, and kept fingers of the dead as souvenirs. They were turned in by a fellow GI, who was then beaten and told to keep his mouth shut and stop "snitching". Originally five soldiers were arrested, now seven more have been arrested as part of the cover-up and assault on the whistleblower.

Continue ReadingA question for President Obama

On tipping points and feedback loops

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept of tipping points with his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Although his book was mainly dealing with pop-psychology, the utility of the term has led to its spread throughout several disciplines. But the arena where it has really come into its own is the environmental movement. Scientists have struggled to find a way to explain complex environmental changes in ways that will make them comprehensible to the layperson. The concept of tipping points is just such an explanation. Wikipedia gives us an example of how tipping points can simplify the understanding of climate changes:

A climate tipping point is a point when global climate changes from one stable state to another stable state, in a similar manner to a wine glass tipping over. After the tipping point has been passed, a transition to a new state occurs. The tipping event may be irreversible, comparable to wine spilling from the glass—standing up the glass will not put the wine back.
In much the same way as you can gradually tip a wineglass to the side, climactic or ecological changes can accumulate slowly. Once the tipping point is reached however, gravity or some analogous force takes control and the situation can change rapidly.

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Egg recall shows (again) how broken our industrial-foods model has become

How many times will it take for the consumer to wake up? Back in May, I wrote a post about the generally dismal state of regulation in matters of food safety, which allows large producers all the slack in the world at the expense of the consumer. I wish I could say that the state of affairs had changed dramatically in the meantime, but the current recall of over half a billion eggs reveals that nothing has changed.

Continue ReadingEgg recall shows (again) how broken our industrial-foods model has become