We've tried to make sense of the huge barely-vetted amount allocated to bailing out failed financial companies. Here is a good view, comparing it to other government programs (adjusted for inflation), such as the Louisiana Purchase, Viet Nam, and the NASA all-time total budget: Chart from VoltageCreative.com Of note to…
Ed adds a nice commentary at the end of his latest post, detailing James Richardson's call for the GOP to get real and stop pandering to ignorance and bigotry: The country has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. With more and more gay and lesbian Americans coming out of…
Here is a link to an excellent essay by two of my best friends. It talks about how labeling plays out in both art and real life and how labels are both irrelevant and destructive. I attended that workshop they refer to, Clarion, and that's where I met them. That…
Sylvester McMonkey McBean is now preparing to leave the White House. I'm alluding to that crafty character from that terrific book by Dr. Suess: The Sneetches. Both McBean and Bush made lots of money through bigotry. They both encouraged suspicion and hate between groups of people. It has been such…
What if there were far too many people living on planet Earth, but no one had the courage to talk about it? According to Global Population Speak Out, that is exactly our situation. Consider that we repeatedly see news reports about scarce and dwindling resources (e.g., water, food, fish, fuel, topsoil), but these news reports rarely consider the exploding population on Earth as a major contributor to these problems. This refusal to consider the carrying capacity of Earth is truly staggering. As a thought experiment, consider how our "environmental" issues would be altered if each country had 25% fewer people than it currently does. Or 50%. Instead, we the human population of earth is at 6.5 billion, headed toward at least 9 billion by 2050. When it comes to discussing sex, reproduction and birth control, we freeze up, even when out-of-control population growth threatens our way of life.