As reported by Alternet, the Italian people do not want multi-national corporations controlling their water supply. The vote can be seen as a declaration that water is a basic human right, which should also be seen as a stern pushback to the Ayn Randian Free-Market Fundamentalism that prevails in many places these days.
I recently bought a new camera, which tempts me to take more time to see more of the things around me, then try to capture them. Feel free to click on the images for better views. Here's a sampling--first, a tale of two birds: This turkey at the local Farmer's market is deemed to be food, whereas the peacock at the zoo is deemed to be art.
Tonight, my family and I walked through Forest Park, where we were treated to a strikingly pink sky (none of these photos in this post have been retouched except for cropping):
Refusing to stand idly by, my 12-year old daughter, JuJu, borrowed her mother's iPhone and took some photos, including this yellow flower:
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At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has noted a huge split amount conservatives. Not all of them want to be seen as hawks anymore:
It’s been interesting, watching the seamless transition many conservatives seem to be making now, from brainless war-drum-beating to Randian isolationism. Six or seven or eight years ago, I seem to remember, anyone who even hinted that not using military force to resolve any foreign policy dispute, no matter how trivial or how imaginary the justification, was to be considered a traitor.
You all know how NASA eats up a huge portion of the federal budget, and that's why we need to cut lots of NASA fat, right? Actually, that's a misguided public perception--many people assume that NASA accounts for 20% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA only accounts for half of one-percent of the federal budget; for this past year, the NASA budget amounted to $20 billion. What else can you get for $20 billion? How about this? According to Steve Anderson, a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq, the United States spends $20 billion every year air conditioning U.S. military tents and other temporary living quarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two starkly unnecessary wars, and even a small portion of the expense of these wars equals the total budget for NASA, which, for decades, has inspired all rational-thinking people with its space exploration missions. Priorities like this force me to conclude that our leaders are functional psychopaths.