The seduction of positive thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich explains that positive thinking is often a bad (and dangerous) approach to facing adversity. She argues that: 1. Delusion is always a mistake; and 2. It is cruel to tell people struggling with adversity that it is all in their head (beware the central message of The Secret) Ehrenreich is not advocating doom or depression either. We tend to slip into this because we are hard-wired to be vigilant. These can also be delusional. Instead of positive thinking or depression, Ehrenreich is advocating realism. She is advocating that we take the view that we can address many of our problems with hard work.

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Peak water

From the U.K. Guardian:

In a major new essay Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world's people, are now overpumping their underground water tables to the point – known as "peak water" – where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year. . . "The world is seeing the collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Because of the failure of governments in the region to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them."

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Our secret court system

I'm a lawyer and I'd like to study U.S. surveillance court rulings, but I can't, and you can't either, because court rulings are secret. Our massively opaque government (all three branches) has truly become Kafkaesque. So much for the People running this country. The NYT reports:

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

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U.S. media pummels Edward Snowden with snobbishness

When they don't like you, media outlets can crucify you with irrelevant personal attacks. This means that there is always an out for those who don't really want to report a story. That's what happened regarding Edward Snowden. He didn't graduate from high school, though he did pick up a GED. Nonetheless, he has repeatedly been smeared as a "dropout." FAIR reports on this hatchet job.   It turns out that Snowden is in fine company. Consider this excerpt:

Consider these high-school dropouts: Founding father and genius inventor Benjamin Franklin. Founding Father and First President George Washington. The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. American aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The first lady of civil rights, Rosa Parks, who refused a Montgomery Alabama bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. The man who gave the world its most popular chocolate bar, Milton Hershey. Before he would become America's most beloved author, Mark Twain left school at the age of 12 to become a printer's apprentice. The great man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln.
There are many others, including Bill Cosby, and presumably Jesus. But as we've seen, calling someone a "dropout" is a selectively used weapon, not a truly relevant aspect to most stories. To compound things, many of the smartest people I know do not have college diplomas, yet they too are treated miserably by a society that seeks quick, easy and often wrong answers to the question of who is "smart" or worthy of respect. This is a travesty for all of us, credentialed or otherwise.

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South American leaders blast U.S. kidnapping

From Common Dreams: The South American government leaders blasted the 'kidnapping' of the Bolivian president as an act of brute power, revealing that the U.S. and European governments still view themselves as the colonial rulers of Latin America. Uruguay's president Jose Mujica declared: We are not colonies any more. We…

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