Ever since Arianna Huffington convinced me to undertake the "sleep challenge," I have been trying to get more sleep, and I've been enjoying it more, as well as enjoying my better-rested awake time more. Yesterday, I stumbled across this quote: "Sleeping is my drug, my bed is my dealer and my alarm clock is the police."
I enjoyed looking at this series of photos of Swedish students showing their modest amounts of possessions. I know that I'm no longer a student, and I do have children who have their own collections of things, but I do aspire to have a more portable existence. If I were to move to a small space, the most obvious problem is that I have thousands of paper books, many of them with my hand-written notes inside. If only there were an efficient way to scan all of those pages, to shrink all of them to the size of an external hard drive. Another problem is that I have a workshop full of tools. Last night, I reached into some spare parts and fixed the furnace, so I'm weary of giving away even the boxes of odds and ends, much less the tools that I use to repair things at the house. And what would I do with my musical instruments? I have several guitars, as well as a PA and (once again) boxes of music. Then again, I sometimes imagine the house being destroyed by fire--we all escape with nothing at all, but I do have backup hard drives off-site with all of my writings, photos, movies, financial paperwork. It would be a disaster, of course, but in this thought experiment it would also be an opportunity to rebuild my collection of possession leaner and meaner.
There are still far to many people who assume that Wikileaks should be outlawed and banned. They assume that the rights Wikileaks asserts in doing its work are different than the rights asserted by the New York Times and other major media outlets when they are doing their best work. Most Americans don't realize the incredible good that Wikileaks has done by exposing corruption and violence perpetrated by Americans in Guantanamo. They don't realize that Wikileaks exposed a toxic waste dump in the Ivory Coast that caused tens of thousands of injuries (after The Guardian was gagged from reporting this horrific event by a secret court order). This video documents the admirable work done by Wikileaks in Iceland (see 16 min mark), exposing the corruption and incompetence of the Icelandic banks. It covers Wikileaks' revelation of the corruption of Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi (min 8). Wikileaks exposed (min 25) the events related to the "collateral murder" video after the American military refused to come clean. This is an especially haunting episode. And consider (min 37) that Wikileaks exposed the widespread civilian deaths and the widespread torture, all of this facilitated or directly caused by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of this covered up by the United States.
At Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers urges us to remember the victims of gun violence
Former Prosecutor Neil Barofsky explains that HSBC is too big to fail, just like several other Wall Street banks. The evidence is that prosecutors had the goods on HSBC--it was clear that HSBC knowingly laundered $800 Million in Columbian drug money, but used its political influence to cut a deal to write the whole thing off as a relatively small cost of doing business. As Barofsky explains on Cenk Uygur's show, we need to break up and "neuter" the big banks, but he's not optimistic that this can happen before yet another crash.