October 2011
3 posts
“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education...”
– H.L. Mencken (via glynnthomas)
“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually...”
– H.L. Mencken (via glynnthomas)
August 2011
38 posts
“Eighty percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas. The way public education...”
– Matt Yglesias (via pegobry)
The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man →
The economic downturn exacerbated forces that have long been undermining men in the workplace, says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard professor of labor economics. Corporations have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country. The production jobs that remain are increasingly mechanized and demand higher skills. Technology and efforts...
“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the...”
– Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (via azspot)
“Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial...”
– Cornel West (via azspot)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names →
People have exactly one canonical full name.
People have exactly one full name which they go by.
People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
People’s names do not change.
People’s names...
“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism...”
– David Graeber (via azspot)
“Here lies the huge irony in this discussion. Persistent pseudonyms aren’t ways...”
– On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google (via azspot)
“…there is the assumption that people want to trust Google with their true name....”
– Why I’m not on Google Plus (via azspot)
“‘America needs heroes,’ it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a...”
– William Deresiewicz (via ayjay)
A Case for Pseudonyms →
There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with. They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture.
Online, the reasons multiply. Internet culture has long...
“Reagan’s economic advisor, Milton Friedman, was an anti-religious Objectivist...”
– Gregory Paul (via azspot)
"Last-place Aversion": Evidence and Redistributive... →
Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in “last place” undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone “beneath” them. In laboratory experiments, we find support for “last-place aversion” in the contexts of risk aversion and redistributive preferences....
Americans Don't Realize Just How Badly We're... →
In my report, The Economic Elite vs. the People, I reported on the strategic withholding of wealth from 99 percent of the US population over the past generation. Since the mid-1970s, worker production and wealth creation has exploded. As the statistics throughout this report prove, the dramatic increase in wealth has been almost entirely absorbed by the economic top one-tenth of one percent of...
“Businesses are not doing anything. They’re not actually helping. All this risk...”
– Nouriel Roubini (via azspot)
“But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become...”
– David Harvey (via azspot)
Our second civil war →
Two world views are at war. The first, represented rather weakly by President Obama, represents what is left of the governmental and economic structure which the Missionary (b. 1863-1883) and GI (about 1904-24) generations built up during the first half of the twentieth century. That system was a child of the Enlightenment and believed that reason, science, and research could help government...
1 tag
Who needs a unifying theme anyway?: Corporations... →
pegobry:
indefensible:
In a sense, the idea that corporations are people is true. The concept of incorporation, the word itself, is a reference to the creation of a corporeal being - a person.
But a corporation is a person in the way a country is a person. You see, a nation-state can act. It can make decisions, it can…
Amen. I can hardly think of anything more ignorant than the lefties who...
“Sometimes one feels that the center might be a little too serene. The emphasis...”
– Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker (via ayjay)
5 tags
Watchsoupsoup:
Mark Cuban on the stock market: ”buy and hold is a crock of $%#!” and diversification is for idiots.
Cameron’s Broken Windows →
A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.
Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.
The American right today is obsessed with...
2 tags
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% →
Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons...
1 tag
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is...”
– Coretta Scott King (via zeitgeistmovement, kabinessence, tsjr1704)
Contrast this quote with the silly AZ Spot quote above about non-violence.
“But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as...”
– Drew Westen (via azspot)
Erie struggles with unemployment rates and job... →
A recent article by Evan MacDonald in the June 2011 issue of Consumer Report states that:
“In 23 of the past 24 months, lower income Americans have lost more jobs than they’ve gained. Meanwhile, more affluent Americans seem to be gaining more jobs than they’re losing.”
To hear millionaire Congressmen and TV pundits, poverty only exists in Third World countries while America is rapidly...
Breaking the Spell of Money →
MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like...
Winters on Oligarchy →
Jeffrey Winters’s new book, Oligarchy, is a brilliant comparative study of the role of wealthy elites in politics. He argues that the protection of wealth is a central theme in politics throughout history. He draws on an enormous range of illustrations, from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval city-states to contemporary Indonesia and the Philippines. He also shows its influence in the...
“The truth is, we no longer need the government to censor us; we now preempt any...”
– Derrick Jensen (via azspot)
“There has never, ever been a single case of an American bystander, armed with a...”
– David Brin (via azspot)
How many secret wars are we fighting? →
Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done… for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.
After a...
FuckYeahRadicalQuotes!: The horror of class... →
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that…
How Recession Is Hastening the Wal-Martization of... →
azspot:
With all the focus on the drama surrounding the debt ceiling, and the much-too-late focus on the economic pain the final deal’s austerity agenda will inflict, items that really matter—jobs, jobs, and jobs—have been all but ignored.
But a new report by the National Employment Law Project looking at the jobs created since the recession officially ended brings the focus sharply back to...
“So if you want to create change, in 2011 and beyond, at least some of your time...”
– Turning the Internet off (via azspot)
‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange by John... →
All three of these letters simply assume that psychoactive drugs are highly beneficial, but none of them provides references that would substantiate that belief. Our differences stem from the fact that I make no such assumption. Any treatment should be regarded with skepticism until its benefits, both short-term and long-term, have been proven in well-designed clinical trials, and those benefits...
July 2011
43 posts
Is crisis necessary? Apparently →
If one subscribes to the hypothesis of The Fourth Turning, the answer is yes. There is a truly Old Testament feel to Strauss and Howe’s uncannily accurate “prophesy” from fifteen years ago. American society enters a crisis phase every eighty years or so (1780, 1860, 1940… 2020). There is abundant macro evidence that our situation resembles the 1930s in many ways—high debt-to-GDP load, rampant...
Breaking Down the Lucky Duckies →
But put that aside. Even stated accurately, you might be wondering how it is that so many people end up not paying any federal income tax. Today the Tax Policy Center has the answer for you. In 2011 they estimate that 46% of Americans will pay no federal income tax. Donald Marron breaks this down:
23% pay nothing because they’re poor. A couple making less than $19,000, for example, doesn’t owe...
FDR
Here is Franklin Roosevelt, in Madison Square Garden, in 1936:
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun...
“For centuries, aristocrats criticized democracy because their feared the people....”
– I cite (via azspot)
the reality-based community? →
jayrosen:
Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the…
“There is widespread and growing agreement that the two major political parties...”
– James Howard Kunstler (via azspot)
“I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all...”
– Marshall McLuhan (via azspot)
