GLOBAL LIFE COPING INSURANCE reprise

Birdlife

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE:

Dr. Phillip M. Harter at the School of Medicine of Stanford University compiled the following overview of our global village.

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like this.  There would be:

• 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 8 Africans, and 14 North and South Americans.
• 52 would be female, 48 would be male.
• 70 would be non-white, 30 would be white.
• 70 would be non-Christian, 30 would be Christian.
• 89 would be heterosexual, 11 homosexual.
• 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
• 80 would live in substandard housing.
• 70 would be unable to read.
• 50 would suffer from malnutrition.
• 1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth.
• 1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education.
• 1 would own a computer.

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

LIFE INSURANCE FOR THE PLANET:

SON of VAMPIRE SQUID

 PARTY’S OVER?  How important is it to ignore the Democratic Party, DCCC (congressional democrats) and DCCS (senatorial democrats) funding pleas to fill their coffers for general unspecified disbursement?  Will the party collapse, will senate and congressional Democratic representation shrink?  The dilemma is that the label “Democrat” does not a democrat make. CLICK the PIC to see what Progressives stood for at the turn of the Twentieth Century:

A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO

Electing a corporate right wing democrat is the same as electing a republican obstructionist – they are part of the problem, not its solution – we’re being overwhelmed and hurt on a daily basis by the corporatists.  The corporatists are attacking the rest of us and seek to control us; they are the enemy of democracy.

So-called “Bluedog” right wing Democrats who favor a de-evolutionary return to the Salem Witch Trials and a pre-civil rights pre-Darwin era are also unacceptable.  We don’t need or want any pseudo-Democrats talking about “mud people,” or assaulting a woman’s right to reproductive freedom, taking office with Party blessing and funding.

On this score, the simple question is: Does the Democratic Party owe allegiance to the people, or to corporate bosses and other human rights foes?  Present answer is both, but the practical end result is a stagnant society headed for a crash.  We shall lose the fight for posterity if we do not act now to liberalize and prepare our nation for what is to come.  Delay can only spring from denial, and facts speak for themselves.

YOUR ENEMIES ARE UP reprise

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840.  “I am of opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing under our eyes, is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world… …Friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the channel by which they will enter.”

MY TWO-BITS reiterated:

Obama’s pretty much been off on the wrong course.  He sprinkles “public goodies” up to and including the health care insurance act, which achieve limited but not system change, while shoving our government ever more firmly into corporatist pockets.  He still listens to Robert Rubin, Ben Bernowski, and Timothy Geithner, the corporate tools who crafted and executed the big rip-off that plunged our country into near-receivership for Bush Jr. and the Koch brothers consortium of Fortune 500 “masters of the universe.”  Jack Lew, Obama’s new chief of staff, used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JP Morgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House. Obama seems hellbent on using the same old tools to craft and execute a brand new disaster.

No special foresight or vision is necessary to see the probable outcome of Obama’s already failed – before even implemented, in some cases – policies and programs: too little, too late.  Perhaps our asses will be held up a short while longer so Obama can get safely through his presidency and out of office, before we fall on them.  His actions are, however, without future, and there is no posterity in them.  He plays for the moment, little reforming and much protecting the corporate base with increasing stiffness.  Perhaps the candidate of change has been replaced by a corporate android, and the real Obama is locked up in the Whitehouse basement.  Perhaps.

AWFUL THINGS REPUBLICANS DO

 

 ABSTRACT: 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance By Dennis Rahkonen, The Smirking Chimp.

The political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negative than ever. Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic. Here’s what an unfettered Republican Party would do “for” America:

1)  Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the rich, forcing working families to make up revenue shortfalls.

2)  Bust labor unions, and prevent collective bargaining for wages and benefits.

3)  Stubbornly deny the climate change while pumping more pollutants into the environment from dirty industries and practices.

4)  Remove regulations on investment banks and credit card companies eroding consumer protections.

5)  Continue to criticize and under fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, to dumb workers down.

6)  Outlaw abortion, under a moral guise, impelling thousands of functioning females to perish because of sexist denials of their basic rights.

7)  Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while harrassing homosexual citizens.

8)  Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a host of Patriot Act sins against the U. S. Constitution in the name of “national security.”

9)  Bully the world with US aggressions on foreign soil, kill countless thousands of innocents, waste billions of badly-needed dollars, and make us hated around the planet.

10)  Generally drive down the income levels of America’s working-class majority, as a cost-saving corporate measure, dooming society to economic ruin!

11)  Lie about affordable health care for all, creating a national security threat by fooling some Americans into thinking that public health care is a godless socialist attack on basic American freedoms.

12)  Unleash de facto ethnic cleansing against 12 million immigrant men, women, and children, blaming them for hardships experienced due to capitalist excess.

13)  Shamefully try to lend credence to their avarice and social irresponsibility by revising the Bible to obscure passages that place human need before abject greed as one conservative group is really trying to do!

14)  Support intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals.

15)  Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

While there are certainly Democrats who’ve yet to show spine in furtherance of vital change, let’s be absolutely clear about the unmitigated disaster that would follow if Republicans, in their present ultra-rightist incarnation, ruled our country exactly as they wickedly wished.  READ MORE:

http://www.alternet.org/story/143917/15_awful_things_republicans_would_do_if_they_had_the_chance

FREETHINKERS

Freedom from Religion Foundation

CORPORATIONS + PARALLEL UNIVERSES reprise

The Edge.

CITIZEN BROTHERS AND SISTERS (an open letter):

Politics and economics are increasingly moribund time wasters against the accelerating decay of our earthwide ecosystem.  All the varieties of life upon this planet are imperiled and no rationale, no pontification, no obfuscation, or self-deception can reverse or avoid the consequences of this deadly situation.  Your decisions are critical path for the globe right now.  Your integrity and belief in posterity – if we are to have one – is dependent upon your right action.  Nothing less than full commitment to clean energy and freedom from corporate and ideological insanity can favorably impact the outcome.

It is almost too late to act.  Please try to see the future plain.  Do the right thing.

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S NEW TESTAMENT

Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

Thomas Jefferson’s New Testament: Partial ABSTRACT: E.M. Halliday, American Heritage.

Thomas Jefferson had an intense interest in religion’s relation to government. In his second term as President (1805-09) he composed for his own satisfaction a version of the New Testament called “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” He left out the Last Supper. He said he wrote it to rescue the moral teachings of Jesus from “the crazy speculations of crazy theologists, abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried.”

Jefferson called himself Christian, but rejected “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.” He thought Christ was a great reformer, author of a “system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man” – but human not divine. To be Christian one had only to follow Christ’s system of ethics, uncontaminated by additions, adulterations, and distortions of those who came after. The “free exercise of reason” was all one needed to tell Jesus’ original teaching from the dross. Orthodox clergy called this heresy; a cheap disguise for atheism; and it made Jefferson an easy target for Federalists in the campaign of 1800.

BULL RUN

Bull Run Watershed

It is primeval forest, and it’s all about water.  Water.  Water.  Water.  The task of its guardians is to keep the watershed untouched, to resist the slightest encroachment of a developer, or logger or anyone else.  They put diapers on the horses used to remove wind-fallen trees to keep the forest floor unsullied (hired a guy for six bucks an hour to change ‘em, too).  The Headworks Crew jokes, “We’re told we’ll lose our jobs if we’re caught fishing.  So you’ll know what we’ll be doing on our last day!”
Man faces an interesting environmental challenge in preserving pristine wilderness.  The changes of Nature are supposed to be organically accepted, not resisted.   Outside of a few protected areas such as Bull Run Watershed in the alpine heart of Oregon’s Mt. Hood National Forest, the human race has very little practice at that.
Check out the programs at the CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

HEART of the CITY

Heart of the City