Farhad Manjoo has some excellent advice for the President. About these “death panel” and other idiot rumors? Just shut up.

… the dilemma Obama faces in trying to debunk the lies surrounding the health care debate. In True Enough, my book published last year, I argued that despite techno-utopians’ many high hopes, modern communications technology—talk radio, cable TV, and the Web—have fractured society along ideological lines.

Which is frightening enough right there. Read the rest of this entry »

Wales, by Eddie Izzard on the run.

{ fin }

Thom Hartman on Alternet CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it’s such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult—so impossible for mere mortals—that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it’s the sociopath part. Read the rest of this entry »

{ reblog, via kvasir } “If human vices such as greed or envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.”
Small is Beautiful — E.F. Schumacher, 1973: p.18

Worse than that, I would think the evidence is here before us: A society driven by greed and envy. (Marx, I keep tellin’ you, Marx, people. There must certainly be a better way than this. To distribute in such staggeringly wide array the end of discomfort and suffering—yet to do so upon the backs of other people? Hello?) Read the rest of this entry »

InterimTom: How to trust a journalistic culture that fails to question why corporations, which are essentially wealth accumulation mechanisms, are granted human status in the United States.

Well honey, see, they are part of the corporation. There is no free press. The media got bought, sold and traded like so many pork bellies, and not half as good a market. Read the rest of this entry »