It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.
I've said this so many times it's nice to see a TED Talk that says the same thing.
However, this TED Talk was "banned" from the TED website because it was considered "controversial".
Strange, that of the plethora of things that are on TED, this topic is "controversial".
[SOURCE:Justin
Acuff | addictinginfo.org | 11 May 2013]
Saturday, 11 May 2013 at 15h 34m 53s
You get to ignore your responsibility for the violence and blame it on that primative religion over there
That's a quote from Glenn Greenwald at the end of this Bill Maher segment.
Thursday, 25 April 2013 at 1h 1m 41s
Holy S**T
I just realized I've been blogging for 10 years at a website in my own name. Wow.
Thursday, 25 April 2013 at 1h 17m 53s
Preying on the innumeracy of the general public
Kevin Drumm is awesome. I've
been reading him for more than a decade now, back when he was just a Left coast blogger in the
pre-9-11 era. For the last few years he's continued the excellent tradition of information at
Mother Jones.
But he also has an uncanny knack of describing my own sentiments and thoughts in reaction to the
human insanity we experience in this world of humans driven by motives and disguises. I quote this
enter post he has on a Washington Post story about less than a million dollars in bank accounts that
is being wasted. Being a math teacher, I think the entire blog piece is instructive, so I'd like to
have a permanent record source.
Compared to a 3.5 trillion budget, 1 million dollars is .000025 percent, or 1 divided by 3,500,000.
Ask yourself: if you had a million dollars would you worry about losing a quarter every year?
Wed Apr. 24, 2013 10:45 AM PDT
Here's the lead headline at the Washington Post right now:
Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts
This kind of stuff drives me crazy because it preys on the innumeracy of the general public. Should
agencies be more careful about shutting down bank accounts they no longer use? Sure. And does
reporter David Fahrenthold acknowledge that the money involved is "a tiny fraction of the federal
budget"? Yes he does.
But seriously, folks, "tiny fraction" barely even begins to describe this. In numbers, it represents
about 0.000025 percent of the federal budget. But even that's too small a number to really get a
feel for, so let's put this into terms that the Washington Post can understand.
Annual revenues at the Washington Post hover somewhere around $500 million. So how much is 0.000025
percent of that? Answer: $125. Would the Washington Post run a lengthy story about two empty bank
accounts that the Washington Post hasn't closed yet, which cost the Washington Post's shareholders
$125? No. The story is so self-evidently ridiculous that they'd laugh at anyone foolish enough to
even mention it.
Look, I get it. The empty bank accounts are just being used as an example of "old bugs, built into
the machine of government, that make spending money seem easier than saving it." The problem is that
dumb stuff like this is what convinces people that government is wantonly wasteful, when the fact is
that every corporation in America has inefficiencies this large. It's just part of human beings
running a human organization.
And focusing on this stuff is lazy. If you want to demonstrate that the federal government wastes
money, then write a story about actual, substantial waste. Is that too hard? If the government truly
is wasteful, it shouldn't be. In a $3.5 trillion operation there ought be dozens, even hundreds, of
easy examples that cost real money. If there aren't, then perhaps the real story is that the federal
government is actually about as efficient as any other big organization.
The basic problem here is that it's hard to grapple with the sheer size of the numbers involved. Any
corporation in America that kept wasteful spending down to 1 percent would be pretty happy. That
number represents a tightly run ship. But the federal government is so large that 1 percent waste
amounts to about $35 billion. That's a scary sounding number, but in fact, it's pretty small. The
truth is that if you can't dig up at least that amount in wasteful spending—not spending you
dislike, but actual wasteful spending—you don't have much of a story.
[SOURCE:Kevin Drum | Mother Jones |24 April 2013 ]
Exactly.
These criticisms are often made by individuals who themselves, in their own businesses, do
not have any better means of reducing the inherent inefficiencies of any revenue stream. A one
million dollar business would not hire legal advice to pursue the loss of 10 dollars a year, or
0.001 percent (Note: 0.001 percent, is 35 million to the federal government). But the
ideological owner of said business will gleefully whine about the big bad
g'ummament "wasting" a percentage of total revenue that is much less because of the corporate media
that is paid for to put this into their heads. The reporter at the Washington Post knows what his
bosses want him to write about, and if he performs as expected, his future is clear and he can look
forward to promotions and a bigger salary. If not, there will be someone who will be glad to play
the game.
That's what you have to understand about the corporate media. What information you get is always
filtered and channeled by this process, what details are focused upon and/or ignored, who is quoted,
and any conclusions that are made. Nothing is free from the sullied fingertips of a bunch of people
hired to play the pretend game of journalists who are really just the public relations agents of the
aristocracy.
That's why the younger generations don't read newspapers. Listen to the streets. People know
what's up.
Saturday, 20 April 2013 at 0h 3m 42s
Jeffrey Sachs
Excoriates the cult of corruption between Wall Street, Academia, and Washington Politicos.
They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no
responsibility to people… counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and
feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a
remarkable extent and they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory
system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.
Jeffrey David Sachs (/ˈsæks/; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist and Director of The
Earth Institute at Columbia University. One of the youngest economics professors in the history of
Harvard University, Sachs became known for his role as an adviser to Eastern European and developing
country governments during the transition from communism to a market system or during periods of
economic crisis. Subsequently he has been known for his work on the challenges of economic
development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, and globalization.
When money by billionaires is used to construct an artificial economic justification for their
ideological bias, this is what you get.
A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a
huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential
underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based
on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.
Three years ago, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a study that
presented empirical evidence from 44 nations over a 200 year time span to demonstrate that countries
with a public debt over 90 percent of GDP (the United States is at about 100 percent, Japan at 200
percent) have average growth rates one percent lower than other nations.
Forty-four countries, 200 years, Harvard -- pretty convincing, huh?
Except it was wrong.
When the PERI team finally got a hold of the data used by Reinhart and Rogoff, they uncovered gaping
problems. They found that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and
unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent
the relationship between public debt and GDP growth." Adjusting for these errors, the Amherst team
contends that "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of
over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent."
Click the "Source" to read the rest. The second source has a screen-shot picture showing the Excel
spreadsheet error that was necessary to get the erroneous results. Was this accidental, or on purpose?
[SOURCE:Mary Bottari | PRWatch | 18 April
2013]
[SOURCE:Mike Konczal | NextNewDeal | 16
April 2013]
Thursday, 18 April 2013 at 1h 35m 48s
My mantra for life
Another phrase I say to myself, or recall frequently throughout my life is the following:
You have to find comfort in the truth, and achieve peace through understanding
...in order to stay sane in this world of irrational actions and self-serving hypocrites.
Tuesday, 16 April 2013 at 0h 30m 21s
Day care
In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the
importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's
average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to
cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids.
Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care."
Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to
thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long
enough to solve it":
Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more
emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also
have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from
low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite
simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.
[SOURCE:Kevin Drum | Mother Jones | 15
April 2013]
So if we pay $100 billion a year for universal Pre-K, we save ourselves the expenses of later years
when we will have to deal with the 30% or more of young adults who have substance abuse issues, are
involved in crime, have mental or psychological health issues, or are cognitively diminished. How
many of our prisons and how many of the homelessness on the street could be prevented from this kind
of program?
So is it "socialism" when government provides an important community service paid for with taxes?
And without the service, the community pays the costs of the lack of service two or three times
more. And each of these defective people affect others in the population in often negative and
life-changing ways.
Tuesday, 16 April 2013 at 0h 30m 3s
Day care
In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the
importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's
average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to
cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids.
Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care."
Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to
thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long
enough to solve it":
Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more
emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also
have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from
low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite
simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.
[SOURCE:Kevin Drum | Mother Jones | 15
April 2013]
So if we pay $100 billion a year for universal Pre-K, we save ourselves the expenses of later years
when we will have to deal with the 30% or more of young adults who have substance abuse issues, are
involved in crime, have mental or psychological health issues, or are cognitively diminished. How
many of our prisons and how many of the homelessness on the street could be prevented from this kind
of program?
So is it "socialism" when government provides an important community service paid for with taxes?
And without the service, the community pays the costs of the lack of service two or three times
more. And each of these defective people affect others in the population in often negative and
life-changing ways.