boogie chillen!

michael pollan

audio sample of Neale Donald Walsch on Integral Naked -- Making Space for Emergence



[the brightest, real-world, non-academic "news" published on Ken Wilber's blog in ages]


Neale Donald Walsch website

 

 

 

comment submitted to a Paul Krugman blog post:

Who gets stimulated?

Fast work by the people at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who figure out who gets what from tax plans. They now have distribution tables for the stimulus proposal announced yesterday, and they more or less match my expectations.

Here’s what it looks like, by quintiles of the income distribution:

[see graphic at original post]

I’d guess that the top two quintiles are unlikely to be liquidity-constrained, so the rebate will have little effect on their spending. But they get 58% of the money. The bottom two quintiles, which are the place you’d most expect to have an impact, get only 21% of the money. Split the difference on the middle quintile, and you’ve got a plan where around 2/3 of the outlay is likely to be ineffective.

Now. I’ve been in touch with some people on the Hill, who say that the glass is best viewed as 1/3 full rather than 2/3 empty — that it’s only thanks to the Democrats that people likely to spend their rebate are getting anything at all. And they have a point: this plan will produce some stimulus, while the Bush plan would have done virtually nothing.

And I suppose that it may be true that this was the best Nancy Pelosi could get. But I just can’t bring myself to celebrate.

Professor K,

I don't exactly have a "Gospel According to Paul" folder in my collection of internet bookmarks -- my own liberal bible. Still, I cherish as revelation your, "Tax-Cut Con" (together with Ed Kilgore's, "Starving the Beast."

Respecting your opinion as I do, I'd be curious to know what you make of republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee's proposal: rebuild I-95.

To this member of the democratic-wing of the democratic party (maternal grandson of a founding UAW member/paternal grandson of an itinerant coal miner), this sounds like a good idea -- a better idea than any "3-T" consumer spending spree. (Perhaps a more politically palatable version would not be confined to the east coast; or would focus instead on the still-devastated gulf coast . . . or would target mass-transit, rather than roads.)

Also, can you offer any balm for the irksome, underlying agitation I feel about any stimulus proposal: whatever final form it ends up taking, we'll be charging its cost to our China Bank credit card?

Thank you!

[don't know yet if this comment will get "approved" and posted -- or replied to.]

Everything's Cool -- a real-life disaster movie:


 EVERYTHING'S COOL is a film about America finally "getting" global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action. While industry funded nay-sayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudo- scientific deception, a group of global warming messengers are on a high stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels to the new clean energy economy - AND FAST.

We follow the country and our global warming messengers through an extraordinary three years of transformation, from 2003-to the eve of 2007:

Bill McKibben: "The Poet Laureate" of global warming literally wrote the book on this issue when he published The End of Nature in 1987. After 20 years of impassioned writing, speaking, blogging and advocacy, he finally takes to the streets. He realizes "The thing that has been missing from the movement is THE MOVEMENT!", and he and others stage the largest global warming demonstration in U.S. history (to date). There might be hope for our democracy and our planet.

Ross Gelbspan: The "Columbo of Climate Change" has recently come to believe that his decade of writings, interviews, public readings and policy discussions have come to nothing and he is more than ready to retire. Yet, like a "firehouse dog," every time the alarm bell rings he is back on the job.

Dr. Heidi Cullen: Heidi is the first on-air climatologist in America exclusively dedicated to covering the global warming beat. As a PhD from Columbia University and an expert in multi-decadal oscillation, can she distill her vast scientific knowledge into 30-second sound bites for The Weather Channel?

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus: Two thirty-something Berkeley, CA based "eco-messiahs", otherwise known as the "Bad Boys of Environmentalism" rise to the top of the green charts for levying a radical critique of the movement, The Death of Environmentalism. The self-published essay challenged what has, until now, been the basis of almost all climate change messaging - the "I have a nightmare" speech of polar bears floating away on ice caps.

Rick Piltz: His job was to prepare scientific reports to congress on the latest research on climate change. Repressed and depressed by political censorship, Rick Piltz went from downtrodden public servant to front page news when he blew the lid off the White House's scandalous manipulation of global warming science.

Bish Neuhouser:A frustrated snow groomer (who has less and less snow to groom) at the Canyons resort near Park City, determined to convert first his 1970s Mercedes, then all of the Canyons' vehicles, to biodiesel.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Michael Mukasey, Robert Jackson and George Orwell, by Marty Lederman

Bulletins from the Ministry for Torture, by Scott Horton

UK Sunday Times: State Dept. Official (Marc Grossman) Outed Plame's 'Brewster Jennings' to Turkish Agents in 2001, According to Sibel Edmonds, via The Brad Blog




Barack Obama's SC victory speech:




Kucinich to file Articles of Impeachment tomorrow:

Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections

In Too Many Elections, Voters Remain 'Uncounted' -- an interview with film maker David Earnhardt

sat still for some of today's testimony, by Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (broadcast on CSpan).

was struck by an item of "good news" shared by Committee Chairman, Edward Markey:

wind power accounted for 30% of all the new electrical generating capacity built in the United States in 2007.


see: Wind Energy Market Report






[TAKE THAT!, Cheney Energy Task Force -- architects of the US/British invasion of Iraq.  recall that the principal task force participants -- US and British oil giants -- dominated Iraq's oil industry from its inception.  when Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party nationalized Iraqi oil production back in 1972, he ended the dominant role future Cheney-Energy-Task-Force members (or their precursors) had , to that point, played in Iraq, and specifically banned their participation in Iraqi oil production.  "Exxon-Mobil -- OUT!  Standard Oil -- OUT!  British Petroleum -- OUT!!  Anglo-Dutch Shell -- OUT!"  out, that is, until US Marines secured the Iraq Oil Ministry in April 2003.]