What Your Favorite Comic Says About You

These are the 4 i read regularly. Plus "The Phantom"

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson
Adventure is your number one priority.

Tintin, Hergé
You like travel better than sex. You also like crotchety sea captains and deaf scientists better than sex.

Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
You’re somebody’s dad.

Asterix, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
As a kid, your parents took you on trips to Europe.

For more, see: http://www.flavorwire.com/346720/what-your-favorite-comic-says-about-you?all=1

A new documentary reveals the beauty and horror of plastic waste

"The opposite of beauty is indifference" which is an awesome quote from this video: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/plastic-repurposed/

Coolest Bookshelves EVER: Part Uno

Coolest Bookshelves EVER: Part Uno

I want the one that spells our READ!

Whole Earth Mental Health

Journalist Katherine Rowland's article about the evolving field of ecopsychology, which aims to cure what ails us by bridging the human-nature rift. Quotes below, but article can be read in full at:
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/katherine-rowland-whole-earth-mental-health/

An evolving field known as “ecopsychology” proposes that the pervasive but fictive gulf between man and nature not only drives ecological decline, but also contributes to modern afflictions such as depression, anxiety, obesity and heart disease. From tenuous roots in Hippie-era urgings that we all be one with mother earth, ecopsychology has in recent years emerged as a legitimate approach to mental health, elaborating on research showing that people benefit from contact with nature—and suffer from its absence.

Ecopsychology endeavors to explode the nature-culture, mind-body binaries that for centuries have informed how we measure sanity and health. This bifurcating tendency is at the murky core of modern pathologies.
...... In other words, it is only because we are at such a remove from nature that we can behave the way we do: using resources with no regard for consequence, consuming goods with no thought as to their production. Doherty asks “what if we were to reinvent psychology so that at its heart it was an ecological discipline?” Could changing our relationship to nature hold the key to mental health?

How does depression correspond to a ruined landscape, or anxiety link to global warming or visions of future generations walking round a world eternally diminished?
Rather than consider anxiety or depression as outcomes of strictly personal history and circumstance, ecopsychology admits the possibility that outside events and circumstance bear on mental health. “Sometimes,” says Davis, “suffering really is about the planet.”
“It’s a form of insanity that we’re in the process of destroying our own life support systems.” 

For Davis, as well as a significant number of ecopsychologists and ecotherapists, the solution is not to take stock of silver linings, but rather to more actively engage with feelings of pain and loss. He describes contemporary attitudes toward the environment as akin to a passerby blithely strolling as a woman is murdered in the street. “There’s a learned helplessness,” he says. “We grow numb rather than face what’s really going on. We need to learn how to be active participants rather than bystanders to a tragedy.” 

Your childhood house is now dust buried beneath a strip mall; the apple tree that once gave you shade has been cut, burned, turned to splinter; the rivers where you once fished now run thick with toxic silt. Youth inherit this depletion and everywhere is starving, poisoned, desiccated, stripped and out of balance. 

“This environmental destruction can cause a profound sense of loss,” says clinical therapist Linda Buzell, founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy. “And it’s important to reckon with what that means, and really experience that pain in order to move through it." 

We suffer because we’re removed from nature; nature suffers because we are removed from it.

On writing and good advice

Awesome rules for writing: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/

1. Write
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Geek Love

Letters of Note: The Vision of Sin 
Charles Babbage gently takes to task Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Vision of Sin": for a verse "which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." and suggests changing it for accuracy to "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

While in the Guardian, Simon Singh corrects Katie Melua's song "Nine Million Bicycles" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/sep/30/highereducation.uk). He finds the "little ditty is deeply annoying, because [Katie] demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method." Read the rest of the article at the link above - bloody awesome plus it has a poem!!!

Dr Bonners and why it is good for you and the planet!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201204/tom-foster/the-undiluted-genius-of-dr-bronners.html

There's a common narrative that unfolds the first time you buy Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. It starts in the store, where the bottles, with their brightly colored, text-heavy labels, line up like cure-alls from some deranged medicine man. You pick one up. Later, in the shower, there comes a curious tingling sensation after you've lathered up your nether regions. That's when you reach for the bottle again to give it a closer read.
There are quotes from Mao, Jesus, Hillel, Einstein, and George Washington, among others. There's something called the Moral ABC, which appears to be a philosophy for uniting all humans on Spaceship Earth. There's a lot of religious ranting, a liberal dose of exclamation points, and instructions for cleansing your "mind-body-soul-spirit instantly."
Now you're more curious than ever. And if you read enough of the label and happen to Google Dr. Bronner after you've toweled off, you'll discover the story of the late Emanuel Bronner, which reads like bizarro fiction. (We'll get to it shortly.) That story is just the beginning......In 2005, David decided he couldn't in good conscience buy raw materials from operations that didn't take labor practices as seriously as he did, so he set a two-year goal of switching all the company's major ingredients to certified fair trade. Only one problem: Nobody could find any certified organic and fair-trade farms that produced some of those ingredients.
The solution: Get into the farming business. By 2008, Dr. Bronner's owned a 200-employee fair-trade coconut-oil operation in Sri Lanka and a 150-employee palm-oil plant in Ghana, and had partnered on a peppermint-oil operation in India. Maybe the most audacious fair-trade project so far has been a partnership that combines olive oils from farmers in the West Bank and Israel, and has become a symbol of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Emanuel Bronner would be proud.

The Last Place You Ever Live By John Fischer

On a bench outside, I open the plastic containers one-by-one and hand them to my father. We watch the residents filter in and out of the main building, supported by four-footed canes and wheeled walkers.
“This must not be easy for you,” he says to me.
“I guess,” I say. “Is it easy for you?”
“All I have to do is get dragged around for a few days.”
I mumble something resembling an agreement and discover that I’m having trouble meeting his eyes.
“I remember when this happened to my dad,” he continues. “He was diagnosed with mesothelioma from his years at DuPont—this was before you were born. I remember those first real changes in him, when he wasn’t quite my father anymore. The hardest part wasn’t seeing him change. It was knowing he knew I saw it. That really broke my heart.”
I excuse myself from the bench, explaining that I need a bathroom.
Locked in a handicapped stall with an emergency pull by the toilet paper, I sit on my heels and cry. The bathroom is empty and so I really go for it: wailing, shaking, snot streaming from my nose. The minutes wash out in long blurry streaks. Pressure fills my chest like sinking to the bottom of a pool. The light goes flickering and dim.
When I return, my mother and father are debating whether the Toyota will break two hundred thousand miles on our way back. Neither of them mentions the redness ringing my eyes, but my father squeezes my shoulder as I help him into the car. 

The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end.
Part of what makes the truth of aging so unnerving is its scale. It’s the elephant to all of our blind men. .......
But after a while I start to think that scale alone isn’t the problem. It’s that the scale robs us of our individual agency. The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end. Everyone on the planet will experience it in one form or another, as one of the few rituals we share across our species. Except as tiny people with worries and chores, obligations and hopes, we are painfully ill-equipped to reconcile the distance between the personal and the universal. We perceive our own outline in the facts and empirical evidence, and imagine that we can make things different for our parents or ourselves.
Mostly we are wrong. Incontrovertibly and terrifyingly wrong. So we scramble to control whatever we can, in whatever infinitesimally small measure is possible.
The last place you ever live is not really a place. It’s a compromise. It’s a wheelchair or a cane, an argument, a difficult decision, a humiliation to be ignored. It’s a cleaving to the parts that were, and a progressive resignation to the parts that are no longer. It’s the temporary safety of particulars—will the new house be big enough, the food fresh enough, the other residents friendly enough? It’s a father seeing himself through his son’s eyes, or a wife trading hope for common sense. I’m sure it’s millions of other things too, depending on whom you ask. We are sons and daughters, after all, and susceptible by default to the terms of cliché.
If I only get to pick one, I guess it would be something resembling a simple question, probably the same one my parents are asking themselves right now.
How can I possibly make this my own?

You may also like...

Ann Marie Awad: My Egypt
 In the wake of revolution in Egypt, a first-generation Egyptian-American questions what her heritage means now.

Self Walking Backward
When my mother had her second cancer operation, I was in Africa. Gita was angry, because I hadn’t come back from my trip.
Two Doctors
Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.

The Bastard of Salinas
“Better to believe that you come from two happy parents.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/05/emily-dickinson-new-photograph

Emily Dickinson gets a new look in recovered photograph. A daguerreotype appearing to show the famously reclusive poet is only the second photo we have of her.

She looks like Scarlett Johanssen. Also, reading the article, was just like A.S. Byatt's Possession, how the photo was discovered

Two interesting articles from the BBC

Could babies' faces reduce crime?

• The experiment, named Babies of the Borough, follows other attempts to try and use the environment to moderate behaviour.
• One that has had plenty of publicity is the controversial Mosquito Anti-Loitering Security Device. The gadget emits an unbearable buzzing sound and can be set to a pitch that is audible only to those under the age of 25. It was initially used to prevent teenagers gathering outside shops, but opponents tried to get it banned as a breach of human rights.
• Music has also been used. London Underground copied a successful scheme from Tyne and Wear's Metro system to use classical music to reduce crime.
• Police cells in Switzerland were painted a colour described as "cool-down pink", which is said to keep prisoners calm.
• In the town of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, pink lighting has been installed in areas where teenagers hang out. It's supposed to highlight their acne, so they're too embarrassed to be seen there. Cardiff too, has been experimenting with the same idea.

The forbidden public toilets of Beijing

The journalists' rule of thumb in China is that you cannot report the so-called three Ts - Tiananmen, Taiwan or Tibet. But it turns out there is also another T that upsets Chinese censors.

Life without Lights Project

http://www.lifewithoutlights.com/
Peter DiCampo's website link above to his long-term “Life Without Lights” project on global energy access.

....it is easy to forget that 1.4 billion people – nearly a quarter of humanity – live without access to electricity (according to the International Energy Agency’s 2010 findings). And it is difficult to fully grasp the social and economic impact of so-called “energy poverty.”

While living and working as a volunteer in remote northern Ghana, I realized how deeply the lack of electricity affected the lives of my neighbors. It impeded their progress in the sectors of health, education, gender equality, agriculture, and virtually every aspect of development. And, of course, there’s the lack of light.

...Put simply, energy poverty keeps people poor. It is a critical piece in the mosaic of issues contributing to poverty, and often the one that is least addressed. 

...As I continue to research and photograph global energy poverty, I offer these stories as a contribution to the dialogue on energy’s future. While people living without electricity may seem exempt from the energy debate, their plight carries a warning for any region whose economy or energy supply lies on the brink. By examining the causes and effects of energy poverty, as well as workable solutions, this project will ask (and attempt to answer) the questions: What solutions will be made available for the energy poor? Will they be sustainable? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

H/T to Guernica Mag

Two cool new services (Food and sharing)

http://www.ohsowe.com/ - Share More. Waste Less. Help Neighbors.


OhSoWe.com is a website that helps neighbors share resources (items and skills). We make it easier for friends, colleagues, neighbors, parent groups, teams, classmates, churches, Google Group, clubs, hobbyists, Meetups and other groups to asily share items like garden tools, camping gear, small kitchen appliances, party supplies, handbags, ...

http://cookitfor.us/

See a recipe you want made? Then "Crave It!". We'll notify you when local Makers "Make It!" - which could be as soon as now! The more Cravers "Crave It!", the more Makers will "Make It!", so be sure to "Share It!" with your family and friends! Crave. Make. Share.

Two analysis of Bill Clinton's Speech at the DNC - Great Takeaways

Why Bill Clinton's Speeches Succeed - The Atlantic

Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.

That is the significance of "They want us to think" and "The strongest argument is" and "The arithmetic says one of three things must happen" and even "Now listen to me here, this is important." He is showing that he understands the many layers of logic and evidence and positioning and emotion that go into political discussion -- and, more important, he takes for granted that listeners can too.

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. ("I understand the concern about Strasburg's arm. But ... ") You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political "authorities" addressing the unwashed.

It's the difference between clarifying, and over-simplifying. 

Bill Clinton Shows How It's Done - The Atlantic 

Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. .....
He began with an appeal to bipartisanship -- a clever and unexpected turn in a partisan speech, one pitched directly to independent voters in their living rooms. "Nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day," he said. "And every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day." Then he pivoted to attack: "Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness."....
"My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in," he said. "If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."
.......
A few minutes after Clinton was finished, a spokesman for the Romney campaign delivered its response: ""President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight." He did nothing of the sort, of course. But the point was, the GOP knew it wouldn't get far taking on Clinton. Instead, the Republicans could only hope he was so good at pumping up Obama that Obama might pale in comparison. In its way, that was the greatest tribute of all.

Arunachalam Muruganantham: The first man to wear a sanitary napkin #INKt...

In under 12 minutes, listen to the fascinating journey of a workshop helper - from being rejected by the same women whose lives he wanted to change - to now gearing up to create jobs for a million women.

ABOUT ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM :http://www.inktalks.com/people/arunachalam-muruganantham

H/T to my dad

Australians world's worst for illegal music downloads
The link has the coolest interactive graphic - where you can click on the country to find out the most popular download. As for Aus:

According to a survey of downloads from bit torrent sites conducted by Musicmetric, a self-described data and analytics company, Australia, with just over 19 million downloads, placed sixth in the top 10 for music downloads in the past year. The top downloading nation was the US which, according to Musicmetric, downloaded music 96,681,133 times, more than double the next nearest nation, Britain, which had a little over 43 million downloads.

However, by size, Australia with a population of 23 million for those 19 million downloads was comfortably the most frequent user of unofficial or illegal sites. And the most popular artist downloaded in Australia was Adelaide hip-hop group the Hilltop Hoods.

Low cost health intervention to save women's lives

Botswana Doctors Stop Cervical Cancer With A Vinegar Swab

Ramogola-Masire simply swabs a woman's cervix with vinegar and then looks for any potentially cancerous lesions, which appear as white tissue. If pre-cancerous lesions are present, she freezes them with nitrous oxide.
"She's lying on the couch," Ramogola-Masire says. "You look at [the cervix], you wash it with vinegar. You take a picture. You can immediately review the picture because you've got a screen. So you can say to them, this is the white change. I think this is where the abnormality is. We are going to freeze it. What happens is the freezing actually takes care of the top layer. You just sluff that off. And hopefully you've taken care of the problem."
Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. There appears to be higher rates of HPV and cervical cancer among women with HIV, Ramogola-Masire says. Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, with nearly a quarter of all adults believed to be HIV positive.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Ramogola-Masire says, cervical cancer wasn't much of a concern because women with HIV weren't living long enough for the cancer to develop. Once cervical cancer has spread, it's difficult to treat, particularly in poor countries with limited health resources.
If caught early, cervical cancer is easily treatable. If not, Ramogola-Masire says, it's a terrible death. "It invades you nerves at the spine at the back, so you are in a lot of pain," she says.
"The other thing is that because there's a lot of dead tissue, you smell. There's a lot of bleeding. You're incontinent. You're in pain, you're bleeding ... I think it's just a horrible disease to die from."
Ramogola-Masire hopes that the widespread adoption of cervical cancer screening with vinegar in the developing world can help prevent those horrible deaths.

Cynicism in Publishing - Newsweeks' #MuslimRage on Twitter

#MuslimRage: How a Cynical Social-Media Play Became an Awesome Meme - The Atlantic

"MUSLIM RAGE," screams Newsweek's new cover story about last week's violent anti-American protests. This is a well thought out response to how the media's cynicism can be subverted. Go read and check out the links!

Why I heart Calvin and Hobbes

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else

Click on the link above to see all of the list, incl 16 more funny stuff. My faves are below:

On life’s constant little limitations

Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.

On expectations

Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

.......

On the tragedy of hipsters

Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.

.....

On the falling of sparrows (or providence’s lack of a timetable)

Calvin: Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.

....

On realising God is more Woody Allen than Michael Bay

Calvin: They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.

Hobbes: Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.

Calvin: We need more special effects and dance numbers.

On why ET is real

Calvin: Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

.......

On the truth

Calvin: It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring!

Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous

From the anals of the BPS aka British Psychological Society's latest research digest -  Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous with noteworthy points below:

Have you heard older generations lamenting the way pop songs don't sound like they used to? There's a sense that the hits from yesteryear had an innocence and feel-good quality that's missing from today's pop offerings. Now Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous.

.......Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that's fast in minor, or vice versa.

Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs. The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics from 1980-2007, published last year, that found a drop over time in references to social interactions and positive emotions, but an increase in angry and anti-social words.

Guernica - September awesomeness

The latest issue of Guernica Mag landed in my in-box yesterday and below are the links I enjoyed:

1) Women in Power and Politics - Sonia Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi have overcome tragic and arduous pasts to emerge as leaders of India and Burma. What’s next for these two historic icons? http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/women-in-power-and-politics/

2) Making Faces - Two potters keep an unusual art alive in South Carolina. http://www.guernicamag.com/features/making-faces/

3) Reporting Poverty - Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/reporting-poverty/

In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo turns her attention to India and the residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of the city’s airport and luxury hotels. Of Annawadi’s three thousand residents, few have full-time employment. Most sleep in homes of nailed-together scrap metal, plywood, and plastic tarpaulin; some sleep outside. Many children are forced to work instead of attend school. The dwelling’s eastern edge borders a vast pool of sewage.

Amid Annawadi’s grinding poverty lives Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of eleven by selling scraps of trash. Boo chronicles the struggle of Abdul and other families to get out of poverty by whatever means available: corruption, education, work (NGOs, tellingly, never enter the picture). Their lives illustrate what poverty can wrought on the underclass of a developing country, but Boo never reduces them to case studies. She depicts the residents’ relationships, squabbles, opportunities, and misfortunes with eloquence and detail. In its specificity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells a larger story about India’s rapid growth in the global economy, and the people the country is leaving behind. Boo spoke with me over the phone from her mother’s house in Virginia.

—Emily Brennan for Guernica

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?

Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.

A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos.

And the best quote:

There’s a moment I describe in the book when Abdul starts talking about what a life is, says something like, “Even a dog has a life. Even if my mother keeps beating me, even if that moment was my entire life, that’s a life.”

4) Robert Reich: It’s Inequality, Stupid - Income inequality is a pressing issue, but you wouldn't know it from watching the RNC in Tampa.
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/robert-reich-its-inequality-stupid/

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top–among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people–and the steady decline of the great American middle class. 


Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.


Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return. 


The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

5) Brandon Lingle: Queen’s Creek - Back from Iraq, a veteran meditates on the past, present, and future of American warfare, and the small creek in Virginia where they all flow together.
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/brandon-lingle-queens-creek/

The hazy sky, commingled with swamp stench and car exhaust, yanks my mind back to Baghdad. On a certain level I savor the smell of the primordial mud riding the November breeze as our discussion slides toward Mesopotamia. He completed his second Iraq tour a few weeks before I returned from my first, during the death throes of the nine-year odyssey.
“This tour was a joke compared to the first,” he says. “Last time we could shoot back.”
I nod in the dark.
In the past, American forces would fire back on the spots where insurgents launched rockets or mortars toward our bases. More often than not, the bad guys didn’t stick around to watch. Cobbled launchers of scrap iron, batteries, and washing machine timers lobbed their weapons automatically. The U.S. barrage that followed could sometimes kill innocents and destroy their neighborhoods. As Operation Iraqi Freedom shifted toward New Dawn, and Americans left Iraqi cities, the policy shifted too, and we stopped shooting back.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says. “What good is an artillery unit that can’t fire back?”
I begin to think that it’s a good thing his unit wasn’t pummeling neighboring Iraqis, and then I’m ambushed by the reality: it’s much easier to think that way when you’re safe at home on a brisk autumn night.
“Makes about as much sense as carrying unloaded weapons in a warzone,” I say. “Some soldiers didn’t even have their own ammo. The bosses were more afraid of our own guys. Accidental discharge.”
......
The prospect of endless days of mental, physical, and emotional trials excites him. He hopes to eventually deploy to Afghanistan, or maybe Iraq again.
“We talked, drank tea, and got lots of people hurt and killed.” Some worked to keep the war going, riding around the country on helicopters and selling weapons to Iraqis.
“Can we keep 50,000 troops in Iraq, please? 25,000? 10,000? 5,000? How about 150?.” A pause. “I killed a sixteen-year-old boy,” he says. “Our battalion’s only kill this deployment.”
I stare at his shadow on the dock, and I feel a stab of fall air through my damp t-shirt.
“Outside Kirkuk. Got pinned down by someone taking pot shots,” he says. “We figured out where the shooter was, and the lieutenant colonel froze. He was nearly crying. Lying on the ground. Ordered me to take the shooter out. So, I did. Just a barefoot kid with a rusty AK. He fell in a drainage ditch. I remember the muddy water flowing over his feet.”
Like the vast majority of service members, I’ve never fired a weapon in combat let alone killed anyone. I think about how I’d have reacted.
“Damn dude,” I say. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Maybe I accomplished something while I was over there.”

Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

I think its sorta sad-funny that my first thought upon seeing this amazing creature of the sea was, "hmm, I wonder how it would taste." In my defense, I was eating a really yummy melt in your mouth seafood biryani with baby octupus & squid at that time.

Thousands of People in India Die During Drug Trials

Dr Mercola's article today was an eyeopener: Shocking Secret: 2,061 Clinical Trial-Related Deaths and the summary is below:

• Data from the Drug Controller-General of India revealed that more than 2,000 people in India died as a result of serious adverse events (SAEs) caused during drug trials from 2008-2011; only 22 cases, about 1 percent, received any compensation -- which was a paltry average of about $4,800 per family

• Drug companies often target poor, uneducated populations in India and other developing countries to participate in drug trials, where offers of $400 per study earn volunteers far more than the average pay rate of 50 cents a day

In 2010, the government of India called a halt to trials of the Hu­man Papilloma Virus (HPV) vac­cine Gardasil. This came about because of a civil society-led investigation, which highlighted serious ethical violations for clinical research and informed consent rights of study participants or their legal guardians – and followed reports that six of the young participants had died, and more than 120 girls suffered severe adverse reactions, including:

• Stomach disorders

• Epilepsy

• Headaches

• Early menarche

Unfortunately, reports suggested the deaths occurred because the girls either committed suicide (by poisoning) or drowned – despite reports by parents to the contrary.3 This is, sadly, but one example of deaths occurring during drug trials.

Earlier this year, the Argentinean Federation of Health Professionals accused GlaxoSmithKline of misleading participants and pressuring impoverished, disadvantaged families into enrolling their children in clinical trials of the experimental Synflorix pediatric pneumonia vaccine.

Fourteen of the children participating in the experimental vaccine trial died.

Beautiful Quote about mothers

I recently finished reading a book called Emily and Einstein. It's a fairly decent beach read sort of book, but the following quote made an impression on me. When I came across that particular sentence while I was reading the book, it literally had me stopping in my tracks and I had to re-read it a couple of times. Made me think of the ducklings following their mother at the Peadbody Hotels.  Enjoy!

"We are all imprinted by our mothers, that imprint luring us in like a friend or sometimes an enemy, causing us to become a carbon copy or a determinedly made original. We either embrace or reject, though the luckiest among us never realize there is an imprint at all."

Go & buy this book! STAT!

I just finished reading the e-ARC version of Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and what a grand book it is! I was reading it in the doctor's waiting room and trying to stifle my giggles as Ivan tumbled from once crises de nerfs to the next. Thank God Baen Books has e-ARCs - I dont think I could have waited till the book was published.

Nordstron Innovation Lab

Nordstron Innovation Lab
So a real smart, well thought out post from Rory Ford landed in my in-box earlier this week via the Gov2.0Australia Google list serve. The post had a link to his blog and being naturally curious, I went snooping and found a post he had written about this really cool shopping/marketing thingy done by Nordstrom Innovation Labs. Basically the Innovation Lab hijacked a real Nordstrom's store in Seattle for a week and in real time created an Ipad app for customers who wanted to buy sunglasses. Reminded me a little bit of NYC's Improv Everywhere.

I would think the next step would be to make a TV spot about this, set to some cool music, cause just watching the case study on youtube, makes me want to go and shop at Nordstrom's!

My Resume vs My Brother's

My Resume in Wordle - August 2012

My Brother's Resume in Wordle - August 2012

Some interesting articles at The Economist

1) Foreigners in China To flee or not to flee?

Read this with interest. Some interesting points:

IT MAY not count as an exodus. Indeed, it doesn’t even satisfy that hoary old journalistic definition of a trend: three examples.Separately, a pair of expatriates long based in China have written heartfelt accounts of their decisions to leave the country. And though few in number, they have attracted a great deal of heartfelt attention from many other “old China hands”, as foreigners who have chosen to make their lives, careers and homes here sometimes like to call themselves......In one of the recent expatriate accounts, an American film-maker, editor and blogger named Charlie Custer said most of his reasons were personal—and that none of them had to do with ugly threats he’d received since entering into a nasty public feud with a prominent Chinese television personality, Yang Rui. However Mr Custer did acknowledge feeling distress over China’s lack of a free press and rule of law. And he mentioned that his past couple of years had been not only “depressing” and “soul-crushing”, but also “occasionally terrifying”. However he cited as bigger problems air pollution and food safety. These were the most important factors behind his decision to leave Beijing, after a four-year stay. “I like breathing,” and “eating also is fun,” he wrote in pithy summary.
An essay by Mark Kitto, a Briton who first came to China as a student in 1986, ventured into more thought-provoking realms. After living here for the past 16 years as a businessman, Mr Kitto decided he’d had enough. Some of his motivations match those of the wealthy Chinese who choose to leave. He cited concerns that “the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm” but added that the “one overriding reason I must leave China” is the need to give his children a decent education.Other aspects of Mr Kitto’s experience might only make sense to a foreigner, and a disillusioned one at that. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream,” he wrote.Upon returning to China in the mid-1990s, after a post-graduate period spent away, he noted a widespread difference since the time of his student days. An air of optimism remained, but then he also detected “a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community”. Mr Kitto bemoaned China’s shift from a traditional family culture to a “me” culture, and its rush toward materialism and conspicuous consumption.Mr Kitto also wrote that he wanted, in a certain sense, to “become Chinese.” He acknowledges that this was never possible—but not that he was naive to think it might be. Eventually he came to find that his “desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider” was not attainable. 

2) So Mitt? What do you believe? (Economist is against Romney)

All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see article). And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down. We share many of his views about the excessive growth of regulation and of the state in general in America, and the effect that this has on investment, productivity and growth. After four years of soaring oratory and intermittent reforms, why not bring in a more businesslike figure who might start fixing the problems with America’s finances?
But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 1, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 1, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

h/t to Chris Blattman for this. If you are interested in Economic History and a Labor Market book discussion using Malcolm X's Biography as a starting point, I urge you to read the original blog post by Bryan Caplan of the The Library of Economics and Liberty Blog. (PS - I am thinking of subscribing to this too, but its another blog then and I am so time-poor!)

Three links I liked at NYMAG/ Vulture

1) Premium Rush movie review

I liked the below para. It perfectly captures what I felt about driving/walking in NYC!

Gordon-Levitt’s Wilee does have a life philosophy, but it’s nothing terribly complex. “Can’t work in an office,” he says in voice-over while evading numerous, potentially deadly obstacles. “Can’t stop … Don’t want to either … When I see a guy in a gray business suit … my balls shrivel up.” Zooming through red lights and teeming crosswalks, he is exactly the kind of biker to whom we yell, “We have a walk sign, asshole!” But being as we’re seeing the world through his eyes, we think, “Out of the way, assholes!” I must say that this cuts to the heart of New Yorkers’ moral relativism: On bikes, they think, “Asshole pedestrians!” and “Asshole drivers!” In cars, they think, “Asshole pedestrians!” and “Asshole bikers!” On foot, they think, “Asshole bikers!” and “Asshole drivers!” (Wherever they are, of course, they think, “Asshole critics!”) 

2) Mike Birbiglia - Sleepwalk with Me

Another great show - took mum & dad along with me (got cheap tickets thank to Nancy Khuu). I walked out of the theatre 1.5 hrs later, in a daze, just magically carried aloft, dream-walking after being mesmerized by Mike Birbiglia's comedy. In short, need to see the movie and highly recommend it! Plus it has Ira Glass.

Speaking of Ira Glass, pic of mum and me in NYC, when we had 4th row tickets to see "This American Life."

3) August: Osage County

This was hands down the BEST "serious" play I saw on Broadway, during my 2 years at NYU. As a side note, the BEST comedy play I saw was The Norman Conquests (x4 times).

I liked August: Osage County so much, saw it twice - once with John Uppill and then with my mother. This was a sacrifice b/c even with NYU student discount, I paid $70 for the cheap seats vs $25 for The Norman Chronicles.

Cant wait to see the movie, esp with the awesome cast attached (Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis). I reckon Meryl Streep has my heart after seeing her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady - utter sublime!