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Newest Blog Entries:
Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream – NYTimes.com – Joseph Stiglitz
Posted by Michael Butler, Tuesday, May 14, 2013Patent filing claims solar energy ‘breakthrough’
via McClatchy ..Inventor Ronald Ace said that his flat-panel “Solar Traps,” which can be mounted on rooftops or used in electric power plants, will shatter decades-old scientific and technological barriers that have stymied efforts to make solar energy a cheap, clean and reliable alternative .. Ace [says] “This invention can meet about 92 percent of the world’s energy needs.” .. If the trap even comes close to meeting his futuristic vision, its impact could be breathtaking: It could reorder the world’s energy landscape, end the global economic drag of soaring energy costs, and eventually curb greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for climate changeeven if it proves true its a sure bet the oil/coal/nat gas industry will fight fight fight for the next 30-40 years .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, May 14, 2013
WATCH Elizabeth Warren: Students Should Get ‘Same Deal’ On Interest Rates As Big Banks
Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, May 10, 2013Kevin Gosztola: The United States Is Fighting How Many Wars?
Gosztola in FDL ..With neoconservatives and neoliberals amplifying calls for US military intervention in Syria, it is worthwhile to take a moment and consider all the places in the world, where the US currently has forces engaged in daily operations .. By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries. SOCOM had about 4,000 people deployed around the world in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan [including] Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, May 7, 2013
The Neoliberal Assault on Academia
Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, May 3, 2013Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers – video | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Posted by Harry Sifton, Monday, April 29, 2013Green, Healthy, & Safe Product Ratings & Reviews | GoodGuide
Posted by Harry Sifton, Friday, April 26, 2013THE MAN BEHIND AVAAZ | More Intelligent Life
Posted by Harry Sifton, Thursday, April 11, 2013Why Americans Are So Ignorant — It’s Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable Reasons for it
Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, April 11, 2013Gay marriage: And now on to polygamy | The Economist
Posted by Michael Butler, Wednesday, April 10, 2013Fight the Enemies of Truth: Support the Spread of Knowledge | Global Research
Posted by Michael Butler, Tuesday, April 9, 2013David Graeber: A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse [MUST READ]
Graeber in The Baffler ..It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination .. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society .. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 7, 2013
The Real Problem with Education: Students Hate School — And Here’s Why
Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, April 4, 2013Adbusters: #Goldman Sachs has 73 offices worldwide
a new call to action from AdB ..Goldman Sachs, the most powerful and unrepentant of the financial fraudsters, has three offices in Canada and four in the United Kingdom; eight in China; two separate locations in Madrid and nineteen scattered across the United States. #GOLDMAN is an indefinite real-time, live-action game to have some fun while shutting down each of these locations. Points will be awarded for speed, spectacle, courage, and innovation. We take everything we learned from Cairo, Madrid and Zuccotti ... combine it with the lessons of Quebec, Pussy Riot and Idle No More ... and turn #GOLDMAN into a global moment of truth for justice.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Adbusters: Mein Campus
AdB ..A cultural shift is happening on university campuses across North America. Students are lining up for mental health services faster than they can be treated. This shift is defining a generation and marks a profound change in the mental environment on campuses today. There was a time not so long ago when students used to reach out for help with a particular life crisis: a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, difficulty with a major decision. Today, however, students are complaining that their life is the crisis, an all-pervasive sense of bleakness about themselves and their future that didn’t exist a generation ago .. More than two-thirds of student health centers say they don’t have enough resources and counselors to deal with the growing numbers of clients. Thirty-four percent of centers have ongoing waitlists.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 30, 2013
Truthdig – How Schools Are Becoming Prisons
Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, March 29, 2013Slate: The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge, DIY indie-rock shows
Luke O'Neil in Slate ..As anyone who's watched a single crime story on TV or film knows, undercover detective work is dangerous business. There inevitably comes a moment when the crime boss gets suspicious. Scary, sure, but at least police officers have a working knowledge of the rules of the crime game. They’ve trained their whole lives to pull off this deception. Passing yourself off as a credible music scenester, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude more difficult. Never mind drug lords—no one can identify a poseur more quickly than a hipster; sniffing out fakes is essentially the entire job description. That's what Boston police are finding out as their bungling efforts to infiltrate the underground rock scene online are being exposed.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, March 29, 2013
Congress Protects Monsanto, Not Third Graders
Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, March 28, 2013Democracy Now: Energy Nominee Ernest Moniz Criticized for Backing Fracking & Nuclear Power; Ties to BP, GE, Saudis
.. read transcript at Democracy Now
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Margaret Cho: Michelle Shocked Me
Cho in Huff Post ..Well, Michelle Shocked, I am actually totally shocked. What the hell? It's freaky to me, the whole business of going from a queer icon to someone who would actually say that God hates us. When the shock wore off, I found that people were super angry, but I just got scared. I think that as a queer person of color, I have been scared my entire life. I get over it bit by bit, enough to get by and live, but then something like this happens, and it's like getting gay bashed all over again. When people say that God hates fags, there's this idea that it's OK to kill us, that it doesn't matter if we die, because if God -- the supposedly loving force in the world, the one who is supposed to love everyone and everything, the one, the only, whatever, whenever -- hates us, then how are we to exist? But if he hates us, why did he make so many of us? When someone like Michelle Shocked, formerly a beloved, alt queer muse and maker of the '90s, decides that it is OK to hate us and lets us know that God does too, I am truly sickened, as she of all people should know what this means .. And the effect of someone saying "God hates fags" can never be underestimated either. It's a license to kill. It's a death sentence. It's not funny. It's not OK. It's not something I can let go easily, because I know what it truly means.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 23, 2013
Sergei Abramov’s goal: an educational blog that doesn’t bore his fellow Russian teens – CSMonitor.com
Posted by Harry Sifton, Friday, March 22, 2013Bloomberg hits the jackpot: NYC students can’t read, write, or do arithmetic
80% of kid's trying to go to community college can not read, write, or do arithmetic! These are the college bound one's. What about the rest of their high school graduate friend's? These poor kid's. Trusting in a school system with no responsibility built in, taught the children just that. Will politician's stand up and take their responsibility for this? And what of the parts of the system that created this problem? Politicizing education has really worked well. They now have government efficiency at it's best.. Principle's are now more politician than educator, although they must have been the latter at one time. How do you corect 12 years of no education when arriving in community college? What a staggering loss of potential for everyone. With California going to a more strictly government approved and controlled venue in education, I wonder what is happening here for all the rhetoric? b.a.Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, March 21, 2013
The novel resurgence of independent bookstores – CSMonitor.com
Posted by Harry Sifton, Monday, March 18, 2013Bloomberg hits the jackpot: NYC students can’t read, write, or do arithmetic
80% of kid's trying to go to community college can not read, write, or do arithmetic! These are the college bound one's. What about the rest of their high school graduate friend's? These poor kid's. Trusting in a school system with no responsibility built in, taught the children just that. Will politician's stand up and take their responsibility for this? And what of the parts of the system that created this problem? Politicizing education has really worked well. They now have government efficiency at it's best.. Principle's are now more politician than educator, although they must have been the latter at one time. How do you corect 12 years of no education when arriving in community college? What a staggering loss of potential for everyone. With California going to a more strictly government approved and controlled venue in education, I wonder what is happening here for all the rhetoric? b.a.Posted by Michael Butler, Saturday, March 16, 2013
