- As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
- Quoted in John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 440; cited in Understanding Power (2002) by Noam Chomsky, ch. 9, footnote 16
Sunday, September 11, 2011
John Dewey - Wikiquote
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Robert Shiller on Human Traits Essential to Capitalism | FiveBooks | The Browser
There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we've let it happen.
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Perry's Death Penalty Defense - NYTimes.com
That whole "perfectly applied" thing — the goal of which requires the person being put to death to actually be guilty — also troubled others. Marie Diamond at Think Progress Justice undertakes a thorough debunking of the idea that everyone executed in Texas in the past decade or so was guilty:
---Sent from Steve's iPad...[D]uring Perry's tenure as governor, DNA evidence hasexonerated at least 41 people convicted in Texas, Scott Horton writes in Harper's. According to the Innocence Project, "more people have been freed through DNA testing in Texas than in any other state in the country, and these exonerations have revealed deep flaws in the state's criminal justice system." Some 85 percent of wrongful convictions in Texas, or 35 of the 41 cases, are due to mistaken eyewitness identifications.
Those exonerations include Cornelius Dupree, who had already spent 30 years in prison for rape, robbery, and abduction when DNA evidence proved unequivocally that he was not the man who had committed those crime. Tim Cole, the brother of Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis (D), was posthumously pardoned a decade after he died in prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence. The total failure of the Texas courts to protect these innocent individuals reveal a system plagued by racial injustices, procedural flaws, and a clemency review process that's nothing but a rubber stamp on executions.
Friday, September 09, 2011
The Blog : September 11, 2011 : Sam Harris
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/september-11-2011/
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Perry criticizes government while Texas job growth benefits from it - The Washington Post
The disparity has grown sharper since the national recession hit. Between December 2007 and last June, private-sector employment in Texas declined by 0.6 percent while public-sector jobs increased by 6.4 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, government employees account for about one-sixth of the workforce in Texas.
Check out: '1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year' on Slate
I thought you might find this Slate article interesting:
1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year
By John Mueller, Mark G. Stewart
http://www.slate.com/id/2303169?wpisrc=sl_ipad
1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year
By John Mueller, Mark G. Stewart
http://www.slate.com/id/2303169?wpisrc=sl_ipad
Putting this all together, we find that, in order for the $75 billion in enhanced expenditures on homeland security to be deemed cost-effective under our approach—which substantially biases the consideration toward finding them effective—they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks of something like the one attempted in Times Square in 2010. In other words, we'd have to foil more than four major attacks every day to justify the spending.
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Debate Reax, Ctd - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast
---Sent from Steve's iPad...Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.
Fact checking the GOP debate at the Reagan library - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post
"It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there."
— Gov. Perry
Perhaps the governor does not know the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Here's what Merriam-Webster says: "An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks."
This is a frequent mistake politicians make when talking about Social Security. It is not an investment vehicle; it is intended to provide income security as well disability and life insurance. Just more than 60 percent of the 54 million beneficiaries are retired workers; the rest are disabled workers, dependents or survivors.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things. In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities. The value of those bonds is now about $2.6 trillion. (We have written about this at length.)
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places?: Scientific American
The states with the five lowest average IQ all have higher levels of infectious disease than the states with the five highest average IQ, and the relationship was good across all of the states in between.
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Texas cut wildfire-battling agency budget this year - Maggie Haberman - POLITICO.com
Perry and the Texas congressional delegation had asked President Obama to "grant a disaster declaration" that would have brought federal funds to cover much of the fire-fighting.
Sorry Rick, it's your "states eight" to burn.
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Amazon.com: Free Book Collections: Kindle Store
http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2245146011
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Monday, September 05, 2011
The Empire at Dusk - By Stephen Glain | Foreign Policy
the Pentagon still has more lawyers than the State Department does diplomats
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Richard Garner – Beyond Morality » Introduction
http://beyondmorality.com/introduction/
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
Article: Not so odd - Jerry Coyne on Joel Marks
Not so odd - Jerry Coyne on Joel Marks
http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2011/09/not-so-odd-jerry-coyne-on-joel-marks.html
(Sent from Flipboard)
---Sent from Steve's iPad...
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