Morning No: No Basis For a System of Government

by: Natasha Chart

Tue Jul 07, 2009 at 06:00

- Do you remember the big hubbub everyone raised in 2008 when the extremely conservative International Energy Agency predicted that we'd hit peak oil around 2020. Me neither. Three years earlier, the IEA had been denying there was any looming problem that might imperil our petrol dependent world economy.

- Did you know the government isn't systematically monitoring pollution levels in human beings and that most of the thousands of synthetic substances now on the market have never been safety tested, not even the ones that are most rapidly accumulating in our bodies? Ask them to do something about it.

- Someone who was at Goldman Sachs will be charged with theft ... of trade secrets. The FBI has apparently done a bang up job hunting this guy down and prosecuting him for injuring Goldman Sachs' profitability. It's nice to know our priorities are straight.

- Remember when Enron stole $30 billion from the State of California, but it totally didn't cause any problems?

- A former member of the Minuteman militia project says it's "just like hunting."

- Former defense secretary and Vietnam war mastermind Robert McNamara has passed away.

- Reports of bombings are coming in from the Phillipines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Petaluma, CA and San Mateo, CA.

- Police work and alert residents likely averted a bombing by a Pennsylvania man who was visiting Hudson Falls, NY. No one in Washington, DC, has been able to make heads or tails of the situation, since by their understanding, acts of terrorism can only be averted by sustained bombing campaigns and warrantless house-to-house searches in the middle of the night. There is no word on when the first air strikes will be called in against Westmoreland, PA, where the suspect lived.

- Plastic is bad for us.

- "Right now health care is rationed by your ability to pay."

- Working at a law firm won't save you from the downward wage pressure exerted on the peons by greedy employers.

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns out to still be contentious. That wouldn't surprise Clio Bluestocking, some of whose students seem to be under the impression that the abolitionist movement failed. (Via.) [Update, minor correction.]

- You can't have decent health coverage like the citizens of other developed nations because the government likes the insurance lobbyists better than you. Or do they?

- Sorry, no, no co-op plans, please.

- Governments behaving badly: Honduras' coup government is now killing protestors and the Ayatollah Khamenei says recent civil unrest in Iran is the fault of Westerners (I guess Qom is slightly to the west of Tehran, but really more southerly.)

Natasha Chart :: Morning No: No Basis For a System of Government

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Morning No: No Basis For a System of Government | 1 comments

It'a Not "The Civil Rights Movement Failed" (0.00 / 0)

It's "the Abolitionist Movement failed," and more fundamentally, the exact title, in fact "Abolition as a Self-Help Movement"--which means, at the very least, the lack of (A) a framework for understanding history in terms of anything more sophisticated than a personal achievement narrative, and (B) critical thinking skills to realize that the narrative doesn't fit.

This relates to a whole bunch of stuff--such as why some folks don't realize what a incoherent rant Palin's resignation speech was, why Obama's education policy sucks (standardized tests are the enemy of critical thinking, and critical thinking is the enemy of standard tests), and why Obama--though a nice person--sucks as a transformational leader (no truly critical thinker could have that education policy, and the problems Obama faces can't be solved without critical thinking).

It also relates to the themes of educationaction's ongoing series, Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing, particularly his recent discussion of lifestyle activism, which likewise avoids confrontations with power, and defines itself in personalistic terms dictated from within ones own comfort zone. This is especially true of the next installment (I've had a pre-publication peek), which discusses lifestyle politics as portrayed by Mary Pattillo in Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Pattillo will be joining the discussion on Saturday, July 24, when that installment will be published.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Tue Jul 07, 2009 at 07:44:09 AM CDT