Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) The Veganopolis Cookbook: A Manual for Great Vegan Cooking with George Black & David Stowell David Stowell and George Black are professional vegan chefs with a twenty-two-year-long commitment to creating accessible, cruelty-free cuisine for all. After starting out in …
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Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Guest: Dr. Judy Wood Dr. Judy Wood is a former professor at Clemson University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, specializing in the research of thermal stress and deformation analysis with optical imaging, biomaterial composition, and biomimicry. She is an expert …
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Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Dialogue With Your Inner Voices There are good guys and tyrants in all of us that nudge us and possibly torment us each day. It’s the inner judge, the inner admirer or other parts of us that want to …
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The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.
The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.
On the 4th of July, the credit agency Standard & Poor called Greece what it is, i.e. a country in de facto financial bankruptcy . No slight of hand, no obfuscation, no debt reorganization and no “innovative” bailouts can hide the fact that the defective rules of the 17-member Eurozone have allowed some of its members to succumb to the siren calls of excessive and unproductive indebtedness, to be followed by a default on debt payments accompanied by crushingly higher borrowing costs.
Greece (11 million inhabitants), in fact, has abused the credibility that came with its membership in the Eurozone . In 2004, for instance, the Greek Government embarked upon a massive spending spree to host the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, which cost 7 billion euros ($12.08 billion). Then, from 2005 to 2008, the same government decided to go on a spending spree, this time purchasing all types of armaments that it hardly needed from foreign suppliers. —Piling up a gross foreign debt to the tune of $533 billion (2010) seemed the easy way out. But sooner or later, the piper has to be paid and the debt burden cannot be hidden anymore.
“The good news is that more and more people sense at some level that there’s a great misdirection of life’s energy. We know we’re slighting the things that truly make life worthwhile. One survey found that 81 percent of Americans think the country is too focused on shopping and spending; 88 percent say American society is too materialistic.”
Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.
Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Europe A historical account of Europe’s financial troubles, including heavy criticism from Nigel Farage, UK Member of the European Parliament. Events leading to the current European crisis. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s take: social conflicts, social hostility, radicalism, etc. Why people buy …
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The following article first appeared on the Web site of The Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their e-mail newsletters here.
“Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?”
That’s how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured “brain room” in Fox’s New York headquarters for “counterintelligence” and may have used it to hack into private phone records.
At long last, President Obama seems to have run out of patience with the truculent Republicans who have rejected all of his overtures for a budget deal — just as Moody’s and other economic authorities again warned of the potentially catastrophic consequences of a debt default.
On Wednesday afternoon, Obama finally stood up at the bargaining table and walked out of the stalemated budget talks, telling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., that he will “take this to the American people” unless the Republicans showed a real inclination to compromise. Exactly what the president meant by that remark is not yet clear, but some leading Republicans have now realized that pandering to their party’s hard-line base could have serious consequences for them as well as for the country.
At 94, Nelson Mandela is still kicking, inspiring an international day of community service on Juy 18th in his name. This seems to be an idea that Barack Obama borrowed for similar events in the USA.
While activists and athletes and entertainers, are honoring him by responding to his call for engagement, journalists in the obit departments of the world’s news networks are quietly, even secretly, combing their archives for footage and tributes that will air when he moves on to the next world. They are getting ready and seem to think it will happen sooner rather than later.
The Pentagon released a long-promised cybersecurity plan Thursday that declares the Internet a domain of war.
The plan notably does not spell out how the U.S. military would use the Web for offensive strikes.
The Defense Department’s first-ever plan for cyberspace calls on the DoD to expand its ability to thwart attacks from other nations and groups, beef up its cyber workforce and expand collaboration with the private sector.
Some of the moments on the list are easily recalled – Berkshire Hathaway gazillionaire Charlie Munger’s famous “suck it up and cope” quote, coming from a guy whose company was heavily invested in bailed-out banks, was an obvious inclusion – but others are quite shocking.
For instance, I was completely floored by the New York Times‘ pseudo-ironic take on the government’s response to the financial crisis, a piece entitled “You Try to Live on $500K in This Town.”
The Center for Media and Democracy has obtained copies of more than 800 model bills approved by corporations through ALEC meetings, after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistleblower provided a copy to the Center. We have analyzed and marked-up those bills and made them available at ALEC Exposed.
In April 2011, some of the biggest corporations in the U.S. met behind closed doors in Cincinnati about their wish lists for changing state laws. This exchange was part of a series of corporate meetings nurtured and fueled by the Koch Industries family fortune and other corporate funding.
Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) (The first :45 seconds are a little fuzzy, it will get better after that, sorry) What can you learn from walking on water? Yesterday’s guest, Dr. John DeMartini, noted author and speaker, talked about why we are simultaneously attracted …
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Nailing Rupert Murdoch for his employees’ phone tapping or bribery would be a little like bringing down Al Capone for tax fraud, or George W. Bush for torture. I’d be glad to see it happen but there’d still be something perverse about it.
I remember how outraged Americans were in 2005 learning about our government’s warrantless spying, or for that matter how furious some of my compatriots become when a census form expects them to reveal how many bathrooms are in their home.