Attention Kmart shoppers!
All you who would rather save a dollar than a life.
Please be careful!
There is blood on isle 9
From factory workers who died in collapsed buildings
Working to bring you the new Barbie Dream House
At the fantastic price of 19.99.
While we clean that up,
Please go to isle 7
Where we have a tribute to the brave marines
Willing to protect our manifest destiny,
Or as we prefer to say,
To protect American interests overseas.
Why do the heathen rage?
Do they not understand,
That enslaved workers,
Have always been the invisible hand of the market?
Attention Kmart shoppers,
All you who would rather save a dollar than a life,
Please avoid isle 13,
Where a crazed stranger is crying,
That the mark of beast,
Is the corporate logo,
On our clothes.
While it is true the dinosaurs may have gone extinct because of a meteorite strike upon the earth, it is also important to note they died with all their defenses intact. Their giant horns and claws made them maladapted in times of great transition. They were still beyond challenge in contests of violence; but they were, by the same invulnerability, incapable of adapting to their new environment. Their great level of consumption also made them unsustainable. This kind of extinction by way of fortification is also the fate of every human empire. Perhaps this is what is meant by the phrase “the meek will inherit the earth.”
“A new report details how corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they regard as potential threats. The corporate watchdog organization Essential Information found a diverse groups of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer safety, pesticide reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. The corporations carrying out the spying include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others. According to the report, these corporations employ former CIA, National Security Agency and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work, which is often illegal in nature but rarely — if ever — prosecuted.” -Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/25/spooky_business_us_corporations_enlist_ex
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself
to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft
The early feminists were speaking primarily to other women, but men have much to learn from their insights as well. Wollstonecraft was warning women that the desire to be deemed beautiful is a kind of prison since beauty is in the eye of the (usually male) beholder. No one finds their true worth in the opinion of another.
“The pornographic gaze” is a name given to that way of looking at women that sees their physical attractiveness but is indifferent their intelligence and character. If you look at popular magazines, the camera often centers on the faces of men and then lowers that center when taking photos of women. That is the pornographic gaze, which sees men as persons and women as objects of desire for men.
Men must, if we would be friends and allies to women, take responsibility for how we look at others. Almost everyone wants to be seen as attractive sometimes, but no healthy person wants to be seen primarily as a beautiful object for others. Wollstonecraft’s warning to women informs men as well. If we find the worth of women in how they appear to us, even our sincerest compliments are adornments for a prison.
Writing a blog is an education in psychology. The overwhelming majority of responses are kind and respectful even in disagreement, but any blog is going to receive blistering irrational responses as well. Why would someone accuse you of lying, and then ask you to debate? Who wants to debate with a liar? Why would people call you and “idiot” but keep coming back to the same blog expecting something different? Obviously, they don’t expect something different, they are wanting a fight.
The internet has been a virtual space that crowds minds together like hamsters in a cage. If you’ve ever woken to a bloodied hamster you know that, for those rodents, the instinct to protect one’s turf can be irrational and over powering. Timid human souls that have been sheltered from opposing viewpoints are suddenly caught naked and exposed online. Hidden behind a keyboard they lash out confusing insults with logic, and cruelty with competence.
I have not yet figured out how to deal with people who think they are frightening when they are simply rude. I don’t know what to do with those who keep coming back to the same sites to pick a fight while cowering behind a computer screen. What I do know is that cyber-bullies are human beings, and that they must be lonely and miserable to seek out such pathetic victories. Our hope should be that responses that are both kind and strong will invite them out of hiding and into true dialogue.
“Our opponents in the agricultural industry are very powerful and farm workers are still weak in money and influence. But we have another kind of power that comes from the justice of our cause. So long as we are willing to sacrifice for that cause, so long as we persist in non-violence and work to spread the message of our struggle, then millions of people around the world will respond from their heart, will support our efforts … and in the end we will overcome.” -Cesar Chavez
Last week was the 50th anniversary of the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy. Being from Dallas, that day was traumatic for many reasons. At the time, it seemed a young prince had been cut down by a deranged villain. It seemed we had been robbed of Camelot.
This week as I listened to all the talk about the Kennedy assassination, I had a very disturbing thought. I remembered that Kennedy was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, which would have been a similar tragedy to many in Cuba. I asked myself what was the difference, in principle, between those two assassinations, besides the fact that one was completed and the other only attempted?
I could not reach a clear answer. Both believed that someone they deemed to be evil could be struck down without due process. Kennedy, certainly one would guess, had more advisors but does assassination become less evil if attempted by a group?
Like most people in the United States I was taught to think of ethics in terms of heroes and villains. We in the States never think of holding our heroes to the same ethical standards as our villains because “good” and “evil” are more defined by our dramatic narrative than by any fixed principle. Secret bombings, invasions and assassination attempts never counted against Kennedy even if he were to kill many more innocent people than Oswald, a Cuban sympathizer. If I had been born in Cuba, might my interpretation of events been quite the opposite?
So this week I thought about two assassinations, one attempted and one completed, and I asked myself what is the difference, in principle, between them. But when history is a dramatic narrative told from one viewpoint, we may never grasp the ironic possibility that our heroes and our villains may actually live and die by the same principles.
Karl Marx was wrong about many things. Primarily he was wrong in his belief that socialism would dig the grave of capitalism. Instead the grave of capitalism will also be the grave of humankind. Our epitaph will read, “We could not find a profit motive for caring for our sick, which eventually brought on the plague. We could not find a profit motive for peace, which brought on the great war. We could not find a profit motive for saving our planet, and so we here bequeath it to rats and cockroaches.”
Some religionists in Texas believe they should have editing rights to impose creationist ideology upon science textbooks. I wonder how they would feel if the shoe were on the other foot and Bibles had to pass a scientific panel before they could be published? Jesus’ parable about the mustard seed would have to be edited out. Jesus claimed claimed the mustard seed was the smallest seed, which simply isn’t true.
Science is not a theory, it is an empirical method. Therefore, religious assertions have no place in scientific textbooks. But religion isn’t a theory either. Religion is a sense of reverence for whatever has given us being. We demean and ultimately destroy religion when we turn it into a mythological explanation that has to lie about the world to find its place in the conversation.
“…The U.S. spends far and away more on health care than any other. And yet it has among the lowest life expectancies of any developed country. People live longer in pretty much every country in Europe, including Greece, where the economy has been wracked by austerity for years.
“What bothers me most is not that we’re all the way on the right, or even that we are lower than we should be,” Aaron Carroll, professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote on his blog of the chart. “It’s that we are all alone. We are spending so, so, so much more than everyone else.”
…The U.S. ranks 46th among 48 developed economies in health-care efficiency, according to a Bloomberg ranking, below China, Iran, Colombia and, you know, pretty much everybody else.
Why is our system so terrible? Largely because it is built for profit. Unlike many other countries, the government has no role in either providing care or setting prices, and so prices skyrocket.” -Mark Gongloff
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/american-health-care-terrible_n_4324967.html