The Bovine

(hat-tip to Karen De Coster, LRC blog)

From Kimberly Hartke:

December 6, 2011–Washington, D.C.– Independent filmmaker Kristin Canty announces today that her film is being screened next week for members of Congress, and the shocking new food documentary was invited back for an encore run at Chicago’s prestigious Gene Siskel Film Center. This summer’s theatrical releases in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, and Boston garnered critical acclaim, and grassroots interest spawned 150 community screenings around the country.

The film opens in Chicago on Saturday, December 10 through the 12th, for one show daily, with a final show on Thursday the 15th. See Gene Siskel Center website for showtimes. The Congressional screening event will take place on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, December 13, 5:30 pm in the Orientation Theater North. U.S. Citizens are encouraged to invite their Congressman and Senator to see the film (find your Representative: http://www.house.gov find your Senator: http://www.senate.gov.

Farmageddon, The Unseen War on American Family Farms, vividly conveys the stories of numerous farmers who found themselves on the wrong side of government food policy. It is hard to imagine our government using S.W.A.T. raids to deal with misdemeanors, nor is it easy to fathom agents of the law seizing valuable farm products and equipment, particularly in cases where there is no proof of harm. This movie enables audiences all across America to come face to face with harsh realities of farm life in our modern day.

Filmmaker Kristin Canty says, “I am very grateful to the Gene Siskel Center for bringing the film back. We had a number of sold out shows in our brief run there this summer. Now more Chicagoans will have the opportunity to see the film!”

Canty’s film project may also have an opportunity to influence public policy. The gravity of the plight of small farmers has gotten the attention of our politicians in Washington, D.C. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D, ME) and Ed Perlmutter, (D, CO), and Congressman Ron Paul, (R, TX) are sponsoring the Congressional screening of Farmaggedon on Capitol Hill. Pingree, who is also an organic farmer, wants her colleagues to see the devastating effects regulatory policies are having on small American farms.

Pingree serves on the Agriculture Committee and recently introduced H.R. 3286, the “Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act”, which reforms agriculture policy to give consumers greater access to local foods, and gives farmers more opportunities. The bill is co-sponsored by 60 of her colleagues in the House, and has also been introduced in the Senate.

Kristin Canty is a member of the nutrition education non-profit, The Weston A. Price Foundation, as well as, The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, whose work defending the rights of farmers and consumers to direct trade inspired the film. Visit the film’s website: FarmageddonMovie.com.

And now, from a report on the New York City screening of Farmageddon, by Laurel on Health (source for lead picture):

“Last week I attended an NYC screening for the new documentary Farmageddon. From the film website: “Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent ac-tion, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.” The movie is very well done and it’s focuses on an important issue that we all need to know more about—the unseen war on family farms.”

David Gray:

1. Math and Ethnocentrism

The study of mathematics in the West has long been characterized by a certain ethnocentric bias, a bias which most often manifests not in explicit racism, but in a tendency toward undermining or eliding the real contributions made by non-Western civilizations. The debt owed by the West to other civilizations, and to India in particular, go back to the earliest epoch of the “Western” scientific tradition, the age of the classical Greeks, and continued up until the dawn of the modern era, the renaissance, when Europe was awakening from its dark ages. This awakening was in part made possible by the rediscovery of mathematics and other sciences and technologies through the medium of the Arabs, who transmitted to Europe both their own lost heritage as well as the advanced mathematical traditions formulated in India.

George Ghevarughese Joseph, in an important article entitled “Foundations of Eurocentrism in Mathematics,” argued that “the standard treatment of the history of non-European mathematics is a product of historiographical bias (conscious or otherwise) in the selection and interpretation of facts, which, as a consequence, results in ignoring, devaluing or distorting contributions arising outside European mathematical traditions.” (1987:14)

Due to the legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of which was ideologically justified through a doctrine of racial superiority, the contributions of non-European civilizations were often ignored, or, as Joseph argued, even distorted, in that they were often misattributed as European, i.e. Greek, contributions, and when their contributions were so great as to resist such treatment, they were typically devalued, considered inferior or irrelevant to Western mathematical traditions.

This tendency has not only led to the devaluation of non-Western mathematical traditions, but has distorted the history of Western mathematics as well. In so far as the contributions from non-Western civilizations are ignored, there is the problem of accounting for the development of mathematics purely within the Western cultural framework. This has led, as Sabetai Unguru has argued, toward a tendency to read more advanced mathematical concepts into the relatively simplistic geometrical formulations of Greek mathematicians such as Euclid, despite the fact that the Greeks lacked not only mathematic notation, but even the place-value system of enumeration, without which advanced mathematical calculation is impossible. Such ethnocentric revisionist history resulted in the attribution of more advanced algebraic concepts, which were actually introduced to Europe over a millennium later by the Arabs, to the Greeks. And while the contributions of the Greeks to mathematics were quite significant, the tendency of some math historians to jump from the Greeks to Renaissance Europe results not only in an ethnocentric history, but an inadequate history as well, one which fails to take into account the full history of the development of modern mathematics, which is by no means a purely European development.

1. Vedic Altars and the “Pythagorean theorem”

A perfect example of this sort of misattribution involves the so-called Pythagorean theorem, the well-known theorem which was attributed to Pythagoras who lived around 500 BCE, but which was first proven in Greek sources in Euclid’s Geometry, written centuries later. Despite the scarcity of evidence backing this attribution, it is not often questioned, perhaps due to the mantra-like frequency with which it is repeated. However, Seidenberg, in his 1978 article, shows that the thesis that Greece was the origin of geometric algebra was incorrect, “for geometric algebra existed in India before the classical period in Greece.” (1978:323). It is now generally understood that the so-called “Pythagorean theorem” was understood in ancient India, and was in fact proved in Baudhayana’s Shulva Sutra, a text dated to circa 600 BCE. (1978:323).

Knowledge of mathematics, and geometry in particular, was necessary for the precise construction of the complex Vedic altars, and mathematics was thus one of the topics covered in the brahmanas. This knowledge was further elaborated in the kalpa sutras, which gave more detailed instructions concerning Vedic ritual. Several of these treat the topic of altar construction. The oldest and most complete of these is the previously mentioned Shulva Sutra of Baudhaayana. As this text was composed about a century before Pythagoras, the theory that the Greeks were the source of Geometric algebra is untenable, while the hypothesis that India could [corrected] have been a source for Greek geometry, transmitted via the Persians who traded both with the Greeks and the Indians, looks increasingly plausible. On the other hand, it is quite possible that both the Greeks and the Indians developed geometry. Seidenberg has argued, in fact, that both seem to have developed geometry out of the practical problems involving their construction of elaborate sacrificial altars. (See Seidenberg 1962 and 1983)

1. Zero and the Place Value System

Far more important to the development of modern mathematics than either Greek or Indian geometry was the development of the place value system of enumeration, the base ten system of calculation which uses nine numerals and zero to represent numbers ranging from the most minuscule decimal to the most inconceivably large power of ten. This system of enumeration was not developed by the Greeks, whose largest unit of enumeration was the myriad (10,000) or in China, where 10,000 was also the largest unit of enumeration until recent times. Nor was it developed by the Arabs, despite the fact that this numeral system is commonly called the Arabic numerals in Europe, where this system was first introduced by the Arabs in the thirteenth century.

Rather, this system was invented in India, where it evidently was of quite ancient origin. The Yajurveda Samhitaa, one of the Vedic texts predating Euclid and the Greek mathematicians by at least a millennium, lists names for each of the units of ten up to 10 to the twelfth power (paraardha). (Subbarayappa 1970:49) Later Buddhist and Jain authors extended this list as high as the fifty-third power, far exceeding their Greek contemporaries, who lacking a system of enumeration were unable to develop abstract mathematical concepts.

The place value system of enumeration is in fact built into the Sanskrit language, where each power of ten is given a distinct name. Not only are the units ten, hundred and thousand (daza, zata, sahasra) named as in English, but also ten thousand, hundred thousand, ten million, hundred million (ayuta, lakSa, koti, vyarbuda), and so forth up to the fifty-third power, providing distinct names where English makes use of auxillary bases such as thousand, million, etc. Ifrah has commented that

by giving each power of ten an individual name, the Sanskrit system gave no special importance to any number. Thus the Sanskrit system is obviously superior to that of the Arabs (for whom the thousand was the limit), or the Greeks and Chinese (whose limit was ten thousand) and even to our own system (where the names thousand, million etc. continue to act as auxillary bases). Instead of naming the numbers in groups of three, four or eight orders of units, the Indians, from a very early date, expressed them taking the powers of ten and the names of the first nine units individually. In other words, to express a given number, one only had to place the name indicating the order of units between the name of the order of units immediately immediately below it and the one immediately above it. That is exactly what is required in order to gain a precise idea of the place-value system, the rule being presented in a natural way and thus appearing self-explanatory. To put it plainly, the Sanskrit numeral system contained the very key to the discovery of the place-value system. (2000:429)

As Ifrah has shown at length, there is little doubt that our place-value numeral system developed in India (2000:399-409), and this system is embedded in the Sanskrit language, several aspects of which make it a very logical language, well suited to scientific and mathematical reasoning. Nor did this system exhaust Indian ingenuity; as van Nooten has shown, Pingala, who lived circa the first century BCE, developed a system of binary enumeration convertible to decimal numerals, described in his Chandahzaastra. His system is quite similar to that of Leibniz, who lived roughly fourteen hundred years later. (See Van Nooten)

India is also the locus of another closely related an equally important mathematical discovery, the numeral zero. The oldest known text to use zero is a Jain text entitled the Lokavibhaaga, which has been definitely dated to Monday 25 August 458 CE. (Ifrah 2000:417-1 9) This concept, combined by the place-value system of enumeration, became the basis for a classical era renaissance in Indian mathematics.

The Indian numeral system and its place value, decimal system of enumeration came to the attention of the Arabs in the seventh or eighth century, and served as the basis for the well known advancement in Arab mathematics, represented by figures such as al-Khwarizmi. It reached Europe in the twelfth century when Adelard of Bath translated al-Khwarizmi’s works into Latin. (Subbarayappa 1970:49) But the Europeans were at first resistant to this system, being attached to the far less logical roman numeral system, but their eventual adoption of this system led to the scientific revolution that began to sweep Europe beginning in the thirteenth century.

1. Luminaries of Classical Indian Mathematics
   Aryabhata

The world did not have to wait for the Europeans to awake from their long intellectual slumber to see the development of advanced mathematical techniques. India achieved its own scientific renaissance of sorts during its classical era, beginning roughly one thousand years before the European Renaissance. Probably the most celebrated Indian mathematicians belonging to this period was Aaryabhat.a, who was born in 476 CE.
In 499, when he was only 23 years old, Aaryabhat.a wrote his Aaryabhat.iiya, a text covering both astronomy and mathematics. With regard to the former, the text is notable for its for its awareness of the relativity of motion. (See Kak p. 16) This awareness led to the astonishing suggestion that it is the Earth that rotates the Sun. He argued for the diurnal rotation of the earth, as an alternate theory to the rotation of the fixed stars and sun around the earth (Pingree 1981:18). He made this suggestion approximately one thousand years before Copernicus, evidently independently, reached the same conclusion.

With regard to mathematics, one of Aaryabhat.a’s greatest contributions was the calculation of sine tables, which no doubt was of great use for his astronomical calculations. In developing a way to calculate the sine of curves, rather than the cruder method of calculating chords devised by the Greeks, he thus went beyond geometry and contributed to the development of trigonometry, a development which did not occur in Europe until roughly one thousand years later, when the Europeans translated Indian influenced Arab mathematical texts.

Aaryabhat.a’s mathematics was far ranging, as the topics he covered include geometry, algebra, trigonometry. He also developed methods of solving quadratic and indeterminate equations using fractions. He calculated pi to four decimal places, i.e., 3.1416. (Pingree 1981:57) In addition, Aaryabhat.a “invented a unique method of recording numbers which required perfect understanding of zero and the place-value system.” (Ifrah 2000:419)

Given the astounding range of advanced mathematical concepts and techniques covered in this fifth century text, it should be of no surprise that it became extremely well known in India, judging by the large numbers of commentaries written upon it. It was studied by the Arabs in the eighth century following their conquest of Sind, and translated into Arabic, whence it influenced the development of both Arabic and European mathematical traditions.

Brahmagupta

Born in 598 CE in Rajastan in Western India, Brahmagupta founded an influential school of mathematics which rivaled Aaryabhat.a’s. His best known work is the Brahmasphuta Siddhanta, written in 628 CE, in which he developed a solution for a certain type of second order indeterminate equation. This text was translated into Arabic in the eighth century, and became very influential in Arab mathematics. (See Kak p. 16)

Mahavira

Mahaaviira was a Jain mathematician who lived in the ninth century, who wrote on a wide range of mathematical topics. These include the mathematics of zero, squares, cubes, square-roots, cube-roots, and the series extending beyond these. He also wrote on plane and solid geometry, as well as problems relating to the casting of shadows. (Pingree 1981:60)

Bhaaskara

Bhaaskara was one of the many outstanding mathematicians hailing from South India. Born in 1114 CE in Karnataka, he composed a four-part text entitled the Siddhanta Ziromani. Included in this compilation is the Biijagan.ita, which became the standard algebra textbook in Sanskrit. It contains descriptions of advanced mathematical techniques involving both positive and negative integers as well as zero, irrational numbers. It treats at length the “pulverizer” (kut.t.akaara) method of solving indeterminate equations with continued fractions, as well as the so-called “Pell’s equation (vargaprakr.ti) dealing with indeterminate equations of the second degree. He also wrote on the solution to numerous kinds of linear and quadratic equations, including those involving multiple unknowns, and equations involving the product of different unknowns. (Pingree 1981, p. 64)

In short, he wrote a highly sophisticated mathematical text that proceeded by several centuries the development of such techniques in Europe, although it would be better to term this a rediscovery, since much of the Renaissance advances of mathematics in Europe was based upon the discovery of Arab mathematical texts, which were in turn highly influenced by these Indian traditions.

Maadhava

The Kerala region of South India was home to a very important school of mathematics. The best known member of this school Maadhava (c. 1444-1545), who lived in Sangamagraama in Kerala. Primarily an astronomer, he made history in mathematics with his writings on trigonometry. He calculated the sine, cosine and arctangent of the circle, developing the world’s first consistent system of trigonometry. (See Hayashi 1997:784-786) He also correctly calculated the value of p to eleven decimal places. (Pingree 1981:490)

This is by no means a complete list of influential Indian mathematicians or Indian contributions to mathematics, but rather a survey of the highlights of what is, judged by any fair, unbiased standard, an illustrious tradition, important both for its own internal elegance as well as its influence on the history of European mathematical traditions. The classical Indian mathematical renaissance was an important precursor to the European renaissance, and to ignore this fact is to fail to grasp the history of latter, a history which was truly multicultural, deriving its inspiration from a variety of cultural roots.

There are in fact, as Frits Staal has suggested in his important (1995) article, “The Sanskrit of Science”, profound similarities between the social contexts of classical India and renaissance Europe. In both cases, important revolutions in scientific thought occurred in complex, hierarchical societies in which certain elite groups were granted freedom from manual labor, and thus the opportunity to dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits. In the case of classical India, these groups included certain brahmins as well as the Buddhist and Jain monks, while in renaissance Europe they included both the monks as well as their secular derivatives, the university scholars.

Why, one might ask, did Europe’s take over thousand years to attain the level of abstract mathematics achieved by Indians such as Aaryabhat.a? The answer appears to be that Europeans were trapped in the relatively simplistic and concrete geometrical mathematics developed by the Greeks. It was not until they had, via the Arabs, received, assimilated and accepted the place-value system of enumeration developed in India that they were able to free their minds from the concrete and develop more abstract systems of thought. This development thus triggered the scientific and information technology revolutions which swept Europe and, later, the world. The role played by India in the development is no mere footnote, easily and inconsequentially swept under the rug of Eurocentric bias. To do so is to distort history, and to deny India one of it’s greatest contributions to world civilization.

Works Cited

Hayashi, Takao. 1997. “Number Theory in India”. In Helaine Selin, ed. Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 784-786.

Ifrah, Georges. 2000. The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. David Bellos, E. F. Harding, Sophie Wood and Ian Monk, trans. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Joseph, George Ghevarughese. 1987. “Foundations of Eurocentrism in Mathematics”. In Race & Class 28.3, pp. 13-28.

Kak, Subhash. “An Overview of Ancient Indian Science”. In T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, eds. Computing Science in Ancient India, pp. 6-21.

van Nooten, B. “Binary Numbers in Indian Antiquity”. In T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, eds. Computing Science in Ancient India, pp. 21-39.

Pingree, David. Jyotih.zaastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981, p. 4.

Seidenberg, A. 1962. “The Ritual Origin of Geometry”. In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 1, pp. 488-527.

______. 1978. “The Origin of Mathematics”. In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 18.4, pp. 301-42.

______. 1983. “The Geometry of Vedic Rituals”. In Frits Staal, ed. Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986, vol. 2, pp. 95-126.

Unguru, Sabetai. 1975. “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics”. In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 15.1, pp. 67-114.

Staal, Frits. 1995. “The Sanskrit of Science”. In Journal of Indian Philosophy 23, pp. 73-127.

Subbarayappa, B. V. 1970. “India’s Contributions to the History of Science”. In Lokesh Chandra, et al., eds. India’s Contribution to World Thought and Culture. Madras: Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee, pp. 47-66.

Floyd Abrams in the Wall Street Journal on Wikileaks:

“In 2010, WikiLeaks released more than 77,000 confidential U.S. military reports from Afghanistan, which included the names of over 100 Afghan sources of information, placing them at risk of retaliation by the Taliban. This was followed, just a few months ago, by WikiLeaks’ release of the full texts of over 251,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, many containing the names of individuals who had sought and been promised confidentiality.

As summarized in London’s Guardian newspaper, “several thousand [documents were] labeled with a tag used by the U.S. to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger, and more than 150 specifically mentioned whistleblowers.” References were, as well, made to “people persecuted by their governments, victims of sex offenses and locations of sensitive government installations and infrastructure.

Comment

I’ll defer to the judgment of editors who’ve gone through all the material and are in touch with government sources. But frankly, if you are an informer against your own country (“Afghan source of information”), the better word for you would be “collaborator”…. and the character (and fate) of collaborators isn’t usually an edifying one. Not even the fact of their being on “our” side makes that better.

The rest, I agree, should have been redacted.

But, did Assange intentionally release that information? Or did a lot of it just end up on the site because it hadn’t first been vetted?

Next. What rights do governments have to pronounce on privacy when their routine conduct involves surveillance (Echelon, NSA programs that monitor satellite and cell phones, for example)?

Robocalls to cell phones billed to the phone owner might be on the agenda:

“The innocent-sounding “Mobile Information Call Act” would allow all sorts of nuisance calls to cell phones, eating into customers’ costly minutes, Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Sunday.

“The floodgates would be open to telemarketers, who could call you on your cell phone during breakfast, lunch, dinner, no matter if you’re at home, at school, at the office,” said Schumer, who vowed to fight the legislation proposed by House Republicans.

Schumer didn’t mention that the GOP bill’s sole Democratic co-sponsor was a fellow New Yorker — Rep. Ed Towns (D-Brooklyn).

Towns and the entire House Energy and Commerce Committee already got an earful at a recent hearing when consumer groups blasted the bill.

Brooklyn residents interviewed Sunday said the legislation was a bad idea.

“What politician in his right mind would support this?” asked John Berigan, 44, of Park Slope, who uses his cell phone for his real estate business.

“There’s no one in the general public who would want this. “It would seem that some lobbyist in Washington has gotten to [Towns],” he said.

Current law bars telemarketing calls to cell phones unless the customer has given approval. The proposed change would allow prerecorded “informational” calls to be made to cell phones without consent.”

Comment:

Repeat. You would be billed for nuisance and junk calls from strangers. Not to mention the incredible attack on privacy this involves…and the cybercrime it’s bound to enable.

Well, apologies for being away.  Blame it on tech problems that remain unresolved. No phone or computer. That leaves cell phones. Which I avoid.  And friends. Whom I also avoid.

But time away from blogging is always good, because it reminds me how pleasant life away from  “instant access” can be.

The first benefit is the amount of time that seems to be freed up when you aren’t tied to the net.  Computers were supposed to make things faster and easier so we’d spend less time on communicating. instead, they made communication more time-consuming…. by raising the bar.  Staying in touch used to be a letter or post card every month. Now you’re a hermit if you haven’t called in a week. We want to reach out and touch someone, it seems, no matter where they are – driving, eating, sleeping, in the loo…

That seems to be the characteristic of a lot of technology. Or, perhaps it’s a characteristic of human beings. We’re prone to turn a good thing into a bad thing, no matter what.

The net, taken intravenously the way bloggers tend to, is calculated to overwhelm you with buzz, with noise.  You’re inundated daily with events that are either completely irrelevant to your life or of vital relevance…. but completely beyond your ability to affect in any way.

It’s like watching a train hurtling at a baby while you’re locked behind a glass window.

You’re inundated by second-by-second bad news getting badder, class-warfare out of Occupy Wall Street, legislation authorizing indefinite detentions without trial for practically everyone, incipient legislation to shut down the Internet, cheer-leading for all kinds of schemes to remake the system into something even more liable to being gamed, dreamed up mostly by people whom I wouldn’t trust to microwave a pop-tart.

The result for most of us is that we freeze. We give up.  Or we exhaust our nerves and vital energy.

I spent the last few days thinking about that and the fix for it. At least, a temporary fix. It’s quite a simple one and it boils down to this – narrow your focus.

Take your eyes off the big picture.

The big picture is the incessant drive by the elites of the Anglo-Zionist establishment to centralize, manage, and police the entire globe. I say, take your eyes off that picture and fix it on something you can do something about. Not permanently. But just for now. Intermittently. As a discipline.

The small picture I focused on was my desk. Yes, the long-suffering brown kitchen table where I usually work.

I forgot about the empire, Occupy Wall Street, Soros, hackers, the Line of Control, Neocons etc. etc. I took aim at my old receipts, my warranties, old letters, junk  mail, JC Penny deals, gala opening invitations, bank statements, unidentified metal objects, dust bunnies of venerable age , computer thingies that don’t fit anything, cables lurking in a Loch Nessian tangle in the bottom drawer of the cabinet.

And I won. Almost. A few sorties left. A skirmish or two. Then I will be on top of it all.

And I did something else. I began a new nutrition regime.  Specifically, cod-liver oil. It’s better emulsified, but I got a bottle of 100 good quality capsules for about eight bucks and I thought I’d start with that. I’m taking B-Complex and C along with it, because those always help with assimilation.  I cut back on the coffee (slipping for a few days recently), because you never want to drink coffee or tea while taking vitamins, as they don’t get absorbed.

Coincidentally, (or was it synchronistic?), Bill Sardi has a piece on this at Lew Rockwell today on what happens if you don’t get enough B1 – you get beri beri. He claims, plausibly, that because so many people drink tea or coffee today, this is fairly widespread. I believe him.  Here are some of the symptoms he says you should look out for:

• Difficulty walking
• Loss of feeling (sensation) in hands and feet
• Loss of muscle function or paralysis of the lower legs
• Mental confusion/speech difficulties
• Pain
• Uncontrolled side-to-side eye movements (nystagmus)
• Tingling
• Vomiting
• Increased heart rate
• Swelling of lower legs
• Neck veins that stick out
• Droopy eyelids
• Fatigue
• Irritability, moodiness, depression
• Loss of appetite
• Heartburn
• Abdominal pain
• Leg cramps
• Mental confusion
• Underactive thyroid
• Anxiety
• Oversensitivity to pain or noise
• Pain upon pressure to calves (classic early sign)
• Slow heart rate or fast heart rate
• Multiple sclerosis
• Diabetes
• Sleep disturbances
• Memory loss

That’s quite a list, and the good thing is, unlike the bad news, you can do something about it. Quite easily and quite fast.

And my third tip is simple too.  Yoga breathing.

You probably know how already. 5 seconds breathe in through the left nostril, 10 seconds hold with nostrils pinched shut, 5 seconds out through the right nostril. Do that whenever you have a minute, when you’re waiting for someone to pick up, at a traffic stop, or while the hot water is boiling.

That’s it. Clean your work space; take fish oil regularly (with Vitamin B); take deep breaths.

Try that for a week. And then get back to worrying about the globalists. You’ll do it much better.

For anyone who still thinks that Hank Paulson was the only one gaming the system to the hilt, here’s a glimpse of the murky world of welfare assistance:

“A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars.

Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband’s name because they have not officially been charged with a crime.

However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003.

The 2,500 square-foot home, which includes gardens and a boat dock, is valued at $1.2 million. And even though the couple has been receiving the benefits for nearly 10 years, records show that they accurately listed the address of their current home when applying for the state and federal benefits.

A federal official told KING 5 that the couple likely took advantage of a loophole, which allows low-income individuals to receive financial assistance to help them pay their rent and move away from housing projects. However, the law does not require officials to verify what type of home the benefits recipient is living in.

“As if the million dollar home weren’t enough, the supposedly low-income couple also gave money to various charities and traveled around the world to locales in Turkey, Tel Aviv and resort towns in Mexico, according to court records.”

Comment

D’ you think this sort of thing is unusual? I doubt it. And yet, people still go on with their mantras about government assistance going only to the needy, or to starving children.

Children do starve in America. I’ve taught a few who were malnourished, but the problem had nothing to do with money (except in rural areas).

It had to do with completely irresponsible families, violent neighborhoods, drugs, junk food, intrusive school psychologists who diagnose and treat boredom as a disease, and aggressive marketers who target low-income families.

From Andrew Rosenthal, the New York Times blog (apparently the NYT doesn’t think this deserves the front page):

“The Senate is debating the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a series of provisions that mandate military interrogation and detention for any suspected member of Al Qaeda, and authorize indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without trial. (The law is written so broadly that parts of it could also cover U.S. citizens.)

The provisions were co-sponsored by Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, both of whom should know better. Their excuse was that some Republicans had proposed worse rules. But the smart response to that situation would have been to block faulty legislation outright, not to make a really bad deal.

A deal, by the way, that Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said was hashed out behind closed doors without consultation with his committee, or the Intelligence Committee, or the Defense Department, the F.B.I. or the intelligence community.”

Thinking Aloud, a minarchist blog, defends Ron Paul against Gary Weiss’s vicious rant at Salon:

“The Libertarians vision is not one of people starving in the streets so that rich people can be richer.  It’s a vision of a non-coercive society. In Libertarian thought, cutting social services can be done morally because the Libertarians believe Americans are big enough as people to voluntarily provide for those who are hard-up. This does not constitute a denial of our obligations to each other, but rather a denial of the morality of using coercion to fulfill them. I do not necessarily agree that this would happen, but it is fundamentally different than a Randian ‘what’s-mine-is-mine.’  Paul Ryan might be a Randian, but Ron Paul is not. Furthermore, Weiss’s implication that Ron Paul is a shill for oligarchic interests is simply dishonest.  Part of the libertarian critique is that the modern state engages in significant cronyism, patronage, and rent-seeking for the connected-thus creating the oligarchy.  Weiss ignores this entirely in his quest to paint Paul as a stooge, and ignores the wider point that the income of the most economically powerful is most certainly augmented by those sorts activities through campaign finance, regulatory capture, patronage, and other mechanisms.

Mr. Weiss’s tone and style is not well-placed in the service of attacking fellow enemies of American corporatism.  Mr. Paul, though wrong in my opinion, is an honest and principled politician who in many fields is helping to fight the good fight. He is connected to his followers because he offers something different, something principled. He is not a ‘manipulator’ or “faux-populist con job” that Weiss portrays him as.  If Mr. Weiss wishes to spill ink in such a virulent fashion, perhaps he should restrain himself to the actual shills, manipulators, and faux populist con-jobs that inhabit the Republican Party, rather than the honest man in the lot.

Any reader of this blog would realize that I am no member of the Paul-cult, reflexively attacking any critic. Unlike much of the Left, who find their sympathies with the closet-collectivism of American social conservatives, my ‘were I a wingnut’ sympathies lie with the Libertarians. I find the motivations behind libertarians to be nobler and less intrusive than other ideologies. That being said, I also think that life-mistakes should not be punished with utter destitution, that the Federal Reserve performs a useful function in providing for an elastic currency, that Austrian economics is merely the most highly developed form of the arm-chair school, that market power exists and is frequently abused, that there are public goods best served by the public authority, and that there are market externalities that are frequently left un-addressed and that this encumbers society significantly. This is what separates me from the libertarians. They’re good people. Good– but wrong–people.”