[Note: I’m not in favor of artificial stimulus of the economy or creation of credit based on this found money. My suggestion would be that if this money exists as a surplus, then it must be returned to the taxpayer, who can then choose to spend it as he or she wishes. That would provide the appropriate level of consumption or production, not any arbitrary make-work program. Continue reading →

Douglas Valentine reviews “Gold Warriors,” Peggy and Sterling Seagrave’s account of  how gold looted from Asia by Japan was used to fund crime and covert operations by the US and its satraps:

“Gold Warriors is more than a book about Japan’s “serious, sober and deliberate” plundering of Asia’s treasure from 1895 until 1945, and its collusion after the war with American officials to recover and use the loot as a secret political action slush fund to promote right wing regimes: Gold Warriors:America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold is a journey into the darkest recesses of history and the human soul. Continue reading →

“I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don’t treat me right – then shame on you!”

— Louis Armstrong

Update:

I went through the transcript, and, to be honest, don’t know what the fuss is about. So Paul was vocalizing rather than saying, ‘yes, they have a right to discriminate.’

So what? Why are libertarians upset about this one way or other? Continue reading →

“What is morality, she asked. “Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”

“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”

“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

“What is morality, she asked. “Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. “

I’ve always had a rather experimental attitude toward food and health.  I was brought up in a medical family and was surrounded by medical textbooks most of my teen years. Although I never went into the profession myself, I did develop a strong interest in self-medicating, which became obsessive after I dropped my health insurance coverage. Continue reading →

Media critic Neil Postman (1931-2003) wrote convincingly about the dystopia produced by modern media in books like “Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Show Business” (via Third World Traveler)

Postman asserted the superiority of generalization over specialization, showed why media analysis was the important field for cultural analysis, analyzed the role of education in controlling populations, and drew on the writing of Aldous Huxley to expose the roots of the debasement of public discourse in modern media. Continue reading →

Show your support for Alan Greyson’s “The War is Making You Poor Act. Here’s Grayson at DailyKos on this very hopeful development (hat-tip to LRC blogger David Kramer) :

“Next week, there is going to be a “debate” in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.

What George Orwell wrote about in “1984” has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the “military-industrial complex” has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.

But we’re going to change this. Today, we’re introducing a bill called ‘The War Is Making You Poor Act’. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars. Continue reading →

(Hat tip to tech blog arpitnext.com).

BBC reports:

Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube because of its “growing sacrilegious content”. Access to the social network Facebook has also been barred as part of a crackdown on websites seen to be hosting un-Islamic content. Continue reading →