1/ Thomas Friedman with an excellent column, and a prophetic one - we are out of time.....the system we are living under is unsustainable and we need to change.
And change it will - he argues our civilization is rapidly approaching crunch time, but will our political leaders be up to the challenge? And will we selfish Americans stay in denial until it's too late? Good question.....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Earth Is Full
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 7, 2011
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Related in News
Temperature Rising: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself (June 5, 2011)
Times Topic: Global Warming
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“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”
Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.
This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.
2/ One of my favourite columnists who recently left the Times is now working for a website called "Demos", and here Bob Herbert writes on a familiar theme - the jobs crisis in America, how our elites don't care, have no plans and are just ignoring the collapse of the middle class....
Excellent article, well worth reading.....
The Jobs Emergency and America in Crisis
“When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.” – Calvin Coolidge
It was eerie. My wife went into a CVS Pharmacy on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Memorial Day and there was no one behind the bank of registers near the front of the store. When it came time to pay for her purchases, a woman directed her to a self-service register near the front door. My wife scanned and bagged the purchases herself, each step guided by a computerized, affect-less woman’s voice, similar to the voice in a GPS device. Customers paying cash could insert bills into a slot like the ones on a vending machine. Change (including coins) and a receipt were promptly issued. At the end of the transaction, the computerized voice said, “Thank you for shopping CVS.”
Welcome to the increasingly soulless world of rapidly shrinking employment opportunities in the U.S. We’ve been pretending for too long that something approaching normalcy is just around the corner, another era of good jobs at good wages, ready to embrace us like an old friend. Any day now the middle class will be reconstituted. The American dream will be taken off of life support.
Get over it. It is long past time to recognize that we are in the midst of a howling, long-term employment crisis that needs to be treated, as F.D.R. once said, “as we would treat the emergency of a war.” I went into the CVS store a few days after Memorial Day to see what it was like on a non-holiday morning. There was still no one behind the registers. There were also very few customers. An employee working on the floor said the store planned to staff its regular registers only during the busiest hours. He added, with an embarrassed, somewhat ironic smile, “This is the future.”
3/ Fascinating story from the Guardian UK on how food and commodities have been turned by Wall Street investment banks into speculative futures to be bet on, just like a casino.....
The true story behind the steady rise in food prices, and the disasterous results of this manipulation for poor countries ......
Bankers and Politicians Have Turned Food Into a Betting Game
By Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian UK
07 June 11
The result is soaring prices and starving children.
he best kind of argument is one where you already know you're right, which must be what draws in so many people to the row over record food prices. What other issue allows the techno-nuts to bang on about the need for GM crops, the population drones to point out for the nine-billionth time the growing number of mouths to feed in the world, or my comrades on the left to have another go at big bad agribusiness - all at the same time? Some of these points are worth airing; the surging cost of bread or beef around the world is unlikely to have just one cause. But the overriding feature of this debate is how few of the participants feel the need to do any more than dust off their hobby horses.Meanwhile, at the risk of sounding crass, around a billion people - one in seven of the world's population - go to bed hungry every night.
An urgent problem requires more than age-old solutions. Understanding why food prices are rocketing again - with the cost of wheat and maize up around 70% in the past year - so soon after the bubble of 2008 should make us look more closely at what's changed in the food market.
And one of the biggest answers to that question lies not in the farms of Queensland nor the suburbs of Cairo, but on Wall Street and in Washington.
4/ Do you take anything from class of drugs called clonazepam? Brand names Klonopin, Restoril, Xanax, Ativan? Know anyone who does?
If so you might want to read this story as these drugs are majorly addictive and are possibly the most dangerous class of pharmacuticals being pushed on Americans by our dysfunctional medical system......
America's Most Dangerous Pill?
It's not Adderall or Oxy. It's Klonopin. And doctors are doling it out like candy, causing a surge of hellish withdrawals, overdoses and deaths.
June 1, 2011 |
You could argue that the deadliest “drug” in the world is the venom from a jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, whose sting can kill a human being in four minutes—up to 100 humans at a time. Potassium chloride, which is used to trigger cardiac arrest and death in the 38 states of the U.S. that enforce the death penalty is also pretty deadly . But when it comes to prescription drugs that are not only able to kill you but can drag out the final reckoning for years on end, with worsening misery at every step of the way, it is hard to top the benzodiazepines. And no "benzo" has been more lethal to millions of Americans than a popular prescription drug called Klonopin.
Klonopin is the brand name for the pill known as clonazepam, which was originally brought to market in 1975 as a medication for epileptic seizures. Since then, Klonopin, along with the other drugs in this class, has become a prescription of choice for drug abusers from Hollywood to Wall Street. In the process, these Schedule III and IV substances have also earned the dubious distinction of being second only to opioid painkillers like OxyContin as our nation's most widely abused class of drug.
Seventies-era rock star Stevie Nicks is the poster girl for the perils of Klonopin addiction. In almost every interview, the former lead singer of Fleetwood Mac makes a point of mentioning the toll her abuse of the drug has taken on her life. This month, while promoting her new solo album, In Your Dreams, she toldFox that she blamed Klonopin for the fact that she never had children. “The only thing I’d change [in my life] is walking into the office of that psychiatrist who prescribed me Klonopin. That ruined my life for eight years,” she said. “God knows, maybe I would have met someone, maybe I would have had a baby.”
5/ Tragic and compelling Rachael Maddow 9 minute segment.......I can't recall any clip that has left me with such pessimism about the future of this country, and yet it is just a story about a black school in Detroit that is trying and succeeding to break the cycle of poverty in this most blighted of inner cities....
And the Republican Governor of Michigan is closing the school down.....
6/ For the opener of the NBA playoffs Nicole Scherzinger and Jason Bonham did a 1 minute version of the Led Zeppelin "Black Dog"......boy does she sound like Robert Plant....but prettier.....
7/ New York just passed a law saying doctors need to give patients at the end of their lives options other than aggressive treatments, including hospice and other alternatives.....the doctors are pissed off, saying the new law interferes with the doctor/patient relationship.
Actually given realistic choices, a lot of patients near the end will choose hospice.....which is, of course, far less profitable than emergency care and needless operations.....
Bastards.....
PERSONAL HEALTH
Law on End-of-Life Care Rankles Doctors
By JANE E. BRODY
Published: June 6, 2011
I shouldn’t be surprised when doctors object to laws telling them how to practice medicine, as does New York State’s new Palliative Care Information Act — not surprised, but in this instance, distressed.
Yvetta Fedorova
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Vehemently opposed by the Medical Society of the State of New York, the law passed last summer by a two-thirds majority of the Legislature and took effect in February. The legislation was written in collaboration with Compassion and Choices of New York, an organization that advocates for informed choices and greater physical and emotional comfort at the end of life.
The act, which I discussed in this column last August, states that when patients are found to have a terminal illness or condition, health care practitioners must offer to provide information and counseling about appropriate palliative care and end-of-life options. Patients or their surrogates are entirely at liberty to refuse an offer to discuss these options.
California passed a similar law in 2009, and other states are considering them. These measures promise to reduce the cost of care at the end of life, as well as the suffering often associated with it; palliative care is meant to reduce the severity of disease symptoms, pain and stress.
Although there are penalties for violation, it is not the specter of punishment that raises the hackles of some physicians. Rather, they say the new requirement interferes with how they choose to deal with their patients and does not take into account the nuances of a doctor-patient relationship.
8/ Great Stephen Colbert clip where he takes Sarah Palin's side in the Paul Revere controversy, even proving all of the things Palin said Paul Revere did can be done on a horse.....
Very funny....6 minutes......
9/ The stupidity of this Scott administration is incredible. Floriduh indeed, but you can say one thing about him and that's that he's consistent. Consistently stupid.
Florida is fighting the health care law in court, and by doing so is turning down millions in federal funds.....
TALLAHASSEE — Florida already leads a lawsuit challenging the federal health care law, but state officials are going a step further and ignoring the law almost entirely — rejecting millions of federal dollars to provide health care for retirees, seniors, children and people with disabilities.
So far this year, Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-led Legislature have returned or refused to spend at least $19 million in federal money associated with implementing the health care law. Scott also has stopped any state planning for the creation of mandated health care exchanges, which will allow consumers to comparison shop for health insurance plans.
The decisions put Florida at odds with conservative governors in Texas, Indiana and Wisconsin, who are fighting the constitutionality of the health care law on one hand and planning for it on the oth
10/ What's new in E-books.....if you are thinking of getting one, read this column from the Times "tech" guy.....
STATE OF THE ART
Moving Forward in E-Readers
By DAVID POGUE
Published: June 8, 2011
We think we’re so modern. We think we’re hot stuff, with our touch-screen tablets, video cellphones and Internet movie downloads. But mark my words: we’re in the Paleozoic era of consumer technology.
Stuart Goldenberg
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Our grandchildren will listen to our technology tales — spotty cellphone coverage, 24-hour movie viewing windows, three-hour battery life — and burst out laughing the minute they’re out of earshot.
Take e-book readers, like the Kindle and its rivals. “Come on, Grandma. You really couldn’t read Kindle books on a Nook, or vice versa? What a dumb system!” “Tell us again why you couldn’t read Harry Potter books on e-readers?” “Grandpa, what do you mean ‘monochrome’?”
This week, though, e-book readers just took their first slimy steps out of the primordial soup.
Both Barnes & Noble and Kobo, its far less advertised rival, introduced nearly identical readers that are clearly intended to embarrass the industry leader, the Amazon Kindle.
They’re called the All-New Nook ($140) and the Kobo Touch Edition ($130).
Yes, Barnes & Noble actually calls it, and capitalizes it, “All-New NOOK.” Not only is that cloying and annoying, like you’re doing their advertising for them (see also: the exclamation point on Yahoo!), but it’s going to look really silly when it’s no longer new. What are they going to call the next models? The Even Newer NOOK? The All-New All-New NOOK? The Newest NOOK Imaginable?
These two readers have the same latest-generation, six-inch E Ink screen as the latest Kindle: supercrisp black type against very light gray. But they’re smaller, because they do away with the Kindle’s thumb keyboard. Instead, they have the infrared-sensor E Ink touch screens that debuted on much more expensive Sony e-readers.
Todays video - Never go home unexpectedly.....
Todays Irish Catholic joke
An Irishman goes into the confessional box after years of being away from the Church.
There's a fully equipped bar with Guinness on tap. On the other
wall is a dazzling array of the finest cigars and chocolates.
Then the priest comes in.
wall is a dazzling array of the finest cigars and chocolates.
Then the priest comes in.
"Father, Forgive me, for it's been a very long time since I've been
To confession, but I must first admit that the Confessional box Is much more Inviting
To confession, but I must first admit that the Confessional box Is much more Inviting
than it used to be."
The Priest replies: "Get out. ...............You're on my side
Todays bonus dating joke
A while back, when I was considerably younger, I picked up a lovely date at her parents' home.
I'd scraped together some money to take her to a fancy restaurant.
She ordered the most expensive items on the menu. Shrimp cocktail. Lobster Patron. Champagne.
I asked her, "Does your mother feed you like that when you eat at home?"
She ordered the most expensive items on the menu. Shrimp cocktail. Lobster Patron. Champagne.
I asked her, "Does your mother feed you like that when you eat at home?"
"No," she replied. "but my mother's not expecting a blow job tonight."
I said "Would you care for dessert?"
I said "Would you care for dessert?"
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