Middle Class

A Pew Research Study has a great graphic....let's see if I can get it in..... okay, I can't, but check ir out!

There's 84 stats that prove the dicline of the middle class, but you have to make your own mind up about what makes it so...

and go figure, US News gives us figures demonstrating that the decline of a middle class is a first world problem.

We the People of these United States of America recognize the corrupting influence of money in our body politic and acknowledge that our elected representatives are unable to reform a corrupted system of campaign finance that they are beholden to,  and therefore do hereby amend the Constitution of The United States in an attempt to restore integrity to our campaign-finance and election processes by:

establishing publicly financed elections to  abolish any undue influences of monied-special-interests,

to ensure that money is never again confused with and equated to free speech,

abolishing the system of legalized bribery of elected represtentatives known as lobbying.

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The above is one initiative of Integrative Activism, a business designed to promote the common good through,
----establishing a more comprehensive charity system supporting those doing good works

---- the creation and promotion of public education campaigns

Asheville Water

The vultures are trying to strip the flesh from Asheville's infra-structure, the water system in particular. Yep, there's big money to be made by a few at the expense of the many. Fortunately there is a good man working to bring the facts into the light. I hope that we rally together and Save Asheville's Water. Hopefully Tim Moffit won't get the evil gang to void our City charter in an act of vengence or desperation.

Don't Roof Rack Me Bro is a video you ought to watch. ABC, CNN and a bunch of others covered the story, like Cognitive Dissidence....a great site!

It's amazing that the Republicons are supporting Mitt Rob-me and Paul Lying, but hey, they have control of most of the voting machines and they have passed some great voter supression laws. Pennsylvania is an incredible case.  Despite overwhelming evidence that there has never beenone documented case of in person voter fraud and explicit language in the state constitution, the judge upheld the law, crazy.

Ohio is playing dirty too, at least the Republicons....

saving uncle sam

The super-rich may be hiding 20 Trillion dollars in offshore accounts. I don't think they're using that money for the common good. Some of them may even be domestic enemies of the USA.

 It's important to acknowledge that there are people working to undermine and destroy the USA. Liberals tend to focus on foriegn enemies and often underplay these threats. Conservatives  more commonly focus rhetoric on what they claim are threats to our country and way of life. Liberals rarely if ever point to domestic enemies of the state while conservatives are quick to villify anyone and everyone who hold views different than their own. The right-wing takes this to extremes and even claim that the President of these united states is a socialist. It is time to correct this imbalance. 

An easily identifiable domestic enemy of the state is Grover Norquist who famously stated that he, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub".

The villification of government is a poison in the body politic. It must end. Countless patriots have fought and died in many wars to ensure that our government survives. The government of the USA is the collective expression of the citizenry. It was the first modern democracy that inspired and changed the world. Every patriot that died in war, died for our government. A true patriot fights to make our government functional for We The People. A false patriot works to undermine a government designed to be Of, By and For The People. Anyone who works to "drown government in the bathtub" is obviously an enemy of the state.

It is time for good and true patriots to rally around the flag of liberty, identify the domestic enemies of our way of life and save Uncle Sam.

No one really likes to pay taxes. No one really likes to part with their hard earned money knowing that part of those funds will go for things that they don't want to support, but paying taxes is part of our civic responsibility. President Kennedy urged us to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Paying one's fair share of taxes is a minimum of what a citizen does for their country. Voodoo economics is a treasonous policy rejected former President George H. Bush and promoted shamelessly by today's Republican Party.

Uncle Sam needs your help. Save Uncle Sam from the domestic enemies who have poisoned the body politic.

Good News

The good news is that we may soon see peak population of humans on the planet. Ten billion people should about be our maximun population, so Hans claims.  

The solar road project seems pretty darn cool. I hope it is really viable. he DOE doesn't have anything on it that I'm aware of, but it does report that wave and tidal energy production has great potential. Maine is even developing the first commercial grid connected tidal energy project.  And if you like that, you should witness the hope shared by Justin Hall that we may have clean energy freed from the grids. Angela Belcher is growing energy and engineering evolution. Yep, growing energy. She thinks that we can design bacteria or viruses to utilize each element within the periodic table. Amory Lovins gives us a 40-year plan for energy that utilizes present technology and could save us trillions of dollars.

If that seems thrilling then you might want to check out what Juan Enriquez has to say about the life-code that will reshape the future. Yes it's more utopic vision from someone who knows a few things about genetics.

Technology is enabling us to code a better government and citizenship, good citizenship is working to make our society a better place. Perhaps someday the villification of government will cease to exist and our institutions will be restored as a source of pride.

We might even achieve human security if you believe Jody Williams and understand the vision she shares with us.

So much of the promise of a better tomorrow depends on the continuation of good science. Unfortunately there is an abundance of bad science polluting the noosphere. Perhaps we should work a bit reforming media because mass media.....well, media matters.

Tim Jackson delivered a great talk titled An Economic Reality Check that I have to view at another time. I have other things to do so I only was able to view bits and pieces today.

The Planet Wreckers have had a bad few weeks and you can read about that here.



Perhaps at a later time I'll post my own talk about my dream and the journey that created the dream, the dream of integrative activism...charity, education and civic duty.

Overkill

We thought one thing, then another thing happened. Well that's just what nature does. We hardly could even think about extinction, but Pliestocene extinctions seemed to follow humanities spread.

It's okay to be wrong. some people even say that it can be awesome.  Heck, it's better than that. Yet it can be even better to realize what you don't understand....but not to deny what you think you know. Just don't let what you think you know from learning what truely is.

Some where along the line, most of us become confused and concentrate too hard reinforceing  to be right

Finding the origins of humanity is an ongoing process like learning about any subject can become.  It's not hard to learn if one has an open mind. A little empathy can take one incredibly far. It's really not such a radical experiment, but it does need to be practiced.

I didn't realize that there is a Bold Predictions, Stearn Warnings theme at TED....let's take a look...
yeah, I had to start with Hansen....he didn't dissapoint. In that talk he stated that there are predictions that we may see 20-50% species extinctions by the end of the century....yeah, that's just in a century. What could happen in the next century, or the one after that? Too bad we don't have a better moral operating system. We are working on it though. Damon Horowitz calls for one and I've used "what should I do?" as a koan for many years now.

Integral Activism is an expression, a byproduct of that question and influenced in part by contemplating the eightfold path....and by lacking a career path. I also think that we can create a database of people along with what they have intellectually consumed....and by creating a ciriculum of what is most important to understand to become the best person a person can become. What are the most important insights? Perhaps I can find this discussion or create it on the TED site. Maybe that way we can cultivate wisdom so we don't have Our loss of wisdom....

Richard Wilkinson explained How economic inequality harms societies, another fantastic talk.



I just love those correlates.

The Next Collapse

It looks like I need to do some homework on Peter Schiff because he is warning us about another impending economic collapse that could be worse than that of 2008. Considering that he is a republican disciple of the Austrian school of economics, I'm not impressed or alarmed.

After listening to some of Rush today, I decided that I should check out Freedom Works. I was told I could download a starter kit, but I cant find it.

There were huge lines at Chick Fillet today. The Party of Prejudice gets the herd of sheeple to rally like nobodys business.

Sanford Weill now says that we should break up the too big to fail banks that he helped to create.