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Here’s a chart showing the Club of Rome’s 1972 predictions for the future, as given in Limits to Growth, and how things have worked out since then. Pretty accurately. Frighteningly accurately. I’ll take the liberty of reprinting it, for those who don’t want to click on the link. It’s copyright etc. the Smithsonian magazine. The […] From Dwight D. Eisenhower: “If all Americans want is security, they can go to prison.” Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, page 745 He said that in the 1950s; he no doubt didn’t mean it to be a prediction.
So apparently, the Supreme Court case on Obama’s healthcare reform is rapidly descending into madness. Let’s start with the objection to mandates. Paul Krugman gives the counterarguments here. To quote: Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage OK, while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why […] Jim Hightower on Common Dreams has an eloquent defense of the Post Office, including the fact that it’s not actually broken at all–the reason it’s having a budget shortfall is that Congress basically tried to kill it.From the article: The privatizers squawk that USPS has gone some $13 billion in the hole during the past […] Our quote of the day comes from William Jennings Bryan: “They call that man a statesman whose ear is tuned to catch the slightest pulsations of a pocketbook, and denounce as a demagogue any one who dares to listen to the heartbeat of humanity.” Quoted in Jason Goodwin, Greenback, page 275 of the hardcover edition. […] This is good news: Obama just nominated Jim Yong Kim for head of the world bank. Who is Jim Yong Kim? Apparently he’s a physician and an expert on health, which might be good to have at the head of an institution whose mission is to actually do good instead of just make a profit. […] Our quote of the day comes from Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of the New Republic, in 1989. “The cheer with which Western commentators greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s tease that the Berlin Wall might come down when the conditions that generate the need for it disappear is another sign of how credulous we have become in receiving blandishments […] I mentioned our screwy patent system last post; today comes the news that the Supreme Court has decided that, essentially, natural laws can’t be patented. From the article: In general, Justice Breyer wrote, an inventor must do more than “recite a law of nature and then add the instruction ‘apply the law.’ ” “Einstein, we […] Consumerist.com reports that Microsoft has patented a system that would let people pay to skip commercials. That could be the start of a rant about our broken patent system (is this really something that needs a patent? Isn’t it sort of obvious?), but I’m on a different rant today. Specifically: People will pay to avoid […] Well, this is bad. An article on Truthout details how a new Pennsylvania law makes it difficult for us to even know what chemicals frackers are using, much less what they’re doing to us, because they’re trade secrets. Check out how difficult it is to get, and especially to share, information that may be needed […] |
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