ECOLOGY / GLOBAL WARMING
The Pacific Ocean garbage patch is growing ... It's now bigger than the state of Texas.
== AP news headline April 2009
"In 2006, the greenhouse gases produced by U.S. farm animals exceeded the emissions of the iron, steel and cement industries combined."
== Lisa Morgan, The Atlantic September 2008
LOST JOBS IN AMERICA
595,000 jobs lost in January 2009, worst in 35 years
== AP News headline February 2009
Jobless rate jumps to 8.1 percent in February, highest since late 1983; employers cut 651,000 jobs...
== AP News headline March 2009
3.6 million jobs lost since the beginning of the recession
The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since late 1983, as a wide range of employers eliminated a net total of 663,000 jobs.
== AP news 3 April 2009
{double that number for the real figure of 17% unemployemnt}
Americans lost 742,000 jobs in March 2009.
== Air America Radio newsletter
OTHER ECONOMIC CONCERNS
"17% fewer dot-com and other standard web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter of 2008 than in the same period in 2007."
== Time Magazine
Chinese exports dropped 17.5% in January 2009 compared to a year earlier
== Time Magazine
Household debt in the U.S. soared from 60% of income in 1982 to 130% in 2007.
== Time Magazine
THE OLIGARCHY
"Over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent [of U.S. taxpayers] saw their share of the nation's income double, from 11.3& to 22.1%, but their tax burden shrank by about one third [from 33.1 percent to 22.8% percent]."
{ **emphasis added } == The Nation Magazine
"From 1973 to 1985, the [U.S.] financial sector never earned more than 16 prcent of domestic corporate profits ... [During the Bush Administration] it reached 41 percent."
== Simon Johnson, in The Atlantic
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Essay #87: "The 2012 Hoax"
This whole thing about The World Is Gonna End! on 12 December or 21 December of 2012 is just another manipulation to instill more fear into the population.
The purpose? A population that lives in fear – about anything, and especially when the fear is about everything – is to that extent paralyzed and diverted from addressing the very real dangers that continually threaten the existence of Mankind here on the Blue Planet.
War, pestilence, famine, death, cancer, droughts and floods, hurricanes, Chinese toys, exploding auto tires, vampires, unions and-or management, white supremacists, Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, atheist extremists, illegal aliens here to take your job, environmentalists here to take your job, Democrats who want to take your guns, rednecks who carry guns to the grocery store, wolves who eat your stock, deer who eat your crops, homeless people who just want something to eat, bankers who want to foreclose your home, a ‘healthcare’ industry that makes people sick – the list goes on and on.
* * * * * * * * Remember the Y2K phenomenon? At least that non-event got a few retired COBOL programmers put back to work updating software badly designed so as not to handle the four-digit year and-or the rollover to first digit of 2. Other than that, what actually happened? A peak in sales of bottled water, camping supplies, and Meals Ready To Eat. Lots and lots of fear that ended in a gigantic fizzle.
* * * * * * * * And let us not forget the decades-long Baby On Board fad. This spread to the U.S from Germany about the time that Reagan was running for President, and still flourishes in the U.K. It began during the same time period that the unthinking religionist sheeple masses were first organizing their political shenanigans, and the very unconscious meaning behind the whole deal was connected to the ‘Jesus Is Returning At The Millennium’ myth.
Using no logic whatsoever, if Jesus returns in 2000 or 2001, then he’d have to be twenty or so, so he’d have to be born anywhere from 1978 to maybe 1980, or if by 1982 then he’d be 18 years old, that could work. So any child of a Christian family could be very, very special, there’s no way to know, so for a couple years, let’s not kill babies and let’s all drive real carefully, because anyone could be the proud parent of a kid who survives being a teenager in America and is revealed by hosts of angels to be the Son of the Christian God-head. (Film at eleven!)
Logic? What if Jesus comes back as a girl? Or even better, someone born into the LGBT community? And the arrogance of us Americans: we are 6% of the overpopulated planet, any such godling is three times more likely to be Chinese.
Well, those yellow diamond-shaped signs that were stuck inside millions of car windows got old after a while, but the kitsch-dealers kept it going. ‘Pet on board’ and other variations, then ‘Driver carries no cash’ (as if robbers and car-jackers might obey the sign), which eventually evolved into ‘Baby carries no cash’, which was kind of the end of the silliness here in America.
We protected all those babies and then none of them grew up to be Jesus. Bummer!
* * * * * * * * This whole Mayan calendar 2012 myth is just more of the same, a waste of time designed to distract and divert the populace from Reality.
Forests will be cut down to report opinions for and against this Mayan myth from dozens of uninformed opinion-mongers who will promote their worthless books on the boob-tube and will draw millions of dollars out of the pockets of the ever-eager fools and idiots that live right in your neighborhood.
Nothing much can be done to prevent the meaningless frenzy, as the idiots are too many among us. It will all play out as the previous such phenomena did, including the people with nothing better to do who will buy tickets and take time off work and get happily drunk at End of The World parties around the globe – “Fox News On The Scene, Live!” – and when they wake up on December 15th they will still feel hangover-ish, and in the next week or so will receive the charges for their excesses on their credit card billing statements.
Copyright 2009 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved
The purpose? A population that lives in fear – about anything, and especially when the fear is about everything – is to that extent paralyzed and diverted from addressing the very real dangers that continually threaten the existence of Mankind here on the Blue Planet.
War, pestilence, famine, death, cancer, droughts and floods, hurricanes, Chinese toys, exploding auto tires, vampires, unions and-or management, white supremacists, Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, atheist extremists, illegal aliens here to take your job, environmentalists here to take your job, Democrats who want to take your guns, rednecks who carry guns to the grocery store, wolves who eat your stock, deer who eat your crops, homeless people who just want something to eat, bankers who want to foreclose your home, a ‘healthcare’ industry that makes people sick – the list goes on and on.
And the big frenzy about Jesus Is Coming, soon swept aside by celebu-tart news stories. (My favorite from back then was the “Jesus is coming – and boy is He p*ssed!” bumper stickers.)
At one company where I worked in the 1990s, some of the Christians spent their weekends up in the mountains training for the End Times; what was most amazing to me was that one of my Jewish co-workers was training with them.
Nothing really happened, Jesus is still missing, it was all simply another fear-based ruckus in the media about nothing, as will be the increasing hooferaw about the 2012 farce.
Each of these media-driven programs of fear-mongering will often run for years. The Y2K thing was lengthened by the silly furor over when exactly the Millennium changed. The big Millennium parties were held in Las Vegas and Tokyo and elsewhere on 31 December 1999 (the False Millennium) and then the B Team held further parties on 31 December 2000 – because they could. (The facts are simple: the artificial First Millennium began 1 January in Year One, therefore the Second Millennium began on 1 January of the year 2001. Duh!)
Using no logic whatsoever, if Jesus returns in 2000 or 2001, then he’d have to be twenty or so, so he’d have to be born anywhere from 1978 to maybe 1980, or if by 1982 then he’d be 18 years old, that could work. So any child of a Christian family could be very, very special, there’s no way to know, so for a couple years, let’s not kill babies and let’s all drive real carefully, because anyone could be the proud parent of a kid who survives being a teenager in America and is revealed by hosts of angels to be the Son of the Christian God-head. (Film at eleven!)
Logic? What if Jesus comes back as a girl? Or even better, someone born into the LGBT community? And the arrogance of us Americans: we are 6% of the overpopulated planet, any such godling is three times more likely to be Chinese.
Well, those yellow diamond-shaped signs that were stuck inside millions of car windows got old after a while, but the kitsch-dealers kept it going. ‘Pet on board’ and other variations, then ‘Driver carries no cash’ (as if robbers and car-jackers might obey the sign), which eventually evolved into ‘Baby carries no cash’, which was kind of the end of the silliness here in America.
We protected all those babies and then none of them grew up to be Jesus. Bummer!
Forests will be cut down to report opinions for and against this Mayan myth from dozens of uninformed opinion-mongers who will promote their worthless books on the boob-tube and will draw millions of dollars out of the pockets of the ever-eager fools and idiots that live right in your neighborhood.
Nothing much can be done to prevent the meaningless frenzy, as the idiots are too many among us. It will all play out as the previous such phenomena did, including the people with nothing better to do who will buy tickets and take time off work and get happily drunk at End of The World parties around the globe – “Fox News On The Scene, Live!” – and when they wake up on December 15th they will still feel hangover-ish, and in the next week or so will receive the charges for their excesses on their credit card billing statements.
If you want to have a little fun with these dolts, then any time anyone brings up the subject of 2012 as The End of The World, offer them ten dollars for their automobile or $100 for their house, based on a written & notarized contract that becomes due on, oh, January First of 2013. If they won’t sign such a contract, then they are fools for promoting a mythical event that they don’t really believe in. And if anyone does sign such a contract with you, then they are truly major idiots who deserve to be thinned from the herd, and they truly deserve their comeuppance in 2013 when you show up with the paperwork to collect your new house or car.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
April 2009 Quotations
{{ NOTE: This is post #150 on this blog }}
"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
"Gluttony is not a secret vice."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]
"Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?"
~~ Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University
"I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay."
~~ Pres. Barack Obama, 23 February 2009
"Real hell is there in the office."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"Nothing in this life happens without a before and after."
~~ Doris R. Meredith
“We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.”
~~ author Philip Pullman
"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ George V. Higgins
"People try to alter my grumpy, curmudgeonly ways by telling me that 'You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar'. But why would I want to attract flies at all?"
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, nbut not against art."
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]
"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."
~~ actress Shelley Winters [1920-2006]
"It's okay to be fat. So you're fat. Just be fat and shut up about it."
~~ Roseanne Barr
"We rarely repent of having eaten too little."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness is the reward of character."
~~ George Santayana [1853-1962]
"Life, of course, is without meaning, and if you find something that gives it meaning, you're very fortunate."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]
"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]
"Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years, arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist
"Stay alert: The Republicans and the fascists lost the election in 2008, but they did not surrender."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The world is illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and [real] in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of comprehending. Our business is to wake up."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
"Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect."
~~ Thomas S. Monson
"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself. The height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. And this law is: the expansion of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [1452-1519]
"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62] (in the "Pensées")
"Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]
"For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world."
~~ writer Dawn Powell [1896-1965]
"The logic of business is coersion, monopoly and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice' or 'service' or universal affluence."
~~ Thomas C. Frank
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"Where there is no vision, the people will perish." ~~ Proverbs 29:18
"In Hollywood, they'll forgive you if you're two-faced, but not if you're two-chinned."
~~ actress Colleen Dewhurst [1924-91]
"Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names."
~~ David O. Selznick [1902-65]
"A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car."
~~ Kenneth Tynan
"When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected."
~~ Shirley Temple
"When I was young, I was terribly concerned with what people thought of me. But now I'm more concerned with what I think of them."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]
"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
~~ Lucille Ball [1911-89]
"A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself."
~~ actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]
"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
"Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are deliberate works of art."
~~ actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]
"To survive [in Hollywood] you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony."
~~ actress Billie Burke [1884-1970]
"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."
~~ Colette [1873-1954]
"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. ... The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
~~ Ken Kesey [1935-2001] (in 1994)
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
"One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential for one man to make a film."
~~ Stanley Kubrick [1928-99]
"Gluttony is not a secret vice."
~~ Orson Welles [1915-85]
"Why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?"
~~ Morton Smith, professor at Columbia University
"I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay."
~~ Pres. Barack Obama, 23 February 2009
"Real hell is there in the office."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]
"Nothing in this life happens without a before and after."
~~ Doris R. Meredith
“We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.”
~~ author Philip Pullman
"This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid."
~~ George V. Higgins
"People try to alter my grumpy, curmudgeonly ways by telling me that 'You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar'. But why would I want to attract flies at all?"
~~ G.E. Nordell
"Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, nbut not against art."
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1919-2008]
"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."
~~ actress Shelley Winters [1920-2006]
"It's okay to be fat. So you're fat. Just be fat and shut up about it."
~~ Roseanne Barr
"We rarely repent of having eaten too little."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]
"Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness is the reward of character."
~~ George Santayana [1853-1962]
"Life, of course, is without meaning, and if you find something that gives it meaning, you're very fortunate."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]
"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]
"Barack Obama was elected President because the governing philosophy of the last 30 years, arrant Reaganism, proved itself bankrupt."
~~ Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist
"Stay alert: The Republicans and the fascists lost the election in 2008, but they did not surrender."
~~ G.E. Nordell
"The world is illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and [real] in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of comprehending. Our business is to wake up."
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]
"Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect."
~~ Thomas S. Monson
"You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself. The height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. And this law is: the expansion of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others."
~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [1452-1519]
"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62] (in the "Pensées")
"Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded."
~~ Paul Bowles [1910-99]
"For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world."
~~ writer Dawn Powell [1896-1965]
"The logic of business is coersion, monopoly and the destruction of the weak, not 'choice' or 'service' or universal affluence."
~~ Thomas C. Frank
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
~~ Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]
"Where there is no vision, the people will perish." ~~ Proverbs 29:18
"In Hollywood, they'll forgive you if you're two-faced, but not if you're two-chinned."
~~ actress Colleen Dewhurst [1924-91]
"Always forgive your enemies. Just don't forget their names."
~~ David O. Selznick [1902-65]
"A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car."
~~ Kenneth Tynan
"When a child abruptly quadruples her family's income, some changes may be expected."
~~ Shirley Temple
"When I was young, I was terribly concerned with what people thought of me. But now I'm more concerned with what I think of them."
~~ Bette Davis [1908-89]
"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
~~ Lucille Ball [1911-89]
"A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is someone who talks to you about yourself."
~~ actress Lisa Kirk [1925-90]
"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]
"Beautiful young people are random acts of nature, but beautiful old people are deliberate works of art."
~~ actress Butterfly McQueen [1911-95]
"To survive [in Hollywood] you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony."
~~ actress Billie Burke [1884-1970]
"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."
~~ Colette [1873-1954]
"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. ... The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
~~ Ken Kesey [1935-2001] (in 1994)
{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}
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