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POPSDorothea Lange - Artist With Vision Beyond The Lens Of Any Camera (Errata Clog)
In response to my clog post entitled, "Strong Support For Health Care Reform With Public Option," I have participated in some discussions about the stunning work of Dorothea Lange. As many of you may know, Dorothea Lange is the photographer/artist who took the famous picture, "Migrant Mother," which is featured in my clog. I entitled this picture incorrectly as "The Dust Bowl," so please accept my apologies for this error. If any of my clogs ever contain incorrect information of this nature, I ask that my readers let me know right away. Aside from correcting errata, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight Dorothea Lange's work further in the clips below. I clipped these bits from the My Hero website. Dorothea Lange is an interesting individual who, in my opinion, captured the class struggles in this country better than any artist of her day with a medium that was not then fully realized. Dorothea Lange died on October 16, 1965. If you are not familiar with the life
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POPSCreative Photography by Ryan Robinson Absolutely stunning examples of creative photography by Ryan Robinson, superb talented photographer, who was born and raised in a small farmtown with an enormous extended family.Ryan loves to make people laugh, the smell of spring, the silence of a winter snowfall, witty people, hard work and the dogs who smile.
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POPSCorrupted doctors When you lied once at least, who will trust you further? :cool: Striking example of our totally corrupted medicine and health care. Corrupted by whom? Who corrupt society and its institutions? How we calling those who perform the corruption and their accomplices? If these organized individuals do corrupt our society, how can we expect any benefits for our health and well being from them, their actions? Lie cannot last forever and in the end the truth will find its way out. Who will resist to make it happen?
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POPSSocialism Kills: The Human Cost of Delayed Economic Reform in India
What would the impact on social indicators have been had India commenced economic reform one decade earlier, and enjoyed correspondingly faster economic growth and improvements in human development indicators? This paper seeks to estimate the number of "missing children," "missing literates," and "missing non-poor" resulting from delayed reform, slower economic growth, and hence, slower improvement of social indicators. It finds that with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India's socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither. by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar Swaminathan Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity
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POPSGIANT Crystals! Uh, yeah, I know, it's a stupid title and I normally have something more cerebral to say, but this is just plain cool. I wonder what could possibly explain my fascination with these crystals?
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POPSNonviolence As Their Weapon "It was 2001. Khatib watched in horror as Israeli soldiers shot an unarmed friend at a checkpoint. Two weeks later, the militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade made a revenge attack on the checkpoint, killing seven soldiers. "My first reaction was 'Good for Al Aqsa!' " Khatib said. Then he realized the dead soldiers belonged to a different unit, not the one on duty when his friend was shot. "It made me wonder: This cycle of death, of violent action and reaction, how we can break it?"
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POPSInvested In War n 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets. Interestingly, the report also mentioned that members of the senate foreign relations and armed services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts. The burning questions for many people are the following: Are there any ethics left in politics? Could the universe ever exist without wars? The answer is no, because wars have been a major part of our social make up, in addition they force geostrategic changes, make profits for the elite, and reduce population.
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POPSSperm Whale Classified Carbon Neutral Prior analysis of whale carbon dioxide emissions attributes 25 percent of carbon dioxide emissions total to the animals in the Southern Ocean region. Subsequent computation lowers the whales’ carbon dioxide emissions estimate to 0.3 percent, which is equivalent to 17 million tons of carbon a year. Lavery and team explain that there are low levels of iron in the Southern Ocean, and the sperm whales each contribute about 10 grams of iron to the surface. Since the iron comes from the whales’ waste material, it takes the form of liquid plumes, effectively acting as a fertilizer and encouraging growth of plankton. Depending on the exact values and environmental conditions, sperm whales can then be classified “either a net carbon sink or as carbon-neutral,” Discovery writes.
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POPSGood Intentions with Disastrous Effects
But fraud and corruption are only part of the failed system that is Medicare – the other is basic accounting. In this morning’s Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson compares the troubles with Medicare to the “public option,” which he calls a “mirage,” that is gaining strength in Congress. While Medicare is a monopoly, the proposed government-run health insurance plan seeks to attract investment capital to subsidize the enormous costs that it will incur (such as marketing campaigns). If this fails, which it undoubtedly would, Congress would step in to bail it out. When asked why it has taken Medicare so long to figure out they were being scammed, Attorney General Eric Holder told CBS’s Steve Kroft, "I think lack of resources probably. And then I think people I don't think necessarily thought that something as well intentioned as Medicare and Medicaid would necessarily attract fraudsters. But I think we have to understand that it certainly has." Good Intentions maybe but...
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POPSThe Mircale Of Perm Russia's up and coming cultural capital. Russia overcoming its soviet past? Or Russia coming to terms with its soviet past? Either way, a place i'd love to visit and experience for myself!
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POPSto beaver or not to beaver hmmmm- sometimes a plan just isn't in the thought....but more in the thought of "really" thinking the thing through..............maybe they should call this to bear or not to bear..............
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POPSNew Seven Layer Whopper! Can You Handle it? This Windows 7 Whopper might be estimated at five times larger than a typical quarter pounder. Thus, if you do the math, this 7-layered Whopper could be using 7,000 gallons of water to produce (give or take, depending on the size of the patties). In a world running out of fresh water supplies (fossil water), that's a huge quantity to plow through in one meal.
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POPS Microsoft Windows 7 The biggest knock against Microsoft is making the installation of Windows 7 seem more complicated than it really is. There are five editions of Windows 7: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. To tell you which version of Windows 7 you should choose, Microsoft lays out an atrocious mess of a chart to illustrate upgrade paths.
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POPSBeing vs Doing We're afraid of losing control. If we really slowed down to a more balanced pace and took time to enjoy life, what might happen? Would anything get done? Would we survive? Frightened of loosening our grip and free-falling into an imagined abyss,we struggle to impose our agenda on life while contracting away from the natural, ever-changing, and unpredictable flow of being. Like Arjuna on the battlefield when Lord Krishna reveals his splendor in the Bhagavad Gita, the mind is innately terrified of being because it represents mysterious, unexplored terrain. In fact, the mind's job is to resist the unknown and create a false ground of security, constructed of beliefs and identities designed to protect us from the groundlessness of impermanence and change. As the great spiritual traditions teach, however, our essential nature is far vaster than the mind can encompass. A constant challenge - the great balancing act.
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POPSThe death of language? "What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege. "Its also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express." For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are a living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too. ____ According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered. ____ "Most people are not at all interested in the death of languages," Claude Hagege says.
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POPSPolitical Essay From The Mind of Einstein Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. (Albert Einstein, 1949)
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POPS Hammer Wants An Anvil Fawning “Inconvenient Truth Teller” article inside paints him as a sort of goof savant … a bit like Chauncey Gardiner of “Being There,” he’s been in Washington DC his entire life, everyone likes him, and suddenly they think he’s a genius. The three-decade gaffe-and-reverse record requires some acrobatics, though. The Newsweek scribblers clearly like his go-lite, wack-a-mole strategy though they are big enough to admit at the end that people who actually know what they are talking about say it won’t work. It’s not exactly the Joe Biden embed that I wished out loud NYT’s Dexter Filkins would do as a counterbalance to his McChyrstal piece earlier this week,* but close. Some administration officials, led by Biden, appear to hope that American forces can rely more on counterterrorism operations"attacks by Predator drones and small elite units on terrorist hiding places"to hold Afghanistan together and defeat Al Qaeda. But critics call this “splitting the baby" and say . . .
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSAmreeka: The Movie As luck would have it, Muna has come to the US at the start of the Iraq War. Anti-Arab sentiment is raging in some quarters. Her brother-in-law, a doctor, has lost patients due to backlash, and her sister is quickly losing patience with the hatred and fear that mars their lives. Though educated and with experience in banking, Muna is unable to find work in her field, but knowing that she must become independent, continues to search for employment, finally finding a job at a local fast food restaurant. Tensions build as Muna, ashamed, tries to hide her place of work from her son and sister; as Fadi deals with bullying bigots at school; and as her sister's family begins to unravel in response to the pressures of the war, and the enormous hardships resulting from anti-Arab bias. Through it all, Muna not only survives, but remains hopeful and thankful for each kind gesture from strangers and new-found friends who come to her assistance in ways small and not so small.
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POPSRape and Black Roots What this means is that, in defiance of the law and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long been occurring in the United States, about which we, as a society, have for just as long been in deep denial. I have never given an admixture DNA test of a black person who turned out to be 100 percent African, no matter how dark or “African” they appear to be. Some of this inter-racial sexuality was voluntary, we now know, but far more was coerced, a reflection or a result of a profound imbalance of power. Because of a confluence of factors — the illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape as the source of these relationships, infidelity, guilt, shame, and disgrace — both black people and white people had a certain interest in keeping these relationships in the dark, as it were.
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