Turn Them Off!!

Peter Finch
35 sec

Cancer Early Detection Myth

G.E.Griffin
1 minute or so

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1026-1028

Reallocating croplands away from fuels and animal feed could boost food available for people by 70 percent without clearing more land, new research from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota research shows.

The world’s croplands could feed 4 billion more people than they do now just by shifting from producing animal feed and biofuels to producing exclusively food for human consumption, according to the research.

Existing cropland could feed 4 billion more
August 5, 2013
Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence News
[emphasis JS]

 

The president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, has announced the creation of a “Guaranteed Minimum Income” for all citizens. The president said, “Beneficiaries will be all of our fellow citizens who have an income below that which can assure them a dignified living, irrespective of age, class or professional situation.” According to Cyprus Mail, the policy will begin in June 2014. The exact level of the grant will be determined between now and then, but every citizen would be guaranteed “the minimum needs for a dignified living in a European Country.”

basic income news 

[emphasis JS]

thanks to Geneva Hagen 

 Having glimpsed just how unacceptable the world judges my demeanor, could I too strive to make up for my shortcomings? Practice a shit-eating grin until it becomes natural? Love the world twice as hard?

I see the appeal of getting with the program. But this is not my choice. Striving to meet others’ expectations may be a necessary cost of assimilation, but I am not going to do it.

Often I think my defiance is just delusional, self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves to compensate for their poverty and powerlessness. But sometimes I think it’s the only thing that has preserved me intact, and that what has been preserved is not just haughty caprice but in fact the meaning of my life. So this is what I told Mao: In lieu of loving the world twice as hard, I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost. I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it.
PaperTigers 
By Wesley Yang
New York

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1023-1025

Before the figures were revised, it appeared that wages and salary income in 2012 amounted to 44 percent of G.D.P., the lowest at any time since 1929, which is as far back as the data goes.

But the revisions cut that to 42.6 percent, which matched the revised 2010 figure as the lowest ever.

The flip side of that is that corporate profits after taxes amounted to a record 9.7 percent of G.D.P. Each of the last three years has been higher than the earlier record high, of 9.1 percent, which was set in 1929.
U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind
By FLOYD NORRIS
New York Times
Published: August 9, 2013
[emphasis JS] 

 

There’s also growing literature suggesting that direct cash transfers — the term of art for “giving poor people money” — is more effective than most programs providing goods like food or housing.

Join Wall Street. Save the world.
By Dylan Matthews,
Wonkblog

[emphasis JS]

Social protection must be reformed on the principle that everybody has a right to basic economic security, an unconditional basic income on which to survive in dignity. There are three standard objections.

Critics say it is unaffordable. This is untrue. Vast subsidies are given in handouts to corporations, the middle-class, and special interests, costing far more than providing everybody with a basic monthly grant. Moreover, after the financial crash, governments paid out billions to rescue the banks, enabling bankers to resume their lavish lifestyle. Instead, they could have provided their citizens with modest monthly stabilization grants, which would have revived growth much more effectively.
...
Critics say a basic income would give people ‘something for nothing.’ This is hypocritical; the wealthy receive something for nothing every time they inherit. Many have obtained their wealth not by brilliance but because policy changes have provided astronomical rewards for certain types of skill.
...
Society’s wealth depends far more on the contributions made by our forebears than anything we do ourselves. But we cannot say whose ancestors made which contributions. As inheritors, it would be fair if we all had a share of the proceeds of their collective investment, a sort of social dividend.
...
Critics say a basic income would induce laziness. This insults us as human beings. Almost everybody wants to better him or herself and would not be content with a basic income. And if there were a few idle people, it would scarcely matter; identifying and coercing them into jobs would cost more than letting them be.
...
Aristotle argued that to be civilized, we need aergia, laziness, so that we can reflect, deliberate, and take part in political life. We also need more time to do the work of caring for others, our community, and our environment. So, less labor, more self-chosen work and more real leisure! Basic income would help achieve that.
Pleasure before Business
Guy Standing
The European
[emphasis JS]

thanks to Geneva Hagen

Kill It! Who Are You?

Cornel West, 2013
57 sec


Cornel West, 2013
40 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1020-1022

You might learn that you’re not meant to be a doctor at all. Of course, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one. You can pound your round peg through the very square hole of medical school, then go off into the profession. And society will help you. Society has a cornucopia of resources to encourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do. To ease your grief, society offers alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don’t need. But all those too have their costs.
Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?
by Mark Edmundson
Oxford American

The Senate is unelected, unaccountable, unrepresentative, secretive, unethical and undemocratic — and a waste of your money.  Many senators have their jobs only because they are a friend of, or did favours for, a Prime Minister, and they have their job (with you paying their salary) until age 75 even if they do little or nothing.
Democracy Watch

The Lancet estimates that the three-year recessionary period from 2008 thru 2010 was a source in the United States for “4,750 excess suicide deaths.” This increase was not caused by genetically induced biochemical brain imbalances, but by criminal Wall Street practices.
By Bruce E. Levine
AlterNet
What's Behind ‘Substantial Increases’ in Suicide Rate for Middle-Aged Americans? Bad Economy Is Likely Culprit

A University Education In 2 minutes 25 seconds

Henry Giroux,
2 min, 25 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1017-1019

Sameness and repetition are among the chief causes of boredom. If they haunt marriages, they are even more powerfully at work in the realm of vocation. Once work went beyond the artisanal state, where farmers and craftsman had a personal hand in their productions, once the assembly line and its white-collar equivalent, the large bureaucratic office, came into being, work, owing to its repetitious nature, became one of the chief sources of boredom in the modern world.
Duh, Bor-ing
Joseph Epstein
Commentary
[emphasis JS]

A June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have “checked out” of them. Life may or may not suck any more than it did a generation ago, but our belief in “progress” has increased expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment. For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel.
...
We are today disengaged from our jobs and our schooling. Young people are pressured to accrue increasingly large student-loan debt so as to acquire the credentials to get a job, often one which they will have little enthusiasm about. And increasing numbers of us are completely socially isolated, having nobody who cares about us.
AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine
Why Life in America Can Literally Drive You Insane
[emphasis JS]

I’ve always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.

Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.
Paper Tigers
By Wesley Yang
New York

Psychologist And Daughter

Psychologist and Daughter,
1 min 58 sec