CIVIL LIBERTIES

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com 48% See Government Today As A Threat to Individual Rights - Rated 02:20am • 6 reviews • GIGrafx • conservative politics • rasmussenreports.com

mother and child

stunning and beautiful

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com Legends Online: Joyce Tenneson Legends Online: Joyce Tenneson Rated Jul 02 • 2 reviews • horseyoucameinon + 1 Friend • photography • pdngallery.com

tatooed woman with red ribbon in her hair

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com bluejams favorite websites - StumbleUpon Rated May 26 • 3 reviews • largeGROUCH + 2 Friends • stumblers • stumbleupon.com

marilyn

such a lovely beauty

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com Marilyn+Monroe212-727466.jpg (JPEG Image, 295x400 pixels)

"TOO BIG TO FAIL"

from the May 16, 2010 New York Times

clipped from www.nytimes.com Op-Ed Columnist The Great Consolidation By ROSS DOUTHAT Published: May 16, 2010 This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son might be about to win a Republican Senate primary. This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it. But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

DRAGON TREE

found in tenerife, one of the canary islands. it exudes "dragon's blood"---a red sap when cut.

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com 10 Strangest Trees on Earth | ZuZu Top Rated Apr 26 • 33 reviews • xineann + 3 Friends • environment, photography • zuzutop.com 10 Strangest Trees on Earth

ENCHANTING

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"CULTIVATE YOUR CURVES..."

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com ~Cultivate your curves - they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided~ Mae West~

Image by Kristamas Klousch

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IMAGE BY KRISTAMAS KLOUSCH

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RED

clipped from www.chictip.com

"THE GLORY OF POLAND"

April 12, 2010, New York Times op-ed.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Poland should shame every nation that believes peace and reconciliation are impossible, every state that believes the sacrifice of new generations is needed to avenge the grievances of history. The thing about competitive victimhood, a favorite Middle Eastern pastime, is that it condemns the children of today to join the long list of the dead. For scarcely any nation has suffered since 1939 as Poland, carved up by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, transformed by the Nazis into the epicenter of their program to annihilate European Jewry, land of Auschwitz and Majdanek, killing field for millions of Christian Poles and millions of Polish Jews, brave home to the Warsaw Uprising, Soviet pawn, lonely Solidarity-led leader of post-Yalta Europe’s fight for freedom, a place where, as one of its great poets, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote, “History counts its skeletons in round numbers” — 20,000 of them at Katyn.

"The History of White People"

clipped from www.nytimes.com Who’s White? Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

clipped from www.nytimes.com If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

FASCINATING READING

clipped from us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com Global Guerrillas JOURNAL: Resilient Communities and Darknets Featured in Time Magazine

QUESTION: CAPITALISM, THE GAME?

posted by John Robb, 23 march 2010.

clipped from globalguerrillas.typepad.com If you built a massively multiplayer game called Capitalism (you could even throw in Democracy), based on the way it runs today, would anyone play it?  __________ NOTE: here's a quick response to those that maintain that the system we have today is a perversion of Capitalism and not Capitalism itself.  The implication is that the term is being misused in the question above.  Some thoughts: What makes Capitalism so weak, as a system, that it is so easily and horribly misused and/or perverted? Any theory that relies on a tightly bound set of  theoretical assumptions and lofty preconditions in order to perform effectively sounds very similar to an ideology.   It's unlikely that any existing economic system, including Capitalism, is the best of all possible systems (we aren't Panglossian here).   So, if the technology is available to compete with it (it is), why don't we?  May the best system win.