Very much worth two minutes of your life.
"How we got into this hole - ... that's $4 trillion right there; part of the way you fix this problem is don't do those things..."
(hat tip Andrew Tobias; discussion at Sierra Voices )
Stale blog offering Perspective on ideas, issues and life from Nevada County, California - belaboring the obvious since 2003
Friday, September 30, 2011
3 comments:
Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...
Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.
* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.
If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.
New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)
Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.
The right-wing, including the local right-wing, has gone crazy over this little speech, which is now viral on the Internet.
ReplyDeleteAs usual with the right-wing, the message is the same everywhere (eliminating the time-consuming annoyance of actually having to think about it): she's a Marxist, a socialist, etc.
Partisan derangement syndrome.
The "socialist" business reminds me of this parable (reprinted in Forbes):
ReplyDelete"[William Gates Sr.] says that the wealthy in America are the product not just of brains and hard work, but beneficiaries of a stable government, a strong educational system, and often of government-funded research and technology. As the rich grow richer, they should expect to give something back.
Gates warms with a parable of his own invention: Imagine, he says, that God is in his office looking over his portfolio. God's stocks are down--he's too heavy in the dot-coms--and to reverse his fortunes, he summons the next two spirits to be born on earth. He proposes an auction. The winner will be born in the United States, the loser in Ethiopia. He asks the two spirits to bid by writing down what percentage of their net worth they are prepared to cede to God upon their death. Hearing the terms, God's adviser (his accountant?) pulls him aside and says it will never work. Both spirits will certainly write 100%.
"What is it worth to be an American?" William H. Gates Sr. asks..."
Interesting!
ReplyDeleteI always thought Bill Gates' dad sounded like a good guy. He wrote:
"Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes"
http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Our-Commonwealth-Accumulated-Fortunes/dp/0807047198/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1317511763&sr=8-2