Monday, April 8, 2013
Please Sign Petition to Stop Proposed Cuts in Social Security   SHARE Mr. President, please do not cut Social Security! Mr. President, the chained CPI is a cut to Social Security benefits that would hurt seniors--it's an idea not befitting a Democratic president. If you want to reform Social Security, make the wealthy pay their fair share by lifting the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes. Sign the Petition!

       Saturday, April 6, 2013
Obama Caves on Social Security   SHARE President Obama reportedly is unveiling a budget using the chained CPI inflation measure to cheat elderly Americans out of the benefits they were promised. In two previous posts I've explained the perversity of the current debate about Social Security. The tax-favored private components of America's mixed private-public retirement system -- programs like employer pensions, 401Ks, and IRAs -- are inefficient, volatile, and subject to manipulation by overcompensated, fee-extracting money managers. In contrast, the Social Security program is simple and efficient, and has low overhead costs. And yet the bipartisan establishment, including many "progressive" Democrats as well as Republicans, wants to cut Social Security -- the part that works -- and expand tax-favored private savings, the inefficient, unstable, and inequitable part.

(3 comments)        Friday, March 29, 2013
Time Magazine: Scholars Split on the "Tomb of Jesus"   SHARE When the Discovery Channel aired a TV documentary last year raising the possibility that archeologists had found the family tomb of Jesus Christ in the hills behind Jerusalem, it caused a huge backlash among Christians. The claim, after all, challenged one of the cornerstones of Christian faith -- that Jesus, after his crucifixion, rose bodily to heaven in his physical form. The Lost Tomb of Jesus, made by Hollywood director James Cameron and Canadian investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, was shown only once on Discovery. Britain's Channel 4 canceled its own plans to air the documentary, which reexamines an archeological find from 1980 in which a crypt was found containing what were said to be the ossuaries of Joseph, Mary, Jesus, the son of Joseph, Mariamne (possibly Mary Magdalene, say the filmmakers) and Judah, son of Jesus.

       Thursday, March 28, 2013
Did Republican Greed, Hypocrisy and Exploitation Finally Kill the GOP?   SHARE I think it's rather ironic that George W. Bush's desire to keep the Mexican borders open is what might have put the final nail in the GOP coffin. He did it so businesses could pay sub-minimum wage, without benefits, etc. But this essay on Pat Buchanan's swan song at MSNBC implies that this may be the case...

       Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Billionaires Dump US Stocks as Economist Warns of 90% Market Correction   SHARE Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast. Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of "disappointing performance" in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods. In the latest filing for Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in "consumer product stocks" by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel.

(3 comments)        Saturday, March 23, 2013
Forbes' Billionaire World Map   SHARE For the 27th annual Forbes billionaires list, our team of reporters spent months tracking down the wealthiest people around the globe. Ultimately, we found 1,426 billionaires who are together worth a total of $5.4 trillion -- a record sum. The combined wealth of billionaires from the United States, $1.87 trillion, is larger than the combined wealth of all the billionaires from Europe, $1.55 trillion, or any other continent. BRIC nations represent three of the five countries with the largest combined net worth: Russian billionaires have amassed $427.1 billion, ranking second. Followed by Germans, $296.25 billion, Chinese, $262.96 billion, and Indians $193.6 billion.

(2 comments)        Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Elizabeth Warren: Minimum Wage Would Be $22 An Hour If It Had Kept Up With Productivity   SHARE Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a case for increasing the minimum wage last week during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing, in which she cited a study that suggested the federal minimum wage would have stood at nearly $22 an hour today if it had kept up with increased rates in worker productivity. "If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour," she said, speaking to Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has studied the economic impacts of minimum wage. "So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn't go to the worker."

       Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Al Gore: My Vision of the Future   SHARE Denied the presidency by the United States Supreme Court (in a 5-4) vote, Al Gore became a Jeremiah for awhile during the worst of the Bush years. Generally, the mainstream media ignored him or derided him, even as he spoke truth to power about the War in Iraq and the threats to democracy. Since then he's become an apostle about the crisis of climate change, an entrepreneur, and a visionary. In his latest book, "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change," Gore offers a futurist manifesto. As with most chroniclers of the human condition and the debate over the challenges ahead for our species, Gore has his advocates and detractors.

       Saturday, March 16, 2013
100 Jobs In One Year: Dave Herman Explains How To Get Hired Submitted at Rob Kall's Request   SHARE A year ago, Dave Herman was just another one of the thousands of struggling actors in New York City, picking up odd jobs to make ends meet. Today, he's a master of productivity, a philosopher of motivation, a self-appointed self-help guru, and full-time brand ambassador (pictured above in one of his comedy videos). What happened in 2012? Herman had 100 jobs. Millions of Americans would be thankful to find just one job right now, and Herman now knows how it's done. To complete his project -- 100 jobs in one year -- Herman was a night receptionist, an electrician, a script reader, a bartender, a newspaper boy, a dog walker, and a professional laugher. He also handed out a lot of fliers. With the help of a couple of temp agencies, the website TaskRabbit (where people advertise odd jobs), and friends, Herman completed the challenge, 20 minutes before midnight...

       Thursday, March 14, 2013
Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio Of Buenos Aires, Elected Leader Of Catholic Church   SHARE Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio Of Buenos Aires, has been elected to be the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Francis. Francis was elected to the papacy after two days of conclave meetings with a total of five ballots cast. Voting in the conclave, which began Tuesday afternoon, is confidential and cardinals were sworn to secrecy, but Francis received at least 77 votes, which is the minimum two-thirds required to become pope. There were 115 cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave. All were under 80 before Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's retirement, as required by Vatican rules. In 2005, when Benedict was elected, it took two days and four votes to elect him.

       Thursday, March 14, 2013
Mary Jo White and the Incestuous Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between Regulators and Wall Street   SHARE Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote recently about the revolving door syndrome regarding prosecution and financial regulatory agencies in DC. They began their commentary by focusing on President Obama's nomination of Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC): In our last episode of that ongoing Washington soap opera, "As the Door Revolves," we introduced you to former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White, pursuer of drug lords and terrorists, who left government to become a hot shot Wall Street lawyer defending such corporate giants as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, General Electric and Microsoft. Oh yes -- and former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, currently appealing his insider trading conviction.

(1 comments)        Friday, March 8, 2013
Elizabeth Warren Takes On Eric Holder's 'Too Big To Jail' Statement   SHARE Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took on Attorney General Eric Holder's admission that some banks are too big for the Justice Department to prosecute, asserting that Holder's statement illustrates why the financial institutions should be held accountable. "It has been almost five years since the financial crisis, but the big banks are still too big to fail," Warren said in a Wednesday statement. "That means they are subsidized by about $83 billion a year by American taxpayers and are still not being held fully accountable for breaking the law. Attorney General Holder's testimony that the biggest banks are too-big-to-jail shows once again that it is past time to end too-big-to-fail."

(7 comments)        Friday, March 8, 2013
"The Concept of the Messiah in the Old Testament" by Dr. Randall Price   SHARE This article can be found as a link at worldofthebible.com/resources.htm Dr. Price is a Th.M. graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary in Old Testament and Semitic Languages and holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is Distinguished Research Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Liberty works with young Earth creationist organizations including Answers in Genesis.[1][2][3][4] He has served as Director of Excavations on the Qumran Plateau in Israel (site of the community that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls) since 2002 and has excavated at other sites in Israel since 1990.

(1 comments)        Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Video Showing the Huge Gap Between Super Rich and Everyone Else Goes Viral   SHARE Wealth Inequality in America," a six-minute video produced by a YouTube user named "Politizane," casts an interesting angle on the plummeting savings rate. Set to depressing piano music and packed with crystal-clear animations, it gives a powerful snapshot of the American economic landscape. Noting that "The top 1 percent own nearly half the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual funds," the video goes on to contrast those impressive holdings with the rest of the country. By comparison, it points out, the bottom 50 percent of earners own only 0.5 percent of those investments. It isn't hard to see why there is such a yawning gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us. Since 1976, the share of national income earned by the top one percent of workers has nearly tripled, from 9 percent to 24 percent...

       Wednesday, February 27, 2013
"Distractions", by Aldous Huxley   SHARE "In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions..."

(11 comments)        Monday, February 25, 2013
Why Jesus Couldn't Have Been the Messiah   SHARE "Often, people point to the miracles that the Gospel reports that Jesus did, as well as the alleged 300 Old Testament prophecies that he fulfilled, to corroborate the claim that Jesus was in fact the Messiah. In Deuteronomy Moses warns: "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul." (Deut 13:1-3)

(1 comments)        Friday, February 22, 2013
Al Gore on the "Daily Show with Jon Stewart"   SHARE Former Vice President Al Gore is interviewed by Jon Stewart on a wide range of topics, in conjunction with his new book, "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change."

       Thursday, February 21, 2013
"Overview: Astronauts Give Their First-Hand Accounts of Space Travel"   SHARE "On the 40th anniversary of the famous "Blue Marble' photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts' life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside -- a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect. The Overview Effect, first described by author Frank White in 1987, is an experience that transforms astronauts' perspective of the planet and mankind's place upon it. Common features of the experience are a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment. "Overview' is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect...

(9 comments)        Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Al Gore: Democracy Needs to Trump Capitalism or the Global Elite Will Triumph   SHARE "The former vice president of the United States and rightful winner of the 2000 presidential election has a new visionary book just published that will largely be ignored by the mainstream media. Why? Because it values democracy over capitalistic excesses. Because it proclaims that the elected officials in DC are just lackeys, in essence, for the moneyed elite. Because it details how the global corporations and financial institutions are now more powerful than nation states. And that's just the beginning of why you won't read much in the media about Gore's "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change." As Brad Blog quotes from a Jon Stewart interview with Gore on "The Daily Show" (one of the few outlets that will allow Gore free rein to state his anti-status quo viewpoints), Gore doesn't hold back: Our democracy has been hacked. It's been taken over..."

       Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Fifty Years of Failing America's Mentally Ill   SHARE On Feb. 5, 1963, 50 years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress on "Mental Illness and Mental Retardation." He proposed a new program under which the federal government would fund community mental-health centers, or CMHCs, to take the place of state mental hospitals. As Kennedy envisioned it, "reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolations will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability." President Kennedy's proposal was historic because the public care of mentally ill individuals had been exclusively a state responsibility for more than a century. The federal initiative encouraged the closing of state hospitals and aborted the development of state-funded outpatient clinics in process at that time.