Otium est pulvinar diaboli
Jul
4
“At some abstract level Obama sees that he’s not going to get his health care costs under control unless we change the way Americans eat. Because the crisis of rising costs in the American health care system can be translated very simply as the catastrophe of the American diet, which represents probably half of what we spend on health care in America. We spend about $2 trillion a year. The Centers for Disease Control says that 1.5 trillion goes to treat chronic disease. Now you’ve got smoking in there, alcoholism, but other than that, chronic disease is mostly food related. So you really can’t get control of that system unless you are preventing some of those chronic diseases. And the way you do that, really, is to change the food system. But, you know, it’s very, very hard to do.”
Michel Pollan on We Are Headed Toward a Breakdown in Our Food System on alternet.org
Jul
4
pieto:
Untitled (detail) - Pinot Gallizio (1959)
“The patented society, conceived and based on simple ideas, on elementary gestures of artists and scientists reduced to captivity like fleas by ants, is about to end; man is expressing a collective sense and a suitable instrument for transmitting it in a potlatch system of gifts that can only be paid for by other poetic experiences.”
Pinot Gallizio
Jul
4
“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.”
Ojibwe saying (The Sopranos) (via madipacheco)
Jul
3
“[Thomas] Paine advanced the causes of universal suffrage, equality for women, abolition of slavery, separation of church and state, public education, and progressive taxation. He made the first proposal for a guaranteed minimum income. He advised a system of public funding to give starting grants to young workers, and to aid the poor, the unemployed and the elderly. He believed that only well-informed and active citizens could defend democracy, and he roused the hostility of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others who were already a rising oligarchy of the wealthiest landowners and merchants.”
The Age of Paine (via azspot)
Jul
3
retropolitics:
The Daily Beast
The Obama administration will protect a court filing that reveals conversations Dick Cheney had with top officials over the Bush administration’s response to “Plamegate.” The information, derived from interviews between Cheney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, was kept private during the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration has agreed that it should not be disclosed out of fears that it will discourage future public officials from holding similar interviews. But the document could shed more light on Cheney’s role in the Valerie Plame case, in which the CIA spy was outed in the press, setting off a scandal. The document is said to reveal conversations between Cheney and top officials about Bush’s mention of uranium in a speech on Iraq and conversations between Cheney and Scooter Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice over the Plame case only to have his sentence commuted by the president. As for Plame, Assistant Attorney General David Barron said Cheney discussed “the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure.”
Read it at The Washington Post
Jul
3
igather:
apsies: A US soldier carries a stuffed toy to give to an Iraqi child as he goes on a last mission before the US pulls out from all Iraqi towns and cities. Pictures of the Week - TIME
Terrifying and sad at the same time.
Jul
3
“Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further. So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I. All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.”
Paul Krugman (via azspot)
Jul
3
americansatori:
misstugui:
Miroslav Tichý
“People ask me, ‘What are you, Mr. Tichý? Are you a painter, a sculptor, or a writer?’ I reply, ‘You know who I am? I am Tarzan in retirement.’
I am a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos, because only from chaos something new emerge.
I cut a lens out of Plexiglas wiyh a knife, ground the lens, made a camera of wood and cardboard, and took pictures with that. Of course it worked. When I do something, it has to be precise. Truly, the lens was not precise, but maybe that’s where the art is… Then I grind the lens with various types of sandpapers, first coarse sandpaper, then finer and finer, until you can see through it beautifully. And then what? It needs to be polished, that isn’t a problem. You take toothpaste, mix it with cigarette ash, and then you polish it. And that’s what I photographed with.
I didn’t choose anything. I looked under the enlarger and whatever seemed like the world to me, I printed. But what is the world? Everything that is, that is the world. Whatever seemed like the world to me, I printed. That’s all.”
