People who follow the politics in the USA knows host stupid the people in the system can be.
I’m watching Citizen Tube here http://www.youtube.com/citizentube?feature=ticker on the Healthcare summit. I’m seriously envious of them right now. When we have senators who are hitting each other with personal snide remarks. When most of the questions that are being asked in Presidential forums are not up to snuff, Simply put I have no Idea who has the policy-fu down pat. Who knows basic economics, basic public policy etc. Damn. and you have self styled pundit who really know nothing.
rePost::Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article
Excellent read. This was a letter written by Yunus defending his bank on accusations of below board practices. Loved reading this.
A Counter-Culture
Grameen had to create a banking counter-culture of its own. Grameen's central focus is to help poor borrower move out of poverty, not making money. Making profit is always recognised as a necessary condition of success to show that we are covering costs. Volume of profit is not important in Grameen in money-making sense, but important as an indicator of efficiency. We would like to make more profit so that we can reduce interest rate — and pass on the benefits to the borrowers. In Grameen system when a borrower cannot pay back we try to activate our system to help her overcome her problems, rather than go in a punishing mode.
We consider credit as a human right. We built our system on the faith that the poor always pay back. Some times they take longer than the originally scheduled time period, sometimes natural disasters like flood, drought, cyclone, etc and political unrest, rules and procedures of the bank, make it difficult or impossible to pay back; but given the opportunity they pay back. Non-repayment is not a problem created by the borrowers, it is created by factors external to them.
We have always carefully avoided the practices of the conventional banks to make sure we do not fall into the same logical loop which kept the poor out from financial institutions. Grameen had to create new systems to balance financial and human considerations. For example, it presents loan information separately for women and men, lists meticulously every single business of the borrowers in its annual report, and recognizes that a house is not just a house, but a workplace for the poor women, something that is categorised as a 'consumption' loan by the conventional banks is actually a 'production' loan for the poor. Grameen is a system based on human-relationships, not on threats of penalty imposed by legal system or any other agency. Grameen required new style of business, new banking culture of its own.
Sometimes people who are used to conventional banking become suspicious of Grameen because it is different. It is a conflict of two different banking cultures. Just because they do not understand us, they think we are wrong. When they spend some time with us with patience they start enjoying the exciting world of Grameen banking.
via Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article.
Elink Video :: Tim Wise: On White Privilege (Clip)
Watch this video.
http://www.MediaEd.org From the DVD: The Pathology of Privilege Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on…
http://www.MediaEd.org
From the DVD:
The Pathology of Privilege
Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
From the DVD:
The Pathology of Privilege
Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality
from Experimental Theology
For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation of white privilege and the damage it does not only to people of color, but to white people as well. This is an invaluable classroom resource: an ideal introduction to the social construction of racial identities, and a critical new tool for exploring the often invoked – but seldom explained – concept of white privilege.
Elink Pic: Freedom from XKCD
You one thing that seems to get at me? I don’t like the helplessness random people espouse. A little backstory. My social skills are almost perfectly correlated with how good I am feeling. It’s like when I’m in a great mood I can strike up a conversation with most anyone. The sad thing is I’m mostly in the not too happy and not too sad mood, which translates to interacts with people who I trust. The few times I’m in that great mood I tend to converse with whoever is around me. I find that a lot of people have this feeling that life is what’s happening to them, not what they are doing to the things around them. It’s as if you have no choice on things. To find the one you love, To find a job you’ll like, To find your passion. Yes finding these things are not easy. Yes, you’ll probably be near exhaustion or to your wit’s ends. But you either try to live, try to find light in this sometimes dark as a moonless overcast sky night, sometimes bright as the noon time clear sky day, or just go jump out your 3rd/4th floor terrace. Fuck nihilism, Fuck meaning. Live. Don’t cocoon yourself, shutting everyone off, and slowly losing connection with life. Marc Cuban once wrote that “being rich saved you from problems not having money brought” or something similar. So you didn’t have a life less ordinary. So you didn’t expect that after college life would be so fucking hard. So you didn’t think that things would be so fucking slow. Well so what. The sun will shine if you’re not here. People will be happy. Happiness is a choice. Living is a choice. Fucking deal with it!!!!
PS:Sorry for the rant spent from 6:45 am to 2:30 pm in a fucking long line under the searing heat of a summer inspired sun for an NBI fucking clearance , while my fucking sense of right didn’t allow me to go to the fucking fixers who were helping people skip the line, I needed to unload.
rePost::How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker
Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant. It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.
But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦
via How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker.
rePost::New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
This new law is washed from the blood of all those who have died to the GREED of ship operators and the carelessness/greed of officials. In some ways I have a feeling that laws are not enough for people can and will still be bribed. This is a small but important step for the transportation industry of an archipelago of 7100 islands.
New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing
MANILA, Philippines — President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has signed a new law giving the Philippine Coast Guard increased law enforcement powers, including the authority to detain and prevent from sailing substandard passenger and cargo vessels plying the country’s waters.
Known as the “Philippine Coast Guard Act of 2009” or Republic Act 9993, the new law aims to further enhance maritime safety and prevent sea tragedies.
Investigations into some of the worst disasters in maritime history that occurred in Philippine waters showed there was need to pinpoint clearer responsibility for the enforcement of maritime safety regulations.
Eight years in the legislative mill, the new law strengthens the arm of the Coast Guard to issue and enforce rules and regulations covering the “promotion of safety of life and property at sea on all maritime-related activities,” as well as promote marine environmental protection.
Transportation Secretary Leandro Mendoza called the Philippine Coast Guard Act of 2009 a measure that “has long been awaited by the maritime industry and the riding public.”
via New law lets Coast Guard stop ships from sailing – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.
rePost::Writers describe the positive impact of D&D on their lives Boing Boing
I playd D&D when I was younger (note the younger not young part , we’re still young as bryan l. commented in facebook) and I can vote!!! Read the D&D players coming to the defense of something I loved to do when I was younger (and still if only someone would organize a D&D weekend, the fun that would be!!!!).
Writers describe the positive impact of D&D on their lives
via Writers describe the positive impact of D&D on their lives Boing Boing.
Matt sez, “With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop’s crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I’d take an opportunity to look at the good D&D has done for several writers I know. This is that article. By the way, I’ve been a D&D player for almost thirty years now, and have been a happier, more productive person for it.”
I haven’t played since my early 20s (late teens?) but D&D was an enormously positive influence on my life and imagination.
rePost::Bitterness « Paulo Coelho’s Blog
I know I’m getting bitter on one facet of my life, I pray that other facets are saved from this bitterness. I’m pretty much sure they are.
The main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as the doctor of my book preferred) is desire. People attacked by this evil begin losing their desire for everything and in a few years are unable to go outside their world – because they have used up enormous energy reserves building high walls for the reality to be what they wanted it to be.
When avoiding outside attack, they also limit internal growth. They continue going to work, watching television, complaining about the traffic and having children, but all that happens automatically, without really understanding why they are behaving like that – after all, everything is under control.
The great problem of poisoning by Bitterness lies in the fact that passions – hate, love, despair, enthusiasm and curiosity – also don’t appear any more. After some time, the bitter person has no more desire. They had no more will even to live, or to die; that was the problem.
via Bitterness « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.
rePost::RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
When you go to beautiful tourist places in the Philippines, beauty of the natural sort, if you keep your ears open you might just hear mutter the words “enjoy this while you can in a few years this would be gone”. I have nothing against people who have have seen decades of change, environmental degradation and similar things. What I rail about is this attitude that we cannot do anything about this. The sense of inevitability we ascribe to losing these natural wonders to the pictures or even the description of people. We cannot accept this, we must not accept this. We as a people have an implicit obligation to the future generations to keep these places intact , beautiful and functioning.
UN REPORT SAYS
RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas
MANILA, Philippines—East Asia’s economically viable coastal habitats and ecosystems, including those of the Philippines, are under threat from pollution, alien invasive species, and other factors which could impact the region’s poverty levels unless urgent action is taken, the United Nations Environment Program (Unep) said in a new report.
“With nearly three quarters of the region’s population depending directly or indirectly on coastal areas, and with 80 percent of the region’s GDP linked to the coastal natural resources, the time must be right for factoring the marine environment into the center of economic planning,” said Unep executive director Achim Steiner.
The East Asian Seas State of the Marine Environment report said economically important coastal habitats and ecosystems are under pressure as 40 percent of coral reefs and half of all mangroves have already been lost. Coral reefs generate an estimated $112.5 billion and mangroves $5.1 billion annually.
The East Asian Seas—which includes the region between China, the Republic of Korea, and Australia—have some of the world’s highest concentrations of shipping and fishing vessel activity. They account for 50 percent of global fisheries production and 80 percent of global aquaculture production.
via RP, other Asian countries told: Protect seas – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.
Better Government Please::Bus firms threaten to pull out of DOE’s CNG project – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
Bus firms threaten to pull out of DOE’s CNG project
MANILA, Philippines — Operators of compressed natural gas-run buses have threatened to pull out of the Department of Energy’s Natural Gas Vehicle Program for Public Transport (NGVPPT) over the government’s alleged failure to address the issues plaguing the program.
According to Roberto Torres, president of the RRCG Transport System Co. Inc., they have been unable to operate their CNG buses due to the inability of the “daughter” station of the Pilipinas Shell at Mamplasan to operate and provide fuel to them.
Torres said bus operators, which have already invested heavily for the project, have been losing some P200 million. He said his company has been suffering losses of about P1 million a month.
“Needless to say, the very promising pilot project of the NGVPPT has bogged down. We see our investment not only in the 45 CNG buses, but also in its technical support in terms of manpower training and supplier, as well as infrastructure-being wasted away and slowly sinking in the quagmire of Shell and DOE’s making,” he said.
via Bus firms threaten to pull out of DOE’s CNG project – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.