Fukushima is still in the news. Reuters reports today that the initial estimates of the amount of radiation released are now known to have been 2 and a half times too low. Tepco will be nationalized due to the exceptionally large losses after the accident. Reuters also reports what we first surmised the clean up will probably take 30 years. In the meantime . . . → Read More: Fukushima Mon Amour
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Following up on my previous post on Debt and Civilization, I read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years. It is a very important book. It lays out a case that we have not yet fully heard: that debt, as a human construction, is something which has been overlaid on our social relationships in such a way as to produce confused mixtures of . . . → Read More: Debt: The First 5000 Years I may start reading the American Conservative more if they keep putting out such well thought out and researched articles as this one by Richard Unz: China’s Rise, America’s Fall. In it Unz takes the book from Acemglou and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, and applies it to the American Conservative’s cover theme of China’s Rise and Merica’s Decline. He points out: Against the . . . → Read More: China’s Rise, America’s Fall Lama Surya Das, a buddhist monk who grew up a Jewish kid from Long Island, writes pithily in this book on the sense of time and the Dharma: It’s always now. Not earlier, not later, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now. Michael Hudson traces the history of debt, war and credit in this interview that we review. . . . → Read More: Debt and civilization Stephen of the Japan Times Online published an interview with Lest Brown of the Gloom, doom — and Lester Brown’s ‘Plan B (hat tip nakedcapitalism). In it he quotes Brown: How can we assume that the growth of an economic system that is shrinking the Earth’s forests, eroding its soils, depleting its aquifers, collapsing its fisheries, elevating its temperature and melting its ice . . . → Read More: Gloom, doom — and Lester Brown’s ‘Plan B’ 
One of the kernels of Buddhist psychology is, in my limited understanding the idea of the cittas. The mind produces thoughts like bubbles on a stream. They arise, persist for a while and pass away. But the mental productions are more than just the thoughts that we identify as ego thoughts in Western psychology and metaphysics. They are also the physical, the world, matter, the universe. The whole of the arising and passing away of these mind things, citta, are what is called samsara, the stream of birth and death. . . . → Read More: The mind, citta and cetasikas Mike Konczal has a good synopsis of a new paper by JW Mason and Arjun Jayadev that suggests: [T]he conservative theory explaining increased household borrowing in terms of shorter time horizons and a general lack of self-control, and the liberal theory explaining it in terms of efforts by those further down the income ladder to maintain consumption standards in the face of a . . . → Read More: Debt did not spiral upwards due to poor household decisions
In part it may be because they are being forced to pay outrageous sums to the banks: www.seiu.org/images/pdfs/Interest Rate Swap Report 03 22 2010.pdf. Mr. Schneiderman, I applaud your efforts to get to the bottom of the foreclosure mess in New York State and would ask you to keep your investigations separate from the proposed multi-state or Federal deal being pushed by the Administration in Washington. Maintain your independence. There are several reasons that I urge you to do so. There has been scant investigation by the . . . → Read More: Letter To Eric Schneiderman, Attorney General, New York State |
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