Slashdot Mirror

.... a review with praise in Common Dreams, a self-identified "Progressive" website, about the surprise winner in Virginia's Republican primary:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...

"... Republican Dave Brat, a college economics professors who spoke about GOP hypocrisy and railed against Wall Street greed, unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary challenge.

âoeAll of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.â ... Thatâ(TM)s a common campaign slogan repeated by Dave Brat, the Virginia college professor ....

The national media is buzzing about Bratâ(TM)s victory, but for all of the wrong reasons...."

-----
The media will talk about anything except the real problem

Here's the part I like about Brat.

Brat: âoeI will fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.â

It looks like he ran as an anti-corporate conservative and on cantor being pro-immigration. I didn't see much about the other items you suggested (tho they are good points-- I just don't see Brat using them in the race).

Interesting analysis here:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...

Well, 3D printing is a lot like magic cauldrons, so we may both be right in the end. :-)

Of course, magic cauldrons are not without their downsides: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Yeah, I've seen surveys that say humanity in the West can more easily imagine nuclear war or other destruction of everything we care about instead of significant social change... None-the-less, as Howard Zinn wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

Here

Remarkably, during the post-interview analysis show that streamed on the web, NBC News anchor and correspondent Andrea Mitchell said in April 2013 he sent the one email to the General Counsel, which he talked about. She then acknowledged the NSA could be covering up “other emails” and Snowden could be right—that there is a “paper trail” showing he made “multiple attempts” to take his concerns to superiors.

So tell me, what makes you so quick to believe an organization that has proven on multiple occasions that it is willing to lie to the people and directly to Congress (and then spy on Congress) over the person who exposed the whole debacle, particularly when his claims about the efficacy of going through channels has been corroborated by others known to have gone through channels?

Well, yeah, he was caught holding the bloody knife standing over the body, but since he says the bystander never said 'stop', we'll just have to let him go."

Verizon "as paid to Obama and legislative leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his predecessor, former Rep. Roy Blunt (now a senator), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as well as to members of four congressional committees charged with developing the laws governing its business.

The President’s re-election campaign and groups tied to it have been the largest single recipients of the company’s aid, the study found, taking in nearly $224,000. Obama has spoken repeatedly of his support for Net Neutrality but the issue received little attention during his successful re-election drive last year and he’s had little to say about it during his second term."

http://www.commondreams.org/ne...

All part of the circus to convince the gullible American people that Congress represents *them*, and not just the oligarchy.

A circus that we the people have no say in whatsoever. Akin to serfdom of old, only with some modern conveniences.

"Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"

Hello again. This time I wont try to have my cake and eat it too, as I have not moderated in this article.

"So lobbying can have good outcomes."

Yes, and a broken ( old style ) clock is correct twice a day. The occasional "good" accident does not mean accidents are good.
( where "good" means has a good outcome ). So, if I were writing a constitution, things would be different.

"It is difficult to separate the feelings that someone bought a result you don't like from an objective analysis of whether what you wanted them to do was rejected after an analysis of the issues"

True, but from where I sit too many things look way too purchased.
Also, https://www.commondreams.org/v...

And it is not about "what I want". I would like for politicians to properly represent their constituents, like they are supposed to.
I really dont think they do that.

"In this case, a "tell me how much I owe" version of federal taxes -- I seem to recall that there was such a system in place many years ago (1970's?) where the taxpayer would send in a form saying "tell me what you want" and the IRS did. I don't hear much about that anymore, so I suspect that it died, and why it died may give a clue to why it wasn't a good idea to bring it back. I don't know."

Lobbying?

"( on buggy whip manufacture ): Why not? If you grant that there are sometimes good outcomes from lobbying, just how do you write this new law prohibiting buggy whip makers while still allowing the useful lobbying?"

Why single out buggy whip manufacturers? Why should there be so much energy expended disallowing stupid. Why not make it so we make the exceptions ( if any ) be the smart things? Strikes me as bass ackwards.

"What SHOULD be the rule is that decisions are made based on merit, and anyone who wants to lobby should have the right to make that speech."

Exactly right. Without extra privileges for those with money. And corporations excluded entirely without exception. ( their owners, managers, stockholders, employees all each individually have the aforementioned right, no additional is needed ),.

If you make $50,000 a year you pay

$247.75 a year for Defense
$3.98 a year for FEMA
$22.88 a year for unemployment ins.
$36.82 a year for food stamps
$6.96 a year for welfare
$43.78 a year for civil an military retirement
$4000 for a year for corporate subsidies

Are you sure that you're pissed at the right people? sources http://www.commondreams.org/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/2012...

That's prejudice.

First off, look at exactly how warmongerish the DNC has been for the last decade. It's really sad that only a sanitized version of the Code Pink discussion with HRC exists any more (textual description: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0307-01.htm ) -- she was so rabidly for invading Iraq, despite failing to read the Intelligence Estimate which called in to question the WMD shit ( http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/02/03/448804/-Hillary-Clinton-and-the-2002-National-Intelligence-Estimate-A-case-of-evasion# )-- frothing at the mouth for war.

Then we have Nancy Pelosi, my own lickspittle rep, and hundreds of other democrats totally on board with the whole neo-con agenda. You faux-liberals can take your awe of the Feds and just shove it.

Sorry. Big anglophile here which is to say fascinated by "Engla-land" its history and it's people. Descended therefrom also. Doesn't stop em from seeing that this UK government is a fascist regime. Specifically

They have sought to turn the act of journalism into a "terrorist" (their word not mine) enterprise and consider journalists to BE terrorists. This is such a sad and sick distortion of this word it use itself threatens to undermine the population's faith and credence in legitimate authority and concern with national security.

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/11/03/332673/outrage/

https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/02-2

On holding onto optimism about change: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate -- in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
. . .
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it repro

The recount only covered 175,000 of the 6 million votes. It only counted 'marked or blemished ballots'. They arranged the ballots so confusingly that 113,000 people voted for two people at the ballots. 79,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate, and 29k chose Bush and a minor candidate. (don't know how many chose both Bush and Gore but I should think blue and red are easier to tell apart)

http://web.archive.org/web/20040820122543/http://www.norc.org/fl/results/media/mediagroup_readme.txt

Even at that stage, the recounts drove down Bush's end result by nearly 400 points from 537 to 154

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12623-2001Nov11.html

They also arranged the ballots so confusingly that 113,000 people voted for two people at the ballots. 79,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate, and 29k chose Bush and a minor candidate. (don't know how many chose both Bush and Gore but I should think blue and red are easier to tell apart).

http://www.issues2000.org/Florida_Recount_Official.htm

Realistically, the Supreme Court ended things for a number of reasons. Firstly, if we had found out that Florida was cheated, then the whole integrity of the voting system, and public confidence in it, would have been shattered. Secondly, Bush had just been granted executive power over the Courts anyway.

Also, whilst the NSA have existed during Obama's watch, he certainly wasn't he person who put PRISM in place. Bush put PRISM together. First he tried to use the Protect America Act in 2005, then when he found that the wiretapping hole still wasn't open for the internet he later amended the FISA act despite a lot of resistance. Without those changes in law PRISM would have never been legal. Granted, Obama re-signed it, but at that point in time PRISM would have kept on running whether or not it was legal.

Source: Protect America Act: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1216-01.htm
(That's actually a NYT report, but NYT pulled it from their site in 2007) See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_qYGbieoMM for lawsuits

Source FISA Amendments: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/20/ST2008062001087.html Resistance: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/senate.fisa/

what evidence do you have that the FBI, CIA, NSA, GCHQ et al are not run by simple crooks?

What, facilitating the sale hard drugs in America or selling military equipment on the black market to "axis of evil" type countries is not criminal enough? People forget the criminal history of some of these organizations rather quickly and seem to ignore the current ongoing continuation of the same. Guess that propaganda and a firm grip on the corporate mass media message reaching the majority just works. We have a serious amount of evidence that those organizations have committed egregious crimes, so the real question is: How do we know/guarantee that they are NO LONGER being run by criminals?

So strong, that you are willing to go to jail for a few hours, at the very least.

Nope, now you can be accused of terrorism and held for a month just as an example or slapped with a nice fine of several thousand dollars for costs of detainment.

Fuck you.

Depending on your level of 9/11 truthiness, if you include the time and complexity of executing the the attacks into the mix of passing the patriot act, then it may not have been exactly an eyeblink. Assuming the "controlled demolition" crowd believe what they say, then that could mean that the 1993 bombing was part of the whole plot. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm - search link for 1993. Dun dun dun. If nothing else, it's a lot of interesting coincidence.

Or in your food.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/12-6

Followed and read your link. What I found was not people standing by the side of the road with a sign. They violated the security of a nuclear weapons facility by cutting through three fences and engaging in vandalism which resulted in a shutdown of the facility.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, July 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property. Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S....

In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.” The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine. ...

On Wednesday August 1, all nuclear operations at Y-12 were ordered to be put on hold in order for the plant to focus on security.

The big difference here is, these three hypothetical people will not be facing a three-year sentence.

how about twenty years?

Well all the good congressman and his peers need to do is de-fund the NSA and their activities. No Bucks, no retards spying on everybody but you see it's no secret that the intelligence committees in the House and Senate have members who create rules themselves and classify information, denying basic information to the rest of their congressional counterparts. Not only do you have the NSA spying on everybody, you have the committees keeping it a secret from the rest of congress! What a great and open system we have! What's more disgusting is that these assholes, the ones who defend the NSA the most fervently, receive lots of campaign contributions from guess who? companies with vested interests in keeping the system going because they provide services and technology to guess what the NSA. This is why the seniority system in DC is bad, very bad for our rights and our nation.

It's time to do three things in this country. 1) Introduce term limits for congress. Sorry, Feinbitch, McShame, you're time is up and it's clear you don't have the best interests in mind for our country. 2) Change campaign funding legislation and limit all contributions to $1000 from any company or private party. 3) We need to re-introduce Stocks (not the wall street kind) in DC and start putting these assholes in them for a week or two, I'm sure it will be a boost to the local economy in terms of travel and vendors selling rotten tomatoes.

Took me all of a couple of minutes and some wiki/google to find a couple:
General Dynamics. Check them out in a long term graph, it has flatlined a bit as the wars cooled down and they had a lawsuit with uncle sam over some defective parts. That said, they have a diverse range of military products, from tanks to communications systems. They are likely to do well.

Bunch of rinky dinks on the list but, Nortrop Grumman stands out. They make a number of military aircraft.

Of course, who could forget Lockheed. Makers of the C-130 "moneyshaker". They have gotten congress to approve the purchase of 5000% more than the pentagon ever asked for, even doubling their order this very year (while moaning about sequesters) (Citation needed? http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/10-6 )

So with more military action on the way, I think its safe to predict these stocks are looking good for the next few years at least.

Well it's a secret court. That, in itself, doesn't make it unconstitutional, but it certainly makes it susceptible to corruption and rot. They're rejection rate for warrant applications is something dismal. They've rejected... what? 11 out of the 34,000 warrant requests in the past few decades? It's a rubber stamp. They don't say no. And since it's secret, they really wouldn't get in trouble if they simply disregarded the constitution.

But whether or not the FISA court is corrupted and doing unconstitutional things is more or less moot. The NSA is bypassing the FISA court. They couldn't even be bothered to get get a rubber stamp.

How about a refresher:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The communications I have between me and my congressmen being "my papers".
The NSA most assuredly can't show probable cause of millions of americans with as many warrants as FISA gets.
And they're not particularly describing the thing they're searching for or the person they're searching for when they're recording EVERYTHING.

There's no legal way for the NSA to be collecting as much information as the leaked documents say it does.

"A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools."

A lot of bad stuff is probably going to go down, true. But, we can remain hopeful good things will happen too. See Howard Zinn, for example:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

I watched that great video on "In the Year 2525" and am writing this on a US$250 Chromebook. Maybe it is not the best tool for covert browsing or communications like, say, "Freedombox" aspires to (for what that might be worth), but this cheap Chromebook is a great tool for learning. It would have been (almost) unbelievable in the 1950s. Ask yourself, as far as content learning goes, if you are a curious intellectually-inclined young person today, would you rather have had an expensive 1980s Princeton education with access to Firestone library (as I got), or just one year with a $250 Chromebook with acess to the 2013 internet for effortlessly following link after link and reading endless discussions on any topic you find interesting? If I was young again, I'd pick the Chromebook. An Ivy league education may have other benefits, as do face-to-face communities, but cheap access to endless information for those inclined to soak it up is now a reality -- and it is affordable for more and more people on the planet (including through discarded last generation smartphones). Another example, from India:
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

I followed your link. Now, please humor me and read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (a sci-fi short story from the 1950s) to see what the internet and cheap mobile computing may still make possible. That story may help rekindle your optimism for what broad global education may make possible. It is available online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51

Even stuff like more people learning about the idea of a basic income may make a huge difference over the next ten years...
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1gd0q7/krugman_endorses_universal_basic_income/

Yes, the USA may be relatively fading (including from thirty years of Neo-Liberalism and stuff like creeping surveillance and fearful self-destructive paranoia).
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"

Been to a protest? Lots of people's free speech rights are impinged upon. In at least one case, a few busloads worth.

A lot of tough talk, but what can everyday Americans do to change their government?

Join a militia to do some group violence? Hear that--that's a drone coming, you've got about 10 seconds...

Go solo against the government? Enjoy your one-way ticket to a secret prison somewhere.

Civil disobedience? How does spending the rest of your life in prison sound?

March in protest? Worked in the 60s, not anymore, unless you like a mouthful of pepper spray and a tear gas canister shot into your skull.

Vote? LOL

Depends what you mean by a deal. Lots of things pass uncontroversially. Just this year, BEFORE the sequester debate came back, the pentagon's orders were reviewed, and where congress saw the Pentagon wanted 7 new C-130s, congress approved 14 of them. This was bipartisan....this is what they do all the time...in fact, over the life of the program, congress has approved 5000% more C-130s than the military ever ordered: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/10-6

Then there is the whole issue of their fake fights. Someone first pointed it out to me a few years back. Chart the minimum wage over time against inflation. You will find that it follows inflation on a long term average. Everyone who watches the issue knows this. However, congress wont just bake it in because, every few years it gives them an excuse to drag it out and beat the drums.

The Republicans beat the "too expensive to do business" drum, and the money flows into their coffers from all manner of group against raising the minimum wage. Employers all over the country are falling all over themselves to throw money at the GOP.

The Democrats beat the "workers are hit hard" drum, and labor unions, and all of their associated groups fall all over themselves to throw money a the Democrats.

Then in the end....they all "grudgingly agree" to do what they all knew was going to happen from the start....and put the issue away for the next few years until they can dust it off and do it all over again.

Thing is, you see it everywhere. Abotion? ever noticed how often anti-abortion laws blatantly violate Roe V Wade? Ever wonder, why professional lawmakers, people who have had time to study the system and work with it, would propose something that they know can't survive? Fact is, the public's opinion of abortion is a near 50/50 split, and hasn't changed in while. Perfect issue for them.

Propose a law, knowing it will never have to be implemented seriously for more than a few weeks. Money starts rolling in to both sides. Law gets passed, law gets struck down, pro-life and pro-choice groups both see a huge windfall.

Then, they take the budget, come up with an agreement, but call it a sequester, really tiny fractional cuts in the increase in discretionary spending, coupled with a small tax hike, thats all it was. They agreed to it, but structured it so they could pretend to disagree and "try to avoid it" for months, then blame each other when it "hit".

But that isn't really how they deal, thats just how they suck up all the air.

For the deals, look at how the PATRIOT act got passed or renewed. Look at how FISA courts got gutted and how the torture program went unprosecuted. They make deals all the time, they just don't talk about those deals.

Finding hay and calling it needle is even easier. Redefinition is easy when you control the dictionary.

Yeah all of those things are true. Lobbying for, receiving, and taking advantage of tax breaks is malefaction. And to not do so is a dereliction of duty to shareholders. True and true. And the problem is the American law of corporation which demands that corporations be malefactors. We should rewrite that law (laws in each state, plus I believe at the federal level). Here's how one particularly liberal commentator describes it.

We don't allow individuals to "do whatever the fuck it takes to get money, ethics morals and society be damned. Get yours and fuck the other guy." No state encourages or even allows individuals to do that, so it is preposterous to insist that corporations to do so. Just like individuals, corporate responsibility should be first as a citizen of society. This isn't hippie nonsense, it's common sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

There are other reasons people make wars (including pride and political power) but the reasons the infrastructure is there to excess is profit-driven. Nothing like preparing for war or resupplying during or afterwards to boost the profits of certain companies. And then there are, sometimes, the profits to be made during the occupation and "reconstruction" phases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

Estimates there range from about $1 trillion to $6 trillion. A company that can siphon off even just 0.1% of that has made at least a billion dollars. There are billions of dollars to be made destroying parts of North Korea and then pretending to fix them up again. And if the US can get into a huge cold war or lots of proxy wars with China, many companies could make stupendous profits for years.

See also:
    http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1220-28.htm
"There were Seymour Melman's op-eds and letters to the editor in the New York Times starting in his twenties. There were his cogent Congressional testimonies about the permanent war economy and its damage to our civilian economy and necessities of the American people. His economic conversion plans and his advocacy for a muscular peace agreement with the Soviet Union illuminated what kind of economy, innovation and prosperity could be ours in the U.S.A.
    Melman's work was detailed and he challenged what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" like that of no other academic. He would show how talented scientific and engineering skills were sucked into this permanent war economy to the detriment of civilian jobs and economic development as if people's well-being mattered. "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program," he would say, referring to Lockheed Martin's chronically bungled, defective and costly contract."

he was going to get raped by a terrorist

- and he would be right to be worried about it, people do get raped in US prisons, which are nowhere near being "correctional" facilities. The only thing those facilities correct is the trust in the justice system.

Of-course the supposed 'terrorists' in US prisons also do get raped and the people doing the rape are the government representatives, sometimes proxy government representatives.

Terrific point about separating an appraisal of the world from general moods.

And after all, some people even like tough challenges:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

As I quote here from "What Dreams May Come":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
===
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.
===

Howard Zinn also suggested there is always reason for the "optimism of uncertainty": http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm

I agree about the bringing nutrition/lifestyle stuff all together synergistically:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Also maybe of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression

And:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

While Shirky's post has some great insights, I actually disagree with a sentiment implied where he says: "Most of us won't kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. ... Madoff hasn't killed himself because he isn't the kind of person who kills himself." While perhaps true, it is misleading. I'd suggest depression and suicide could happen in almost anyone's life probabilistically, but that certain circumstances make it more or less likely. Then, if it does, the survivors tend to work backwards from "if only" proximate causes, but overall it is always a network of interacting causes and effects. Genes are one thing affecting probabilities, but so is nutrition, lifestyle, mental outlook, mental habits including gratitude, religions and spiritual upbringing or life philosophy, social networks, physical infrastructure, and many other factors (including what we think about the world) which interact with each other. Or, in other words, a life is like a tree, and whether that tree is blown over by any particular storm in life is about both how big the (perceived) storm is and how deep the tree's roots are (and roots help us grow more roots). For a person, roots are things like nutrition, family, friends, hobbies, community, music, values, habits, religion/philosophy, and so on. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

Thanks for the success story of personal growth to grow deeper roots in various ways. Good luck in continuing to grow them as best as is possible in this plane of existence filled with various dualistic tensions, with life at a Yin/Yang interface of

"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."

Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

See also on optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Related by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

By others:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

"Lemme guess, you're a HS dropout and you're bitter because nobody will buy your homemade shit, right?"

Ah, if only I had been smarter and more courageous in High School and indeed completely dropped out and focused on making "homemade" stuff. Probably I might indeed have been more successful and happier? But no, instead I left high school early for college and then blew all the money I earned from writing "homemade" computer software on Princeton, graduating the same year as Michelle Obama. And that was even after having read this awesome essay saying why spending money on Princeton was stupid:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money"
http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/anewsome/Bird%20Article.pdf

So, just an example of how I was deeply in a bubble back then (and probably still am now in various ways).

But, turning the points around to focus on the presenter generally shows you don't have much to say about the points presented? What is your point? That I am "bitter"? See also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

See also:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

Anyway, compared to what I was told about the USA in public school growing up, yes, I am disappointed with where this country has gone in the last thirty years. But there is not just one specific thing I could point to (although neoliberal economics is perhaps a big part of it, which just continues to get worse as we automate jobs away and wealth continues to concentrate).

And I'm not saying all the changes are for the worse though. There is less air pollution in NYC, for example (reflective of an emerging environmental ethic). There is easy access to a wealth of information via the internet. Example:
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
We know a lot more about material science. We know a lot more about the science of nutrition and health. There sure are a lot of people trying to make a positive difference in the world. There is much goodness in the USA and abroad.

There remain reasons for optimism as historian Howard Zinn points out:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
" Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), bu

"...it's also like a combination of the Truman Show and They Live. One massive reality distortion bubble that nobody is aware of.
And the whole discussion, just as the voting choices, always revolves around two options that are only differing in something entirely beside the point, giving the citizens choices for all aspects of their life, except those that aren't meaningless. Everything is condensed down from picking a fuzzy varying area in a multi-dimensional gradient space to a one-dimensional binary choice. With you being called at least "Hitler" for picking the "wrong" one. Let alone trying to think outside that box.
It's ludicrous."

See my comment posted earlier above, or also this by Morris Berman:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/18/the-parable-of-the-frogs/
"In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury? In fact, no crystal ball is required to predict the future here. The tragedy of the commons -- what Hardin called "the remorseless working of things" -- is that a society such as that of the United States won't undertake serious changes even when it is sitting on the edge of an abyss. It has to actually be in the abyss before it will entertain such changes; i.e., it has to be faced with no choice at all. It seems unlikely now, but things are probably moving faster than we realize. In terms of population, energy, food, resources, water, social inequality, public health, and environmental degradation, a crunch of the type I am referring to may be only twenty years away."

By that author:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1118061810/
"During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be? In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation's "hustler" culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country's expansion have become the instruments of its demise. "

BTW, Germany is a legacy of what the USA used to be:
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans. ..."

Yet we in the USA should not lose hope:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.

It's probably worth noting that the Tea Party also did not have any widespread criminal side effects

Damn straight! I searched high and low for the usual felonious shenanigans associated with protest movements, and suddenly find none. I find it pretty fucking hard to imagine my FBI failing in their self-appointed mission of Constitutional violation as if the Tea Party was somehow exempt.

...note that in industrial civilization, riches accrue to those who best stimulate human ingenuity and productivity through peaceful trade and development, not to those who can enslave the most serfs, and that the entire basis of military arms races is basically a "caveman" mentality, obsolete since before WW1, really: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/09-6

And yet both the richest country in the world and the one most likely to depose it are both built on enslaving serfs for the benefit of the few.

...note that in industrial civilization, riches accrue to those who best stimulate human ingenuity and productivity through peaceful trade and development, not to those who can enslave the most serfs, and that the entire basis of military arms races is basically a "caveman" mentality, obsolete since before WW1, really: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/09-6

The justification for arms races was, throughout the nuclear arms race, that we must beat the other team to the capability; except that *taking the lead* in that race is what guarantees the race to happen at all. None of the competitors in the nuclear arms race ever wanted to use one, or did; they understood that their use would make them a target, not a victor.

Bolstered by this realization, you could instead propose treaties, with open development of such technologies, and monitoring of capabilities with the spectre of a ruinously expensive and dangerous race beginning if security around secret weapons development *ever* slips.

Nah. Never happen. Too much money involved.

That sounds great if you don't pay attention to anything regarding nuclear power construction.

You're not paying attention if you think the criticism of nuclear power is based on plant construction, fanboi.

At least in Western models (I don't know much about Soviet designs), very rarely are corners cut.

You mean like turning off earthquake sensors or cutting back on emergency and evacuation drills?

We are currently building Generation III+ designs and working on Gen 4 designs, which all have significantly enhanced safety features.

And the new roof you put on your house will use greatly improved construction methods and materials compared to a roof put up in the 70's. Doesn't mean your new roof doesn't share the same basic hazards as the old one: heat, cold, and precipitation.

Your new nuclear plants can be stuffed with fanboi pedantry to the rafters, but they will still face the same problems as reactors built in the 70's: meltdown, dealing with disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, and the greatest flaw of all, the profit motive. 40 years from now, future greedy corporations will be demanding that they be allowed to run the "new, safe" designs of 2012 for another twenty years past their lifespan. They will still be cutting costs on "unnecessary" measures like earthquake monitors, backup power supplies, and preparing for disasters.

Also, what do you do in a country like Japan? Japan has no natural resources; they import all of their energy.

You mean what country can afford nuclear power, the most expensive energy source ever invented by humans?

You have billions in construction and refining costs. Billions in operation costs. Hundreds of billions in long term storage costs of nuclear waste - which will be with us for hundreds of years. Billions in insurance costs, most of which are born by the taxpayer as opposed to the for-profit corporation running the reactor. For a fraction of that cost you can put up solar panels on every public building in the country. Germany gets the same amount of solar energy as Alaska, but that hasn't stopped them from investing in solar power.

Seriously, do some research before even forming an opinion.

Seriously, get over yourself and your pedantry, fanboi. You can talk about the safety of nuclear power when every plant is run by the U.S. Navy, all profit is taken out of the equation, and plant managers and regulators are forced to live on plant grounds.

EAT YOUR OWN DOGFOOD!!!!!

cat food... It has 'real' tuna and 'real' tuna parts

Yes, you make a good point on third parties. I like the "No Confidence" option idea you outline. However, here is another alternative, basically doing something like the Tea Party did in moving the Republicans more rightward, but for the Democrats moving leftward/Green/other(basic income?), from sociologist G. William Domhoff:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html
===
So what should egalitarian activists do in terms of future elections if and when the issues, circumstances, and candidates seem right? First, they should form Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. That gives them an organizational base as well as a distinctive new social identity within the structural pathway to government that is labeled "the Democratic Party." Forming such clubs makes it possible for activists to maintain their sense of separatism and purity while at the same time allowing them to compete within the Democratic Party. There are numerous precedents for such clubs within the party, including liberal and reform clubs in the past, and the conservative Democratic Leadership Council at the present time.

This strategy of forging a separate social identity is also followed by members of the right wing within the Republican Party. By joining organizations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, they can define themselves as Christians who have to work out of necessity within the debased confines of the Republican Party. That is, they think of themselves as Christians first and Republicans second, and that is what egalitarians should do: identify themselves primarily as egalitarians and only secondarily as Democrats.

After forming Egalitarian Democrat Clubs, egalitarian activists should find people to run in selected Democratic primaries from precinct to president. They should not simply support eager candidates who come to them with the hope of turning them into campaign workers. They have to create candidates of their own who already are committed to the egalitarian movement and to its alternative economic vision of planning through the market. The candidates have to be responsible to the clubs, or else the candidates naturally will look out for their own self interest and careers. They should focus on winning on the basis of the program, and make no personal criticisms of their Democratic rivals. Personal attacks on mainstream politicians are a mistake, a self-made trap, for egalitarian insurgents.

In talking about the program, the candidates actually do much more than explain what egalitarians stand for. By discussing such issues as increasing inequality and the abandonment of fairness, and then placing the blame for these conditions on the corporate-conservative coalition and the Republican Party, they help to explain to fellow members of the movement who is "us" and who is "them." They help to create a sense of "we-ness," a new collective identity. As candidates who present a positive program and attack those who oppose it, they are serving as "entrepreneurs of identity," an important part of the job description for any spokesperson in a new social movement.
====

Some issue I have with the Greens, BTW, even though I though voting Green made sense as a protest vote where I lived (e.g. I have problems with a push for "full employment" instead of a "basic income", or a push for expanding schooling instead of better supporting self-education and homeschooling, or an implicit push for population limits in various ways versus moving into space habitats, etc.):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3227495&cid=41864225

Even in the case of Obama as president, such Egalitarian Democratic clubs could be useful in the sense of, as Ralph Nader cites, "Make me do it" regarding progressive change, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to reformers:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/15-0

Not Did you read the link? US Supreme Court uphold free speech principles in this case. as not free speech per se. he was at a private mall, the security guards didnt like his shirt and told him to leave. he refused, so police hauled him off. constitution stops at the door - it only applies to govt. also, I couldn't find the resolution of the case, whether it was dropped etc. exceptional abusive action by the Bush campaign, overturned by the courts and the guy won $80k in court. pres was a dick, but free speech wins at the end. again, did you read the article? as you overzealous principal, supreme court directly contradicts and supports free speech. I couldnt find how the case resolved itself but it seems cut and dry. may private company, constitution stops at the front door. think dont know how this turned out. protests are usually fine within boundaries. cities usually issue permits, etc. Sure, it's not surprising that a low-level gov't peon steps over the bounds, but in every case the supreme court or other courts support free speech rights.

Yes, exactly right. It is ok for people to burn the flag and chant dept to America. It's also ok for people to make crappy YouTube videos. That's what makes America exceptionally great.

Not
as
exceptional
as you
may
think

So let's talk about hypotheticals that will never come to pass because .. why again?

This is not hypothetical, it is principle.

No actually you're not paying attention to what you're saying. What you said was I had no right to live if I needed to own a slave to live. That's not a principle of anything, it's a hypothetical, and a weird one at that, one which only you injected into the conversation .

Of course if I had looked carefully I would have seen the obvious footrprint of a libertarian of the Grover Norquist "estate taxation is worse than the holocaust" type.

As soon as you guys start injecting slavery into every conversation what's next is "and taxation is a form of slavery".

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1008-07.htm

and of course, here it is...

Without enslaving someone, or taking their money (which is a fancy way to partially, retroactively, enslave them) to pay someone else, just how are you going to provide any of these supposed 'rights?'

My argument goes unanswered- what's the point of recognizing airy fairy ivory tower "rights" if you deprive people of food clothing and shelter by saying to them they have no "right" to them.

The point you keep charging right past and pretending not to see is that if you respect peoples rights you cannot deprive them of clothing or shelter! That is the whole point of rights!

First, you can deprive people of food clothing and shelter by more means than simply snatching them away. You can refuse to give him a job, or pay him so little he cannot afford them. Notably, doing those two evil things are defended as "rights" by libertarians also. That is why the healthy people in society join together to pass laws against discrimination and for a minimum age. As Rand Paul made clear this past year but is always true with libertarians, these are things libertarians hate and are always targeting for elimination. All based on Principles, of course

The only real Principle any libertarian is interested in is the Principle that he can expect to inflict without limit or interference upon those less lucky than he is whatever depravity he sees fit including but not limited to prostitution, indentured servitude, discrimination, slave wages, environmental degradation, and monopolistic practices.

The fact that society has coalesced against all these things enrages the libertarian , the Ayn Randian superman-sociopath, the genetic misprints like Grover Norquist because it goes against the perception of their "freedom" and "rights" their malformed brains generate.

What you seem to want to do is conflate the concept of depriving someone of their clothes and shelter, with simply declining to provide them with clothes and shelter. Two very different things. I dont have a natural right to clothing and shelter provided for me for free - I have a natural right to be left to peacefully enjoy the clothing and shelter I worked hard to provide myself with - *and so does everyone else.*

That is the masturbation fantasy of libertarians- there is a direct correspondence between someone's willingness to work and productivity and their ability to provide for themselves. Success therefore is a measure of moral goodness and hard work. If you're old enough to type and you still believe this, then obviously you're a lost cause or a genetic misprint of whatever. Everyone else recognizes it as being typical of the self-serving lies about the nature of reality that conservatives and libertarians and fundamentalist religionists (prosperity gospel etc etc etc ) spew.

Your alternative is that you have a right to it so it just has to magically be provided for you,

First off , no one is provided with anything as an alternative to work- that's j

All corporations are sociopathic by design

Vote Jill Stein. A candidate willing to get arrested to make a point is a candidate I want.

The short version: Don't own his own seeds and once you buy Monsanto seeds they own your business ..

"A federal appeals court found that soybean farmer Vernon Bowman infringed on Monsanto patents when he planted second-generation soybeans that were the product of seeds he had purchased from Monsanto"

Well, to be fair, the foreign buyer exclusion is a fairly recent change (late 2011, early 2012) in Argentina's policy. A policy which, according to your own link and 5 minutes research, grandfathers in (over a million hectares of) land already owned by foreigners. Foreigners, according to this document (PDF) including several different fashion designers, a food manufacturer, and others. So to say that the land has not been bought by US and other international business people is demonstrably false. Thus Kupfernigk is quite well informed, far better than you, dear AC; and more importantly, Argentinians are losing much of their land to foreign owners, which only contributes to the country's domestic problems. Problems which are also the result of IMF and World Bank dealings.

What. Outright perjuring Congress is not explicit enough for you?

Howzabowt Levin's report:

"Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the Subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors,"

"New documents and information detail how Goldman recommended four CDOs, Hudson, Anderson, Timberwolf, and Abacus, to its clients without fully disclosing key information about those products, Goldmanâ(TM)s own market views, or its adverse economic interests. For example, in Hudson, Goldman told investors that its interests were "aligned" with theirs when, in fact, Goldman held 100% of the short side of the CDO and had adverse interests to the investors, and described Hudsonâ(TM)s assets were "sourced from the Street," when in fact, Goldman had selected and priced the assets without any third party involvement.

New documents also reveal that, at one point in May 2007, Goldman Sachs unsuccessfully tried to execute a "short squeeze" in the mortgage market so that Goldman could scoop up short positions at artificially depressed prices and profit as the mortgage market declined."

https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/14-2

You could ask yourself, could life be made worth living for you? Also, you could look into vitamin D deficiency, iodine deficiency, phyto-nutrient deficiency, omega-3 deficiency, sleep deficiency, and so on (and avoiding refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour). More info on heath issues here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

A life is like a growing tree. What keeps a tree from toppling over in the storms of life is deep roots. To reduce the risk of toppling over in a strom, grow your roots -- friends, family, community, neighbors, hobbies, recreations, communing with the infinite, nature, music, and so on.

See also:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://books.google.com/books/about/Dark_Nights_of_the_Soul.html?id=EG1E8boPodQC
"Every human journey is filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments, or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Thomas Moore's extensive career as a psychologist and theologian has taught him that honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and opportunities to delve into the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage. Moore shows specific ways to engage life more deeply through particular challenges and shares a powerful new outlook. With the soothing, accessible tone and practical philosophy that have made Moore an internationally beloved author, Dark Nights of the Soul will help you tend to the deepest needs of the heart and spirit in a modern world full of life's challenges, and is sure to be a comforting companion during your most difficult times. Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vital and the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Care of the Soul comes the long-anticipated sequel, an uplifting and groundbreaking approach to life's darkest hours. Moore shows specific ways to engage life more deeply through particular challenges and shares a powerful new outlook on such topics as: The healing power of melancholy; The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony; Finding solace during illness and in aging; Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities; Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles; Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness."

Or, as Howard Zinn said:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because