Quote of the day

Well, this is interesting:

We are ready to give him residence in Ecuador, with no problems and no conditions.

-- Kintto Lucas, Ecuador's Deputy Foreign Minister, offering WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange residency in his country; Assange has enraged Washington by releasing classified U.S. documents
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UPDATE: Well, it gets even more interesting. Look:

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa on Tuesday dismissed an offer of residency that a lower level official made to the embattled founder of the online whistle-blower WikiLeaks.

The offer by Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas on Monday "has not been approved by Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino — or the president," Correa told
reporters.

You can read more about that right here.
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Quote of the day

This is about Sarah Palin:

... logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

-- Frank Rich

Very worrying.

I found it on Alternet in an article entitled "4 Most Provocative Reactions to Sarah Palin's Lofty Presidential Ambitions".
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Inspiring headline; inspiring article

This is the very opposite of planned obsolescence:

Holiday Alert: A Company Curbs Clothing Consumption

Imagine a company that actually encourages people to buy less of what they produce!

Here's a little excerpt:

Very few companies get it right like Patagonia does. Not only do they have well-made, stylish clothing, their strong commitment to protecting both land and water causes, is highly commendable. Patagonia believes in using business to inspire solutions to the environmental crisis. It is also dedicated to promoting fair labor and environmental protection where their products are made.

Do click through and read about the details. It's a short article.
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Sunday art blogging

Artist: Ingeborg Bernhard

Image from Wikimedia Commons

So, so true:

He did warn us.

And I'm old enough to remember this:

Relationship between taxes and wages

Okay. Here's your headline for the day:

Why Tax Increases Would Boost Our Wages

And here's the subtitle:

The math is pretty simple: When the über-rich are heavily taxed, economies prosper and wages for working people steadily rise.

Do click through and read the article. It's by the very respectable Thom Hartmann and I learned a lot from it.
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Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The most important headline ever

I mean that. Truly I do.

Here it is:

There Won't Be a Bailout for the Earth

That's right. There won't.

Here's how the article gets started:

Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn't read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn't do bailouts.

And here's a little bit more:

Perhaps the most startling news story of the year passed almost unnoticed. Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world's oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world's most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 per cent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950.
...
The paleontologist Professor Peter Ward is an expert in the great extinctions that have happened in the earth's past, and he believes there is a common thread between them. With the exception of the meteor strike that happened 65 million years ago, every extinction was caused by living creatures becoming incredibly successful - and then destroying their own habitats.

So, are we as a species going to do anything to stop it?

I'm not hopeful, sad to say.
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In honor of "Black Friday"

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!

Absolutely stunning ignorance

This:

Many observers have argued that Palin could never win because of her embarrassing lack of expertise, knowledge, or interest in foreign policy. Her appearance on Fox News host Glenn Beck’s radio show today, captured by Oliver Willis, suggests they may be right:

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? <...>

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

If that woman gets anywhere near the White House, we are so freakin' screwed. Really.

I found it here.
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Snark of the day

This has probably already come to your attention but I just HAD to share!

She's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there.

-- Barbara Bush, former First Lady, when asked for her thoughts on former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

(This is probably the first time I've agreed with Barabara Bush on anything.)
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Lest we forget

John F. Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963)

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Tragic. Just tragic:

And here's your quote of the day:

"They don't give a flying fuck about your safety. If they did, they would give you universal health care. They want your obedience."

I found the quotation right here on Democratic Underground.

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