Sunday, May 27, 2012

Things to Know - 27 May

Matt Bors

1.  Please spend the 23 minutes to absorb this 23 minute video.  It is a classroom lecture type of presentation on the Evolution of Society.  Sounds like something you just want to blow on by....but please don't.  I would not be sending this to you unless I thought there was some value in it.   David is a friend of mine, and we went to college together.  He lives in the South Bay of So. California, and has retired from the Rand Corporation:

2.  Student protest movements in Canada and Chile should be acknowledged for what they are - a movement based on the Networking (see above #1) of similar frustrations with their lives.  Mexico, as read yesterday, is going the same route.   So, what is going on?  If the Occupy movements and students in the States of America regroup and continue, a new-age of this young century is about to take hold:

3.  This appears to be a tongue-in-cheek confession, but it does amplify the feeling that our current hell-bent consumerist behavior is no different than that of a serial criminal in the destruction of our resources (both natural and human):

4.  The States of America is one of only Three countries that do not offer paid maternity leave:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Maternity-leave-chart-final.png

5.  The Texas system of justice seems to be tone deaf on the intent of the law.  An honor student, having to work two jobs to support the family left behind when the parents divorced and split the scene, is tossed into jail and fined for missing too many classes:

6.  It is in the behavior and ethos of political leaders to prove that they are bold and decisive, and that they campaign and demonstrate their backbone.   This can and does border on being nasty and unmerciful.  Is this who we are.  It certainly has been proven by past behavior:

7.  "Home" is where they let you live, not where your identity and soul is imagined.  An immigrant is homeless and without a country when tripped up in the legal definition of the ICE bureaucracy and what one feels in the heart:

8.  This article is about the no-mans land for men without a home, as well.  Most of had left the central cities of Mexico decades ago, made it to the US, and got into trouble with the law in some way, lost their jobs, and got pounced on by the Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico.   Many have ended up in this really shitty place in Mexicali called the Hotel of the Deported Immigrant.  It reads like a dark and sad short story about people living in the shadows of what used to be home, but away from their dreams.  They really are stuck in no-mans land, and they will probably all die there:


--
Juan

"Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious."
       -- P. G. Wodehouse
"People want economy and they will pay any price to get it." 
       -- Lee Iacocca
"Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult." 
       -- Samuel Johnson
"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship." 
       -- Harry S Truman
"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."
       -- Pablo Picaso


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