http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/xjf9lyMWmPo/-Midday-Open-Thread

• Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said we should set aside the health care debate and focus on Afghanistan.
• Four Washington police officers were gunned down in an ambush at a coffee shop this morning. None of the patrons or employees were hurt.
• A Canadian researcher claims there is evidence the "permanent" arctic ice is vanishing.
• A newly released Senate report says Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops, holed up in Tora Bora in December 2001.
• Senator James Inhofe spouted off against retired generals calling for climate change action (in the name of national security), saying they are merely craving "the limelight."
• The Virginia couple accused of crashing the White House state dinner last week is reportedly seeking payment for news interviews.

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The Shrine u builds 2 me is acceptable.

weer iz ur offering?

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Overall, the conference provided a valuable opportunity for racebending.com to further impress both researchers and industry within media and entertainment with our strength and clarity of purpose as a grassroots activist group. This is one step closer to attaining a world where all movies — not only culturally-focused ones like The Last Airbender — will be cast responsibly and with fair representation.

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Canada
Young Giant of the North
Leitch
1964

I was so excited to learn about our neighbor to the north. This was definitely written for an American audience.  Toward the end was a nice historical timeline comparing Canada and the US.  Too bad it didn’t get past the early 1960’s.  I also loved a whole chapter dedicated to these mysterious Canadians.   For those of you unfamiliar with our friends in Canada, here are some pictures of typical Canadians.  Did you know that Santa is actually from Canada? 

Mary

http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/XPVgX5FTMPk/-Book-review:-Barbara-Ehrenreichs-Bright-Sided

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt: New York
Hardcover, 256 pages, $12.42
October 2009

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, positive thoughts were flowing out into the universe in unprecedented volumes, escaping the solar system, rippling through vast bodies of interstellar gas, dodging black holes, messing with the tides of distant planets. If anyone--deity or alien being--possessed the means of transforming these emanations into comprehensible form, they would have been overwhelmed by images of slimmer bodies, larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth.

But the universe refused to play its assigned role as a "big mail order department." In complete defiance of the "law of attraction," long propounded by the gurus of positive thinking, things were getting worse for most Americans, not better.

Happy talk is killing us. Faux cheerfulness is blinding us. Optimism is making us delusional. And America is knee-deep in the happy happy joy joy, always looking on the bright side of life schtick, has been from the 19th century on, and Barbara Ehrenreich is, to put it mildly, so over it.

What really pushed her over the edge was a bout of breast cancer that exposed her to the modern American abyss of positive thinking. She recoiled from the resolute cheerfulness of the breast cancer community, so determinedly upbeat that patients end up buying into the guilt trip that any depressed thoughts they might harbor about their illness caused the affliction in the first place. Or the relapse. Or the bad reaction to chemo.

This was the seed of Bright-Sided, which looks at the dark side of the positive-thinking movement, from its origins to The Secret, from its mystical leanings to its manipulation in the modern workplace that aims to make employees compliant with low pay and increasing workloads.

It's a book about happy happy that will piss you off. In a good way.

First off, Ehrenreich says, let's get some basic logic straight: If you're doing okay, you don't need to constantly remind yourself of it through visualizations and mantras.

The truly self-confident, or those who have made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity.

... We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the world "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called "patriotism."

The American compulsion toward optimism, she argues, clearly has more ramifications than just sending messages to ill individuals that their diseases are a result of not thinking positively enough. It's a national compulsion with international consequences, few of which are good. "Positivity is not so much our condition of our mood as it is part of our ideology," she writes, "the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it." For America and her citizens, this tendency toward cheer fosters "reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news."

Like maybe, for example, climate change?

Ehrenreich's research into the positive self-help movement takes her to seminars and conventions nationwide where all kinds of investment advisors, spiritual gurus, self-starting entrepreneurs and lost souls mingle, soaking in the positive vibes of Tom Peters and the like. Here, the author encounters more than a few strange people with some disturbing thought patterns.

But the most startling response I got to my quibbling came from an expensively dressed life coach from Southern California. After I summarized my discomfort with all the fake quantum physics in a couple of sentences, she gave me a kindly therapeutic look and asked, "You mean it doesn't work for you?"

I felt at that moment, and for the first time in this friendly crowd, absolutely alone. If science is something you can accept or reject on the basis of personal tastes, then what kind of reality did she and I share? If it "worked for me" to say that the sun rises in the west, would she be willing to go along with that, accepting it as my particular take on things?

This alienation from reality is traced throughout Bright-Sided. Science, the ultimate reality, is just one of the many things discarded if it brings you down. Anything that affects your attitude in a negative way is suspect in these circles. Yet at the same time, the individual shoulders enormous responsibility not just for his or her own mood, but for all outcomes in life, which get traced back ... to mood, in a sickening sort of blame-the-victim mentality. You're good enough, you're smart enough, and gosh darn it ... if facts make you depressed, dump them! Especially, sadly, news and social issues that make you feel powerless.

This retreat from the real drama of tragedy of human events is suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking. Why not follow the news? Because, as my informant at the NSA meeting told me, "You can't do anything about it." Braley similarly dismisses reports of disasters: "That's negative news that can cause you emotional sadness, but that you can't do anything about." The possibilities of contributing to relief funds, joining an antiwar movement, or lobbying for more humane government policies are not even considered. But at the very least there seems to be an acknowledgment here that no amount of attitude adjustment can make good news out of headlines beginning with "Civilian casualties mount ..." or "Famine spreads ..."

Nowhere is this requirement to take responsibility for personal happiness more pervasive than in the current corporate world. Ehrenreich describes quite accurately the glorification of CEOs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca, comparing them to the megapastors at the megachurches. Part of what comes with this worshipful territory is the tendency to credit business leaders with all kinds of wisdom outside their realm of expertise, and unsurprisingly, a lot of what today's corporate leaders preach is to suck it up, it's a tough work environment, we all must look to our own bootstraps now. What an amazing gift the power of positive thinking has been to today's employer, who in turn, has gifted it to employees!

Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control. "Reality sucks," a computer scientist with a master's degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me. But you can't change reality; at least not in any easy and obvious way. You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime. For now, you can only change your perception of reality, from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world's great gift to its laid-off employees and the overworked survivors--positive thinking.

Bright-Sided is gem--bitter, real and true. It cuts through the bullshit and shakes you up, gives permission to call crappy situations crappy, bad workplaces bad, and selfish societies selfish. In this world, you can't hope to change a thing if you don't acknowledge the reality of any of it, and Ehrenreich's book is like a waterfall of truth in a desert of falsity and commercialized fronts. It's got quite a few turns of brilliant, sparkling writing in it as well, but most importantly, it faces head on the dark undercurrent of fear that runs right beneath the surface of American life, now more than ever. Unacknowledged, those fears of failure, of not making it, of not surviving in this brave new shocked-by-doctrine world, are going to cripple us all and separate us. Brought into the light though, as these fears are in this book, they are not so scary after all, when all of us look at them and all of us vow to solve problems together.

Yeah, right there. That last sentence, right there. That's the irony of Bright-Sided. You can actually make things better, more (dare I say it?) positive, if you admit the awful is pretty damn awful.

And then get to work to change the system.

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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/0GKDCTwW-wo/-The-Venus-Syndrome

It's that most wonderful time of the year! Christmas decorations are going up all over America. Those colorful little strings of twinkling lights racing down eaves and winding artfully around tree trunks can do more than paint pretty holiday vistas. We can use them as an intuitive probe to look at our nearest neighbor in space and speculate on earth's distant, or not so distant, future.

A typical Christmas tree light puts out about one watt of heat and light energy. That's not a lot but it does the job. On that same scale, the incident solar radiation, or insolation, received by earth when all wavelengths are taken into account works to about 250 watts per square meter¹ (usually referred to as just "watts") when averaged over the entire surface, light and dark, from poles to equator. Some of it is reflected back, the rest is absorbed.

If you take an introductory planetary astronomy course you'll hear the usual spiel that the earth is in the solar system's Goldilocks zone, not too hot like our sister planet Venus, not too cold like our smaller cousin Mars. It's actually more complicated than that. At 250 watts, the earth is a little too far away, a little too cold, for our liking. By the laws of simple thermodynamics our lovely blue-green planet should boast an average temperature well below the freezing point of water. And the sun is very slowly heating up, roughly 5 to 10 percent per billion years, so ancient insolation was even less long ago than it is now. The earth should have started out frozen solid right down to the deep ocean trenches and it would be a brilliant iceball hanging in space like a snow-white ornament to this day. What's kept that grim fate at bay for billions of years are greenhouses gases (GHGs).

If you compare GHGs like  carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor (H2O), and ozone (O3), to non GHGs in our atmosphere like oxygen (O2) or nitrogen (N2), one of the first things you notice is that the GHGs have more than two atoms. That's not a coincidence. The physical arrangement of atoms that make up GHGs allows them to absorb a lot more heat than the simpler compounds. They act on our planet just like windows in your car; they let light through but retain heat, so when you come back to your SUV in a sunny parking after holiday shopping, it's noticeably warmer inside.

The Greenhouse Effect saved earth from turning into a snowball and made our world a haven for life, but the same phenomenon pulled Venus into the fiery pit of hell. Billions of years ago, lovely Venus was true to her mythological name, hospitable, inviting, and probably much more like earth. Evidence suggests she had warm liquid oceans and everything else a heat loving anaerobic microbe could want. But proximity to the sun and relentless solar heating evaporated more and more water. Water vapor is a potent heat trapping gas. The temperature rose further evaporating more water, the process fed back, viciously, and eventually the oceans boiled off completely cloaking the planet in thick steam. High in the atmosphere, under the influence of harsh solar UV, hydrogen atoms escaped their watery embrace with oxygen and bled into space. The oxygen combined with left over nitrogen to form clouds of acid. Nearer the now broiling surface, carbon was baked out of the rock and combined with oxygen to form CO2, trapping even more heat. The picture of the surface below taken by a Russian probe (Venera 13) gives an idea of what Venus is like now (Click on any image to enlarge offsite). The horizon is off in the upper right corner.

It's every bit as hot as it looks. Today Venus is as dry as a bone under a smothering atmosphere ninety times denser than ours and the planet roasts at 850 F. So hot it snows metal, so hot you wouldn't need a light in a Venusian cave because the walls glow red. Some scientist speculate that if Venus had a robust microbiology early on, microbes might still eek out a living high in the clouds. But any life that resembled even the hardiest terrestrial thermophiles on or near the surface was charred to a cinder.

Planetary astronomers don't know for sure when this happened. But it most likely occurred at least 500 million years ago, because that's the last time the entire surface melted and re-solidified in the tortured Hadaean tableau we see now. It may have periodically melted, several times, which means the climate on Venus may have spun out of control over two or three billion years ago when the insolation was not much greater than it is on earth today

That brings up a chilling question, no pun intended: could the same thing happen to earth? Yes, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. The sun will continue to slowly heat up until our world is forced into a similar greenhouse loop. It may take hundreds of million of years, but it probably won't take much more than a billion. And with a little help, say if a huge source of greenhouses gases were suddenly released, it might happen more quickly than we could ever dream up in our worst nightmare.

Climate scientists have found that at the current solar luminosity and continental configuration, the earth is amazingly sensitive to small perturbations in climate. The difference between the warm period we're in now and enough cooling to trigger an ice age is one, tiny twinkling little Christmas tree bulb over each square meter of the earth's surface for several centuries. If the lack of a single miniature decorative light could trigger ice sheets marching down into Indiana, imagine the warming that might ensue if 5 or 10 of them were added? Next week we'll look at the most recent work from the man who is arguably the world's foremost expert in climate science. He worries that, under some of the grimmer assumptions, we may embark on a whirl-wind journey to join our sister planet, in more ways than size and mass, a lot earlier than we think.

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Wat? We let him sleep by heater.

can u rotate me?

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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/y47m3640X-Y/-A-Purity-Test-for-Democrats

The RNC is pushing a purity test for Republicans.  True to form, the modern GOP has enshrined an off-the-cuff remark of St. Ronnie the Intolerant and declared that anyone who doesn't leap over at least 8 of 10 newly-created hurdles is no longer welcome at the elephant trough. You don't have to read past the preamble to confirm that the Republicans are now completely in the grip of the most extreme faction of the Beck-heads.

WHEREAS, Republican faithfulness to its conservative principles and public policies and Republican solidarity in opposition to Obama’s socialist agenda is necessary to preserve the security of our country, our economic and political freedoms, and our way of life;

The whole scorecard of Republicanism is now measured in how strongly a candidate stands against the president. How impressive is it that the long dead host of Death Valley Days is always "President Ronald Reagan" while the sitting president of the United States is simply "Obama"? This is a party not just in opposition to Democrats, but to reality.

The idea of the GOP is that this list of "principles" can serve them as the "Contract with America" did the Newt generation over a decade ago. There's a slight problem with that idea. Even assuming that Newt's baby had something to do with GOP advances back then, the Contract at least contained something to do. The Contract with America contained at least eight pieces of proposed legislation. The new purity test? None.

As with all things GOP these days, there's not a single new idea in this test. Instead, it's a test of saying no. The rules require that would-be Republicans oppose health care reform, oppose stimulus, oppose amnesty for immigrants, oppose equal rights for gays, oppose protecting the environment, oppose unions, oppose diplomatic solutions, and oppose health care reform (again). There's a tip of the hat to the NRA, but not one, not one, actual solution proposed. Apparently, being a Republican is completely a negative test. You don't have to actually do anything, you just have to agree to oppose the right things.

Still, the purity test does provide a convenient check list. You too can be accepted as a Republican if you promise to hate gays, poor people, immigrants, and the environment (which, come to think of it, has been the Republican standard for decades). Out of pure bullet-point envy, I propose that Democrats must also have their own list. Ten litmus tests which every potential Democratic candidate should  be able to ace before they ever hope to put (D) after their names. In fact, I'll go so far as to be more pure than the Republicans. If you can't pass every one of these tests, don't bother to sign on.

(1) We support the rights extended to Americans extended under the Constitution. All the rights. For all Americans.

(2) We support thoughtful, pragmatic solutions that protect American lives, American standards, and American pocketbooks. This includes finding solutions that don't require bombing anyone.

(3) We support an America that has diversity in race, thought, background, and religion not out of some hazy idealism, but because it is our nation's greatest strength.

(4) We oppose torture in any form, in any place, at any time, for any reason.

(5) We support American business, and recognize that an unregulated market is an unfair market, an unstable market, and a market doomed to failure.

(6) We support American workers, and know that when workers are allowed to organize they make their jobs, their companies, and their nation stronger.

(7) We believe that the reputation of our nation is valuable and must be zealously guarded against those who place expediency ahead of law.

(8) We believe in spreading democracy and human rights to the rest of the world by vigorously upholding those ideals here at home.

(9) We believe that access to our government is not for sale. Not in the courthouse, not in the White House, and not in the legislature.

(10) We believe that the health of our planet is not a zero-sum game, not a game of "you go first," and not a game.

Not a particularly detailed set of positions, I know. But then it's not supposed to be. Unlike the GOP, we aren't short of ideas, and unlike Newt, we don't have to dream up a batch of legislation with cute names. We already have real legislation out there that meet these goals. Bills like the Employee Free Choice Act, the Clean Water Protection Act, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Affordable Health Care for America Act and many others.

But then, maybe 10 rules aren't enough. I left out the Democratic 11th commandment (thou shalt stop supporting Joe Lieberman's bigger-than-the-Snoopy-balloon-in-the-Macy's-parade-sized ego), and I'm sure I've left out plenty of others. Maybe ones that you feel are vital. What are your suggestions?

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/2009/11/please-slack-off.html