MATT TAIBBI, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: This is a very intriguing spontaneous uprising, coming into existence in response to the transformation of the government at the federal and, now, the state level to a system owned and operated to serve virtual corporate states, and their profits, first.
Something very interesting is happening.
There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.
But there’s something brewing that looks like it might be a blueprint to effectively take on the financial services industry: a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain. I can’t speak for how well the program will work, but it’s certaily been effective in scaring the hell out of Wall Street.
Under the proposal, towns would essentially be seizing and condemning the man-made mess resulting from the housing bubble. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of ‘That’s so crazy, it just might work!’ One of the plan’s originators described it to me as a ‘four-bank pool shot.’
Here’s how the New York Times described it in an article from earlier this week entitled, ‘California County Weighs Drastic Plan to Aid Homeowners’:
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Stephan: Given we are in summer, when both bees and yellow jackets are about, I thought this might be useful.
It’s summer, and the Yellow jackets are back in force.
Should we be alarmed?
Well, it helps to know a little about these interesting creatures.
It turns out that Yellow jackets are a type of paper wasp. Paper wasps get their name because they build structures out of a special paper made by adding saliva to chewed-up plant fibers.
Found Coast to Coast
In different parts of the country people call them hornets and meat bees, too. Whatever their name, yellow jackets can be found across the United States. In fact, each region usually has at least one species that nests above ground and one species that nests below ground. Both types share similar life histories.
Subjects Of The Queen
Yellow jackets, like some species of bees, ant wasps, and termites, live in colonies where many workers serve a single egg-laying queen. The colonies begin to form in early spring, when fertile females emerge from the sheltered locations where they spent the winter and search for nest sites.
At first the nest is just a spherical shell the size of a golf ball enclosing a honeycomb structure where the female lays five or six eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae, which the mother then […]
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Stephan: Not a trend, but one of those little cultural insights I find fascinating, and you may too.
Click through to see the picture.
Fashion experts have been surprised by the discovery of four bras around 600 years old in an Austrian castle.
The underwear style was thought to be a little over 100 years old as women abandoned tight corsets, but the linen versions unearthed by archaeologists date back to the middle ages, the University of Innsbruck said on Wednesday.
Hilary Davidson, fashion curator at the Museum of London, said one specimen in particular ‘looks exactly like a [modern] brassiere’. The garments were unearthed in 2008, but the discovery was only publicised by an article in the August 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine.
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John R. Platt, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is an appalling story of blatant willful ignorance at a cultural level, a manifestation of selfishness and greed with planetary implications. If we lose the sharks, like the bees, an entire ecosystem will change -- in no way to our benefit. A small group, this time a subpopulation of Asians, is prepared to sacrifice the ecosystem of the world ocean, and thus change the planet, in order to sustain a cultural ritual. The breakdown of critical parts of the ecosystem upon which human health depends is about as serious as it gets. Bees and sharks sustain us; their extinction is a catastrophe. This must be resisted. Anything you can do to protect the sharks -- DO IT!
The appearance of a shark fin piercing the ocean surface is often seen as a sign of danger to humans. Even more dangerous to sharks is the sight of a shark fin floating in a bowl of soup.
Around the world, sharks are in crisis. Many species have suffered population declines of 90 to 99 percent in recent decades, mostly to feed the seemingly endless demand for the tasteless concoction known as shark fin soup, which is served to mark important occasions such as weddings and business deals in China and some other Asian communities. An astonishing 10.3 million kilograms of shark fins and shark fin-based products were imported into Hong Kong in 2011, according to statistics released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts Environmental Group in the report, ‘Navigating Global Shark Conservation: Current Measures and Gaps’ (pdf). The organization says Hong Kong imports about half of the world shark fin harvest.
The Pew group obtained these figures from the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong, but even they don’t tell the whole story. Previous research (pdf) has estimated the total worldwide shark fin catch to be three to four times what is legally reported. Because so much of the […]
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HILARY WAINWRIGHT and MICHEL BAUWENS, - red pepper
Stephan: Here is another spontaneous positive development. And once again it arises in response to the increasingly dysfunctional Federal government owned, and in the service of the special interest of the Corporate Virtual States.
I think this and the Eminent Domain trend are part of a larger trend: the transformation of the United States into a system of bioregions, made up of several states connected in a Federal network, but more autonomous than anything we have previously seen. It started with Gov. Schwarzenegger's climate coalition of Western states. Cascadia -- from Northern California to the Canadian border constitutes one such region. Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Eastern Texas constitutes another. Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire a third. Their cultures are as different in degree as those of France and Italy.
In the blue value regions that emphasize tolerant, life-affirming, social networks peer-to-peer production, as described in this report, is going to be a significant factor, I believe
Don't be put off by the archaic Marxist language. I didn't think anyone wrote with that tone anymore, it's such a bad tactical move, and I am not publishing this piece for that. It is the linkage process described that I call to your attention. That is an important positive trend. Many of you I know are involved in it, through things like the Thriving and Resilient Community movement, or other philanthropic or volunteer projects designed to make social wellness a priority, and better.
New words expressing new concepts usually indicate stirrings at other levels of reality. So when we read of widespread ‘peer-to-peer’ activity (sharing without central authorities) and the spread of ‘open source’ (the mutuality of creativity), or come across seemingly paradoxical concepts such as ‘produsers’ (users producing value as they use), or entirely new concepts such as ‘phyles’ (transnational networks of small companies in which the values of the commons are predominant), we should find out about the innovations that old language does not capture.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new ‘proto’ mode of production based on distributed, collaborative forms of organisation. It is developing within capitalism, rather as Marx argued the early forms of merchant and factory capitalism developed within the feudal order. In other words system change is back on the agenda but in an unexpected form, not as a socialist alternative, but as a commons-based alternative.
Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to […]
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