The County Health Rankings show us that where we live matters to our health. The health of a community depends on many different factors – ranging from individual health behaviors, education and jobs, to quality of health care, to the environment. This collection of 50 reports – one per state – helps community leaders see that where we live, learn, work, and play influences how healthy we are and how long we live. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is collaborating with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to develop these Rankings for each state’s counties.
The evolution of networked global communication infrastructures is disrupting and changing delivery of news and the way journalists work. While some publishers have been wringing hands and tearing hair over the collapse of the business model for news publishing, others in the industry get that news, and news authority, will always be relevant, that there will always be a need and a market for informed delivery of and interpretation of facts. I just spent two days (Friday and Saturday, April 1st and 2nd) at the University of Texas’ 12th Annual Global Symposium on Online Journalism, organized by brilliant, forward-looking Professor Rosental Alves. After stewing in the juices of the future of journalism for two days, I’d like to summarize what I think I was hearing.
The future of journalism and the future of Internet are intimately related. The Internet has catalyzed a democratization of knowledge, and is (in my opinion) a force beyond our control, though there are enough discussions about controlling it in some way that I’m seeing discussions of substance about how to resist that control (which are interesting, but out of scope for this post). The democratization of knowledge and the evolution of social tools on the Internet are the two aspects of intense interest on my part that have led me to seemingly diverse projects and discussions involving futurism, politics, evolving markets, participatory medicine, and online journalism. While to some I may seem all over the map, I see a consistency in all of these: they’re all part of an Internet-driven evolution. Politics, marketing, healthcare, and journalism are all experiencing disruption and difficulty as the global online information infrastructure becomes increasingly pervasive and sophisticated.
Apocalypse (Greek: Apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil”) is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton, which literally means “revelation at the end of the æon, or age.[1]”
The unraveling of the US and global financial system should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, doubted the news headlines over the past decade, or plunged into an odyssey of self- and world-discovery by reading books, studying history, or seeking the truth behind the cultural myths that cocoon Americans into the notion that they live in the world’s beacon of democracy and freedom. The most surprising factor is that people who have created the crisis think that they can continue the scam by stealing another $850,000,000,000 overtly through the bailout, and even larger amounts covertly, to keep the game going for the world’s wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else.
In the past, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Rome fell when a small percentage of the population controlled nearly all of the wealth. [2] Today, the rich have never been richer nor the poor poorer. The concentration of wealth has been achieved by conquest, as well as by one of the most powerful tools of empire: money.
John, a few yrs back you were posting doubts about the official explanations (both Norad and Nist have changed their stories) of 9/11, but not in a long time. I can imagine many reasons to abandon the discussion, like not upsetting some of your readers, but I just wanted to point out that back then the debate was dominated by speculation, but that in recent years the Truth movement has been professionalized by such orgs as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (some 1500 members risking their careers), Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, etc., as well as peer-reviewed scientific articles. I'd be interested in your thoughts on the subject nowadays.
We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a ‘good student.'
We train employees to deal with bosses in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to do. Figure out how to do exactly what they want, with the least amount of effort, and the last risk of failure and you are a ‘good worker.'
The attitude of minimize is a matter of self-preservation. Raise the bar, the thinking goes, and the boss will work you harder and harder. Take initiative and you might fail, leading to a reprimand or termination (think about that word for a second… pretty frightening).
The linchpin, of course, can't abide the attitude of minimize. It leaves no room for real growth and certainly doesn't permit an individual to become irreplaceable.
If your boss is seen as a librarian, she becomes a resource, not a limit. If you view the people you work with as coaches, and your job as a platform, it can transform what you do each day, starting right now. “My boss won't let me,” doesn't deserve to be in your vocabulary. Instead, it can become, “I don't want to do that because it's not worth the time/resources.” (Or better, it can become, “go!”)
The opportunity of our age is to get out of this boss as teacher as taskmaster as limiter mindset. We need more from you than that.
• The “entitlement programs” have an unfunded liability of greater than $104 trillion. Your share is $367,000. (Every man, woman and child owes the same.)
• At the end of 2009, $3.2 trillion of the $12.9 trillion National Debt was spent, but never on the government's general budget. Where did 3.2 Trillion dollars go?
• In 2010, the federal government is borrowing 52 cents of every dollar that it spends on general operations. Just to balance the budget, spending will have to be cut by 52%.
• Over the next four years, the federal government needs to borrow at least $3.9 trillion and the world is basically running out of money for us.
Washington, meanwhile, doesn't want to sound the economic alarm. The White House and most Democrats want Americans to believe the economy is on an upswing.
Republicans, for their part, worry that if they tell it like it is Americans will want government to do more rather than less. They'd rather not talk about jobs and wages, and put the focus instead on deficit reduction (or spread the lie that by reducing the deficit we'll get more jobs and higher wages).
I believe the Bowles Simpson recommendations represent, to too large an extent, a set of unprincipled political compromises that would lead to a weaker America — with slower growth and a more divided society.
We now have an economy in which five banks control over 50 percent of the entire banking industry, four or five corporations own most of the mainstream media, and the top one percent of families hold a greater share of the nation’s wealth than any time since 1930. This sort of concentration of wealth and power is a classic setup for the failure of a democratic republic and the stifling of organic economic growth.
The government has nearly convinced the public they have everything under control, when that’s far from the case. In fact, everything could go downhill fast. Here are ten all-too-likely scenarios I look at in my book, It Takes a Pillage:
1. The actual bailout has quietly ballooned to $16 trillion dollars (not including over $3 trillion set aside for money market funds), most of it given out with no strings attached. Wall Street firms could continue to tout the myth that ‘talent’ must be paid for – now with stupid sums of bonus money, funded by the American People.
2. The stock market, which has rallied substantially since the government started giving out free money to the banking industry, could tank on the realization that if that money needed to be paid back any time soon, the banks wouldn’t be good for it.
3. Because bigger is better still seems to be Fed policy, JPM Chase could acquire Bank of America – Merrill Lynch, creating one of the largest, federally subsidized banking firms in the world.
4. Because the bigger just can’t help getting badder, JPM Chase could also acquire Citigroup, and we’d be living with a monopoly economy.
5. We could sink into the delusion that the Obama administration has actually done something to restrain Wall Street, lulling us into a false sense of security. Then the remaining big banks will screw us again.
6. Congress could continue to ignore history and never reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. That act made banks smaller, more specialized, easier to regulate and less expensive to bail out. Repealing it lead to this mess, and there’s barely a whisper heard in Washington of bringing it back.
7. As a Fed approved bank holding company, Goldman Sachs could buy a lot of small banks just to get access to all the money in savings and checking accounts to gamble with. Plus they’d have that great $250,000 FDIC guarantee they get per account. This would make them the biggest bank in the country.
8. Every bank and government agency with access to some aspect of a federal bailout could max out their subsidies chips at once – pushing the full bailout cost to over $26 trillion.
9. Many mid-sized and smaller banks didn’t need a bailout and have been better at allowing consumers access to credit. The largest banks, flush with federal funding and a poor record of helping average Americans, could buy them all up.
10. The Fed could continue to operate in secrecy, despite multiple moves by Congress to push for a full audit of its largesse. Right now, only the Fed knows what the real worst case scenarios might actually be.
