Walter Trout Music Vid (FDL)

Nice one from Walter.

Dude Lives in a Cave (Hancock)

Excerpt from link:

Daniel Suelo lives in a cave. Unlike the average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

This guy's trip is more interesting than it might appear at first glance. He's an got a degree in anthropology and a blog to boot. A lot of what he says makes perfect sense to me, it's just implementing it all that's tricky for most of us wage slaves. Now some might maintain he's a hypocrite since he often benefits off the culture that he purports to hate (by rummaging through towns for various goods that he can find for free), but that's sort of nit-picking to me.

On his blog under the title of occupation he entered: Vaga-Bum. Gotta nice ring to it.

Good Maher Rant on Capitalism (HuffPo)

Very good piece by Maher. Excerpt from link:

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

Bateman Vid

A little late I suppose, but still good.

Greenwald on Cronkite (Salon)

Excerpt from link:

So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite. Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment -- Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" -- was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

Just a great column by Greenwald from beginning to end. Read the whole thing.

Cronkite (NYT)

I'll miss that guy.

Although he was out of the spotlight for years, I was often heartened when he'd speak the truth in his "retirement" about prevailing shoddy journalistic practices and other egregious goings-on. Maybe his biggest contribution, as noted in the article, was his reporting on the Vietnam War, which put the topic center stage on everyone's TV and sanctioned opposition to it.

Also got a chuckle out of his comment about Dan Rather playing a newsman instead of being one.

Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change (AlterNet)

Excerpt from link:

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

The article makes some damn good points of which nothing meaningful will probably ever be done, until its too friggin' late.

Insurance Lobby's Campaign to Smear Michael Moore (Raw Story)

Excerpt from link:

We've just been informed that Bill Moyers, on his show tonight, will expose for the first time the health insurance industry's secret campaign against Michael Moore and his film, "Sicko." It contains a stunning revelation and admission by a top health insurance executive -- the former head of publicity for CIGNA, one of the top health insurance companies in the country -- that the disinformation and attacks on Michael and the film were extensive and well-planned. Their job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared "Sicko" would have).

Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA (which provides health insurance to nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies) admits that, in fact, "Sicko" "hit the nail on the head" and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care.

Clip from Democratic Underground

Old Dogs (The Week)

Excerpt from link:

While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was playing with a water bottle in our backyard—it was one of those 5-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler. At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn’t. I watched him nudge it around until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath, Helen Keller at the water spigot.

That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry’s life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.

From the book: Old Dogs (by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson).

Palin Resigning

Well, I watched the won't-seek-another-term / resignation speech and even by Palin's standards it looks like a pretty weird move. Big scandal in the offing? Health problems? I can't tell. She sounded as nutty to me as she always does. Only dead fish go with the flow? Gotta love that one. But overall the "Barracuda" is looking more like a quitter than a fighter. Has to be more to the story. More to come I'm sure.