The President has tossed Social Security on the negotiating table. The new jobs report is a horror story worthy of Stephen King. Sometimes, you think the world is just going to pieces. Just when you think good news is impossible to come by, you get some (at least, I hope that is how it works).
Take a look at this. We can build a better energy future. We are already starting to do it.
James Pilant
There appears to be a movement in Europe among young people to explore the past by exploring these old constructs. It’s dangerous but at least in the instance of Hitler’s bunker, new information about the war is being found.
Take a look at one expedition – You Tube is full of these.
This is fantastic. You should visit this site just to see the pictures.
Here, we take a trip into the past, one of the missile silos built in the early days of the Cold War.
What remains after fifty years underground of a Titan missile site?
Have a look!
James Pilant
P.S. I cannot give enough credit to the brave souls willing to go into the silo and get these pictures. This is very much a “dungeon and dragons” epic.
When I first began to read this, I thought I was reading a screed, some guy venting his anger. But after getting into what he was saying I realized I had misunderstood (I think Frank Zappa threw me off). His objections are very similar if not identical to my own although worded a little more passionately that I might have done.
I have to add, that increasingly I have been spotting on the web comments and blog posts that seem to give a more positive spin to slavery. This is vile beyond words. Slavery is not comparable to industrial conditions in Northern States, it is not preferable to life in Africa, and if you think bringing people to God is a laudable goal, slavery is still overkill.
Give the attached post your attention, there are some outraged but good thoughts therein.
James Pilant
Chuck Gallagher comments on a Medicare fraud case. Mr. Gallagher is always a good read! He is a noted lecturer in the field of business ethics.
The Safety At Work Blog has some comments on an expulsion. This is an Australian web site. They have a strong reputation in the area of worker compensation.
Bioethics Commission Will Follow Human Subjects Work With Examinations of Sequencing and Imaging is the subject of a post by Pasco Pronesis. The privacy issues surrounding our DNA makeup are staggering in their complexity and implications.
A student discusses her student loan burden and what is the best decision to be made about paying it down. The long term pain of student loans is an ethical issue.
The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (82): Children as Involuntary Suicide Bombers. This is from P.A.P. – Blog, Human Rights etc. I very much enjoy the writing and the outrage on this blog. JP
I agree with virtually everything here. I believe the economy is in serious trouble and it is not getting better soon. I firmly believe that the deficit reduction talks will result in an agreement that will damage the nation severely in the short term, savagely in the long term and serve as the final nail in the coffin of the middle class.
The prosperity and well being of individual Americans making less than a quarter of a million dollars a year no longer registers in any form whatever in the concerns of the governing class.
James Pilant
via Organic News Net
I talk about this a lot myself. My primary gripes are that teachers often teach unimportant things because they are easy to grade. Sometimes, I see meaningless questions asked because they lend themselves well to an easily gradable format. Here’s a disguised version of one I saw –
The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in ….
A. 1935
B. 1936
C. 1937
or D. 1928.
If your career and life depend on knowing the year that social security passed in the format of a Jeopardy question, that would be a good question. In every other way it is useless.
How should the questions be phrased? Like this –
The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in …
A. The first few years of the Roosevelt Administration.
B. The last years of the Hoover Administration.
C. As one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties.
or D. With the founding of the Constitution.
This places the Social Security Act in historical perspective, and it allows reasoning to be used. You can use what you learned in a variety of venues to determine if the act would have been something that the founding fathers or Herbert Hoover would have done.
I believe in teaching difficult subjects. I believe my students can handle difficult material. And I believe that teaching is an art whose highest practitioners can rise to meet the challenges of complexity and ambiguity.
James Pilant
via jay.blog
I think this level of anger entirely appropriate. I was appalled by the “newspaper’s” conduct in hacking the voice mails of crime victims and their families.
James Pilant
Religions other than Christian struggle with equality for women and other societal changes.
Read these two paragraphs from the larger article below –
What exactly is going on here? The governing principles of Wat Pa Pong remain as they have ever been: discrimination against women and submission to the authority of the Ajahns. Since the majority of devotees reject these principles, they have been kept secret as far as possible; however this is no longer possible. The only way to ensure survival is to gain absolute power over the considerable wealth and property invested in the monasteries.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The Ajahns have been telling us these things for years. Equality, democracy, rights: according to the clear, often repeated, and explicit teachings of senior Wat Pa Pong Ajahns, these things are alien, ‘Western’ values irrelevant to the Dhamma and of no value for liberation. What we are now seeing is simply these principles put into practice.
(I’m letting the article speak for itself. The religious issues here are of major importance and my knowledge is not deep enough to do careful analysis.) JP
via Sujato’s Blog
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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