Knosha

What do you think about human capital contracts where investors pay the costs of college in return for a percentage of the students’ future income over a certain amount of time?

I don’t know if I could handle that idea of someone getting paid dividends by me.  But it IS intriguing.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/30/betting_on_bob/

Interesting Article on Art and China’s Revolution Exhibit in the WeeklyStandard.

Taken from the exhibit’s website: “Art and China’s Revolution reflects upon one of the most tumultuous and catastrophic periods in recent Chinese history⎯the three decades following the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. During this time, the government led by Mao Zedong sought to modernize China across all aspects of society, a process that included suppressing or destroying much of traditional culture. The government also sought to create a new visual culture to communicate its goals and ideology to the Chinese people.

Artists were encouraged to create art that reflected the revolutionary spirit of the time, in Mao’s words, to create art for the people. The impact of this directive on artists and art making was enormous. Oil painting in a socialist realist style replaced ink painting—which had been one of the most revered art forms in China for over one thousand years—as the preferred painting style. Revolutionary heroes, such as workers, soldiers, and peasants replaced traditional subjects such as landscapes, birds, and flowers.”

Artists who forsook Mao and continued to work in the tradition of ink paintings where persecuted and subjected to physical and mental torture. The exhibit also features their work as well as a collection of the more impersonal, mass-produced Mao memorabilia items such as tea pots, cigarette packs, and buttons.

Another interesting exhibit: Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture – Picturing Power: Art and Propaganda in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

Heard of the documentary  What Would Jesus Buy released this past year?

I felt sick and sad reading this.  It’s an article from the NY Times about the death of a Wal-Mart employee.  He was trampled by crowds that broke down the door before the store opened Friday morning.  Sometimes I think the cliche advice “act natural” is the worst thing we can do.  Sometimes what comes most natural is for us to act like beasts, rather than men and women.

From Democracy Now’s Nov 26th headlines:

A former Georgian diplomat has publicly testified that the United States gave Georgia the green light earlier this year to start a war against Russia in the breakaway region of Abkhazia. The diplomat [Erosi Kitsmarishvili] told a parliamentary hearing in Georgia that Georgian authorities were responsible for starting the conflict. For months U.S. and Georgian officials have blamed Russia for starting the hostilities.

Bellow is video of Russia Today’s report on Kitsmarishvili’s testimony.

For more information see AP report by Matt Siegel.

Sad Indian

There is much mud and glory in the history of any nation, but when it comes to the history of Thanksgiving in America it is pretty muddy.  Mark Athony Rolo writes an article in The Progressive that is rarely told on Thanksgiving, but one that we should remember.  In our rememberance, we should start to consider how we can better redeem this holiday in light of the history.

I really enjoy reading Colin Beavan’s reflections on living a low impact life…here’s a seasonally appropriate one that I think would be great to emulate.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3042

You can also read his blog as “No Impact Man” at

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) challenged the Washington Post on its Iraqi death toll reporting.  On a weekly “Iraq War Casualties” chart, the Washington Post has been using the Iraqi Body Count figures, which are  2 to 10 times lower than the casualty figures reached by household surveys.  FAIR’s objection was that despite using  “almost certainly a very serious underestimation”, the Washington Post misleadingly referred to their figures as the “maximum count”.  The IBC figures are not an estimate, but a body count, which for many reasons will be considerably lower than the actual number of violent deaths.

In response to the objections of FAIR activists, the Washington Post has ceased using the term “maximum count”, but continues to use the IBC count.

For more information on a significantly higher Iraqi casualty estimate, see the 2007 Opinion Research Business (OBR) report, which estimates the number at over a million.

The BBC has a good 2006 article on the casualty count disparity.

Even when only considering the conservative IBC figures, Iraq is in the midst of a sever humanitarian crisis which, according to the BBC article, the IBC attributes to,

Incompetence/fraud on a massive scale by hospitals and ministries, self-destructive behavior by the wounded, an utter failure by agencies to notice decimation of the male population and an abject media failure to observe the scale of events.

I know that we are all already well aware of the positive/negative effect our attitude can have on both ourselves and others, but I came across this article while prepping for a stress class and thought I’d share…

http://www.ri.net/middletown/mef/linksresources/documents/wired.pdf