Friday, October 21, 2011

percentages of proof

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-- A friend was kind enough to pass along this link, which details the participation by some percent of the one percent excoriated by the Occupy Wall Street (the "99%) movement. Warren Buffet is not alone in recognizing that outsized wealth is not a sign of beneficent or socially-responsible success.

-- Further, on the protest that began Sept. 17, 2011, there is this story about the management company that is responsible for Zuccotti Park, the place in New York where Occupy Wall Street participants have taken up residence. The rules governing Brookfield Office Properties' responsibilities are vague -- vague enough so that it is easy to imagine their being used (when and if someone decides to take concerted action against the protest) to kick ass and take names.

-- Libya's strong man, Moammar Gadhafi, was killed yesterday. It's unclear whether a French air strike on the convoy in which he was riding is responsible or whether, when the rebels who have been waging a bloody campaign against his regime pulled him out of a vehicle, they shot him. The latter seems more likely. Either way, he is dead and the news is awash in speculation about what comes next. It is no small thing to eradicate a much-loved villain and then be faced with the quandary of what to do with all that energetic and beloved focus.


-- China is feeling a sense of outrage and shame after a two-year-old girl was run over by two vans in Foshan and passersby did what passersby do ... passed by the bloodied victim. The incident was caught on a surveillance camera. I imagine the surveillance camera, probably meant to capture various sorts of civil malfeasance, caught a little more than it was supposed to ... perhaps the complicit willingness to overlook the deaths of female children. It's one thing to know that things happen and quite another to have it shoved in your face. It's too much like looking in the mirror, I imagine.


-- And a spear head lodged in mastadon bone has apparently upended the idea that North America was first populated when travelers crossed the land bridge from Asia 13,000 years ago. Several discoveries, including the spear head, suggest that the continent was populated perhaps 15,000 to 16,000 years ago. I wonder what all this does to "Native American" claims. 
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2 comments:

  1. Saddened and sad with the baby girl incident. And from all these ripples, may China reawaken to the consciousness that lives from before time and space. May China, and us all, reawaken to the heart of compassion and peace once agian.

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  2. The graphic pictures of the remains of el-Qaddafi were shocking. It reminded me why I try to watch very little news broadcasts which seem to make a judgement on who should live or die, and that's just the media, what does it say when we have governments that considers assassinations, torture for questionable cause, etc etc.
    John Donne, the seventeenth-century English poet and preacher, said:
    "...anyone's death diminishes me because I am involved in humankind".
    The triumphalism of a drone killing, killing by a lethal injection or a bomb dropped from an aircraft are all deaths; lets try to stop and think what has just happened, not just to the victim but to ourselves.

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