Your Letters for March 30

Geo Geller writes to comment on reports that the public doesn’t care about the US Attorney scandal:

who is the public and who is doing this survey and whose point of view - does the poll survey people have - and where are they - i think the gang of government knows they are in trouble and are basically careless and fearless since they know about the length of the public memory is so short they are all about distractions anyway as far as i can see - when ever there is a large media event i look elsewhere to see what they don’t want us to see and the main one is IRAN and anything that gets people distracted from war and the next war with iran that they are building up and IRAQ is already a lost cause but a new war will bring new energy - soon you will hear that the IRAQ war was really about the big domino effect of getting IRAN to tople and bring peace and freedumb to IRAN and the middle east too - anyway soap opera government style - to me its all about do something that it is not - why do you think they make their less then positive announcements on friday or saturday and their look at how wonderful we are on monday or Tuesday/

Ted Alexander loves Rosie:

I love Rosie. It’s refreshing to see someone on mainstream TV talk about the things she does which no one else will talk about. But, she
needs to stop spouting out the nuttier ideas like how the Twin Towers collapsed. She was talking about this today on her show. She says fire can’t melt steel (it can, how do you think they make it) and explosives made World Trade Center 7 collapse (nobody knows exactly why but its fairly simple to rule out explosives).

I afraid all that good talk is going for nothing because of all the nonsense talk. Maybe you can talk to her or maybe you know somebody who can. She needs better sources. Common Dreams posted a great article by Gwynne Dyer on Iran’s capture of 15 British soldiers. Much more sense than what Rosie et al was saying about it on the View today.

Anyway, I felt like saying something. I enjoy your blog. I used to print it out and read it while on the elliptical machine. Something more interesting to read than the usual magazines at the workout clubs.

John Gilpin writes:

Danny Schechter – Heard your interview with Bob McChesney last Sunday. Three cheers for your advocacy of the teaching of “financial literacy”!

Here is a thought to go with that, and hopefully become part of it.

The word “exponentially” entered common usage not too long ago, to mean something like “very quickly”. It’s original meaning, of course, is “[changing] at a rate proportional to current size”, which is a decidedly more intense version of “quickly”, and one completely outside the intuition of any but a few technically-trained people.

I suggest that high schools should devote an entire semester to the study of exponential growth and decay, because it takes at least a semester to provide kids with the needed degree of appreciation.

Applications would include compound interest in both its benign and malignant forms, as well as things like population growth, economic growth, and cancerous growth. Hopefully, students would come to understand at a gut level that an exponentially-growing consumption economy is going to come to grief in a finite world.

When I was a kid in the late ’40s, we learned that the US had enough coal for 4000 years. Nowadays the figure is 300 years. What happened? Exponential growth. Global warming aside, that 300-year figure is no good either. People simply have no idea of how fast things are changing, because they have no understanding of exponential change.

What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

Adam Curtis (BBC Video)

Curtis is best known for his 2004 series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics of Fear. This detailed how neocons in the US talked up the threat of radical Islamism to justify their “war on terror”.

SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE BACK—AND IN THE MOVIES

Peter Miller has resurrected two American heroes whose story and suffering is all too relevant today. A new documentary opening at the Quad Cinema (34 W 13th) tonight in NYC and thenat Laemmle in LA April 6 revives a chapter of our history that cannot be forgotten. It’s the story of two Italian immigrants and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who were accused of murder and executed, American style, in Boston back in l927. They were a cause celebre and still symbolize a kind of bigotry against foreigners that is still alive in the century we live in.

It is a dramatic story and this film does it justice with recitations of Vanzett’s powerful writings and profiles of the two which include Sacco’s observation that he was living “under America” which is where the poor and immigrant laborers often end up marginalized and scraping for existence.

We are living through a time with more than a few parallels to the world of Sacco and Vanzetti in country that often suffers from amnesia. This is a story that can’t be forgotten. Go see it. I watched it once and I a will again. Howard Zinn is in it but this is more than an illustrated lecture. It is a film that you won’t forget.

TRAVEL TIME

I am off tomorrow to AlJazeera land, in the state of Qatar in the Gulf for a conference that promises to discuss all the most contentious issues in the Middle East. I was pleased to be invited and happy to go to blog and report for Mediachannel.org

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