http://www.linktv.org/programs/dalai

A Link TV exclusive documentary that presents highlights of an extraordinary day-long ethics conference, featuring the Dalai Lama in conversation with some of the nation’s leading activists. A co-production of Tibet House U.S. in New York and Link TV, the program brings together for the first time ever one of the world’s most important spiritual leaders with renowned journalists, economists, environmentalists, and politicians to discuss the ethical dilemmas of the new millennium.

With allegations of government subterfuge, corporate malfeasance scandals and a devastating global warming crisis dominating the headlines, this unprecedented television program gives millions of Americans a rare glimpse into the enlightening ethical teachings, peaceful nature, and often surprising humor of the Dalai Lama.

The Economist | April 21 | Washington DC

Work in progress -- The presumptive nominee is steering his economic policies to the right

When Paul Ryan released his proposed federal budget a year ago, Mitt Romney greeted it coolly. He congratulated the House Budget Committee chairman for “setting the right tone”, but pointedly declined to endorse any of its details.

The coolness was understandable. Mr Ryan’s budget was political dynamite. It proposed to slash income-tax rates, especially for the rich and businesses, and replace traditional Medicare with vouchers for the elderly to buy health insurance. Conservatives loved it, but voters, once they saw the details, recoiled, as did some Republicans. Newt Gingrich, vying with Mr Romney for the party’s presidential nomination, called it “right-wing social engineering”. When Mr Romney released his own 160-page economic platform last September, it promised much more limited tax cuts. On Medicare, all he promised was a plan that would “differ” from Mr Ryan’s while sharing its objectives.

One benefit of my keeping tabs on a certain right-wing discussion board is that I occasionally gain insight into right wing memes that I would otherwise fail to understand.

This is the case for women's rights and the "GOP War on Women".

I was truly surprised by this reaction against the left's highlighting of GOP anti-women's rights.

However, I happen to know that the posters in question are not all simply shills or trolls, but some genuinely believe what they are posting, even if it might be conditioned by right-wing funded media.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.

Ted Thornhill | March 26 | Daily Mail UK

Is this finally proof we're NOT causing global warming? The whole of the Earth heated up in medieval times without human CO2 emissions, says new study

Evidence was found in a rare mineral that records global temperatures

Warming was global and NOT limited to Europe

Throws doubt on orthodoxies around 'global warming'

March 21 | University of Buffalo

Do animals have reflective minds able to self-regulate perception, reasoning, memory?

According to one of the leading scholars in the field, there is an emerging consensus among scientists that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition -- that is, our ability to reflect on our own mental processes and guide and optimize them.

David Mielach | March 22 | Business Daily

Women make better bosses. That’s the finding of a new survey, which found that women in management positions lead in a more democratic way, allow employees to participate in decision-making and establish interpersonal channels of communication.

[...]

Those interpersonal channels of communication facilitated increased communication between management and employees in companies with women in management positions. This has a twofold benefit for these organizations. First, these companies are able to make more well-informed decisions, since employee feedback will be utilized in the decision-making process.

Matt Taibbi | March 14 | Rolling Stone

The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

http://www.healthcareadministration.com/wp-content/uploads/student.jpg

Matt Taibbi | October 12

Rolling Stone ...the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

Crooks and Liars - Oh, the irony, the sweet, sweet irony. From the bowels of the Cato Institute, an email exchange surfaced. An email exchange between Charles Koch and Friedrich Hayek, king of the free-markets-rule economic theory where Koch tries to lure Hayek to the Institute of Human Studies by extolling the virtues of Medicare as the safety net that would protect Hayek from being excluded from health insurance coverage if he were to leave Austria...

Matthew Yglesias | September 13

ThinkProgress - I half agree with the sentiments in Ezra Klein’s Bloomberg column about the importance of the 2012 election, but I think there’s a dangerously misleading idea lurking there. He quotes Larry Bartels’ brilliant exposition of the point (see this PDF but also this one) that you have to put FDR and the New Deal realignment in comparative perspective. All governments that were in office when the Depression hit lost power, and all governments that were in office during recovery regained it. The implication in the column seems to be a kind of nihilistic one, where economic outcomes are just driven by luck and a bad recession just so happens to take a long time to recovery from. This is partly true, perhaps, in the case of small open economies but large economies are primarily custodians of their own short-term destinies. A long recession is a recession to which policymakers mounted an ineffective response. Herbert Hoover did have bad luck relative to (say) Warren Harding but he also had bad policy relative to Franklin Roosevelt....

By H. Caldwell Tanner (Loldwell.com) and Roscott Nover (SystemComic.com)

by Maria Petringa

Arab News - The mysterious land of Libya, located at the heart of the Mediterranean and yet so isolated during the past few decades, has been through many changes in its long history. The current political climate of contestation throughout the Arab world may add yet another flag to Libya’s collection.

More images at Troll.me

Wikileaks and Anonymous are cooperating to make public some information about Bank of America and others starting Monday. Anonymous has stated that a broader mission is to expose "Primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system ... accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy".

See the articles Agonist member Raja has posted about:

- what WikiLeaks has on BoA

and

- statement by Anonymous

Also see background articles on financial crisis illegal activity, in the comment section.

Between 1887 and 1892, John C.H. Grabill sent 188 photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Grabill is known as a western photographer, documenting many aspects of frontier life – hunting, mining, western town landscapes and white settlers’ relationships with Native Americans. Most of his work is centered on Deadwood in the late 1880s and 1890s. He is most often cited for his photographs in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Indian Re

Updates January 29: See updates in thread comments about technically how the Internet was shut down in Egypt, and comparisons to U.S.

Chloe Albanesius | January 28

PCMAG - With reports of Egypt's government completing shutting down the Internet in the country, talk about an "Internet kill switch" bill in the U.S. has reemerged. Could it happen here?

The bill in question is the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, a cyber-security measure introduced in June by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. It was an over-arching cyber-security measure that, among other things, would create an office of cyberspace policy within the White House and a new cyber-security center within the Homeland Security Department.

Stephen C. Webster | January 13

RawStory - Prepare for the rise of libertarian progressives.

That was the message earlier in the week from trends analyst Gerald Celente, who predicted that the rapid acceleration of wealth into the coffers of the ultra-rich would drive a global youth resistance movement in 2011 and reformat long-held political boundaries.

And then there were two.

Longtime American politics gadfly Ralph Nader, a man of many ideas almost diametrically opposed by most libertarian conservatives, said Wednesday that he sees a coming convergence of liberals, progressives and libertarian conservatives in the wake of a worsening financial crisis and dogged partisanship that's put the government into gridlock.