Monthly Archives: August 2011

(Community Matters)  in The Atlantic: Can the Middle Class Be Saved?   A compelling argument why parents should up their children’s expectation from going to college to going to an elite college and then to graduate school. It might not be long before most of those families with only a bachelors degree will struggle much like we previously saw many families without college educations. Engaging children in civic & religious organizations is also highly recommended by the data – and might be a counter influence making up for the lack of an elite school education.

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(Community Matters) in the New York Review of Books: The Next Election: The Surprising Reality

Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia has been the person to go to for often ignored voting statistics and insight into their meaning. His edited volume on the 2010 elections, Pendulum Swing.

(Community Matters) I was struck by Paul Farmer’s humility, personification of servant leadership, and that he travels all over the world with a theologian, his advisor.

This Foreign Affairs article: Partners in Help: Assisting the Poor Over the Long Term on “accompaniment” should inform all social initiatives, perhaps political as well. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the Latin origin of the word means breaking bread together.

Accompaniment is both an objective that is set at the beginning of a task and a mode of follow-through. My lesson, in a nutshell, is that the great failures of policy and governance usually result from failures of implementation, and accompaniment is good insurance against such failures.  

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(Community Matters) Gov Rick Perry is in. He just announced his race for President of the United States.

Interesting run in Huff Post: Rick Perry Super PACs Raise Issues of Coordination, Collusion

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(Community Matters) a bumper sticker spotted by Michael Mitchell:

There was a time when religion ruled, it’s called the dark ages.

(Community Matters) “An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking,” he wrote. “Washington hassles over debt ceilings instead of job creation in the mistaken belief that a balanced budget will produce a balanced economy. It will not.” NYTimes

and, Let’s hope Warren Buffett doesn’t have to resign as “the Oracle” in favor of Paul Krugman (nope, not wrong posting. Meant to link to Stewart)

(Community Matters) Viable Opposition

I don’t know this site or its author. It was in a comment on this Economist article about today’s debt and the S&P rating (graph from Economist)

I do think there should be some context and that we should also be looking at the US level of debt relative to two wars

(Community Matters)

I have a patient at the clinic, she’s a dancer. . . . Maybe we don’t want to heal her.  That’s all I can figure.  Maybe there’s a cost we don’t talk about – . . . . . . . . . . . . .. ……….Steven Tomlinson

He’s performing his 4 short pieces written for People’s Community Clinic again today

THE DOCTOR
© Steven Tomlinson 2011

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I have a patient at the clinic, she’s a dancer.

She invites me, so I go to see her dance.  What I see on stage is more than courageous, it is wholehearted.

I see what it looks like to be unafraid.

Every step is graceful, every gesture has purpose.  But beneath the choreography, you see something else.  Something more primal than an artist could imagine — a truth that is part of her body.

She has kidney stones.  On x-rays you see crystal spikes cutting into her flesh.  You see obstruction and inflammation.  You can see why she is in constant pain.

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(Community Matters) Love this story about tshirts anonymously donated to a neo nazi concert, and already imagining several alternative settings

when washed the message changed from “Hard Core Rebels” to “If your T-shirt can do it, you can do it too – we’ll help you get away from right-wing extremism,” reads the slogan (below) on the shirts after their first washing.

(Community Matters) The Marfa 100 ride, benefiting Marfa Public Radio and LIVESTRONG

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(Community Matters) “The threat of the infiltration of Sharia, or Islamic law, into the American court system is one of the more pernicious conspiracy theories to gain traction in our country in recent years.”

– proud & appreciative of Abe and ADL

Op-Ed: Shout down the Sharia myth makers

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(Community Matters) “There is nothing wrong with our country,” Pres. Obama says. “There is something wrong with our politics.”

Hat Tip: David Gail