[Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
- The Insane Thing About the Rally for Sanity
- [RHRealityCheck.org - Sarah Seltzer gets closer to what I was trying to say this morning. -L]
Obama and Stewart could say "let's be friends" and "you're a total d-bag" to Glenn Beck supporters, and the ensuing response would probably have the exact same level of disdain and outrage because they're not really listening.
…Jon Stewart refused to even politicize the afternoon’s discourse to the level of “please vote on Tuesday”…
…he was just spoofing all people who care a lot. He has chosen to take on irrational people for their passion and their involvement, not for their irrational beliefs. And in doing so he’s fallen into a trap laid by the very same mainstream media he so despises, doing the same dance away from the term “liberal”…
- First Female President Elected in Brazil
- [RHRealityCheck.org - Jodi Jacobson]
Brazilian voters have elected their first female President, Dilma Rousseff, who ran for national office for the first time in this campaign. [informative links]
- Cash-Transfer Programs Show Remarkable Success in Fight Against Global Poverty
- …a growing strategy against global poverty is showing strong signs of success… handing out cash directly to those who need it…
The strategy is rooted in a simple idea: people generally know what’s best for themselves…
It should be said up front that giving funds to individuals doesn’t solve structural problems…
There is no magic bullet to a problem as encompassing and multifaceted as global poverty… The point isn’t that structural change is unnecessary, but that trying to change structures without giving individuals resources tends to not work as well as we’d hope. It seems that starting out with individuals and giving them the freedom and agency to make their own decisions — you know, treating them like adult human beings rather than a monolithic group or a “cause” — does a lot more good.
- California reveals terms of nation’s first economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system
- [Scientific American]
California regulators have released the country's first comprehensive, mandatory emissions trading system for greenhouse gases.
The California Air Resources Board issued a preliminary design last week detailing how approximately 2.7 billion allowances will be distributed to emitters in their effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 — an amount anywhere between 18 million and 27 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
The Of interest (Mon, Nov 1st, 11am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.