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Obama, Catholics and The New Old War

by Another Trope 2/7/2012 - 10:40 am

Here we go again.

As a New York Times blog puts it:

When President Obama‘s administration last month unveiled rules that would require some religious hospitals, colleges and other institutions to provide free contraception to their employees under the new health care law, it might have seemed to be a political winner.

The idea of birth control being covered by insurance companies is popular across the political spectrum, even among Catholics. The new policy will exempt churches themselves and will have no effect on doctors who object to prescribing contraception. And the decision means the president’s health care law will help make birth control cheaper for millions of women.

So life should be good, right? Wrong. [Read more]

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The Fallacy of Mark Levin's Ameritopia: What on Earth Can I Do?

by Another Trope 2/2/2012 - 9:37 pm

The environmental activist Hazel Wolf once wrote that if one wanted to convince an economist, one had to talk to them like an economist.  In the contentious atmosphere of socio-political discourse, this is often easier said than done. The principles and fundamental assumptions of the economist are in the grand scheme of things are relatively easy to grasp.  The challenge becomes how to translate one's stance through the prism of those principles and assumptions.

When we confront, however, the vast scope of socio-political ideologies the situation gets a whole lot messier.  [Read more]

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The Fall of the Alpha Male

by Another Trope 2/1/2012 - 9:33 pm

The alpha males still control the top of the hill.  For now. Their time, however, may be coming to an end, a victim of necessity, of survival.  In their place will not be a replacement, a mere shifting of their hierarchical ranking from them to their conquerors.  There will be no conquering. Rather, there will be a truce of sorts, an agreement, a reconciliation. Who will be there on the top of hill will shift in a collaborative act of play and thought. [Read more]

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Stockholm (Resilience) Syndrome

by Another Trope 1/30/2012 - 9:19 pm

I was nine years old in April 1974 when the images of  Patty Hearst -- newspaper heiress and Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapping victim -- wielding an M1 carbine while robbing a San Francisco bank with the SLA splashed over the news.  Because I was nine, I wasn't aware of the whole back story or who the SLA or Randolph Hearst were.  I knew Ms. Hearst was some kind of an "important person" who normally doesn't go around robbing banks.  I was aware of the debate as to whether she had voluntarily joined in the SLA or whether she had been somehow brainwashed into doing so.  And somewhere along the line, I became aware that Ms. Hearst's apparent new revolutionary tangent was purported by some to be a consequence of the Stockholm Syndrome. [Read more]

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Happy 20th Anniversary, Agenda 21! (Rio+20 or Bust)

by Another Trope 1/27/2012 - 8:35 pm

Has it really been 20 years?  Well, 2012 minus 1992 equals 20, so I guess it has been.

In case you didn't know, twenty years ago the UN convened in Rio the Earth Summit officially known as the Conference on Environment and Development.  [Read more]

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Architects on the Edge

by Another Trope 1/26/2012 - 9:34 pm

We as a nation can begin a meaningful march

toward a sustainable and just society. 

A national paradigm shift, however,

will be a necessary prerequisite.

And it will be the architects who will show us the way forward.

  [Read more]

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Born Rich: Romney and the Taboo Topic

by Another Trope 1/24/2012 - 2:57 pm

 

Why is Romney having so much trouble talking about his taxes and his wealth?  It isn't so that he is uncomfortable with talking about it (which he is); it is (in my opinion) that he is literally not used to talking about it. 

Below is a synopsis of the documentary Born Rich by Jamie Johnson, one of those like Mitt who was born into an affluent family.  You can watch the documentary here. [Read more]

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Raging Newt

by Another Trope 1/23/2012 - 1:55 pm

In the thread on Articleman’s latest blog, he responded to one of my comments with comment about Mitt:

You can't offload muscularity to your superPAC.  Mitt has a glass jaw…. Mitt lacks that gear, which works if you lack any plausible alternative who does. The problem is, Newt is back to plausible and cannot be eradicated with superPAC drones.

I was just musing that we might want to replace muscularity to rage.  And the difference between Newt and lot of other politicians is that he doesn’t have to work to get into that rage (muscularity) gear.  He is already there.  His rage isn’t an act that other politicians put on to appease the base. [Read more]

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Our Political Ecotone Dilemma

by Another Trope 1/21/2012 - 12:04 pm

Ann Pendleton-Jullian in Design Education and Innovation Ecotones writes [emphasis mine]:

Ecotones are typologically unique ecosystems connecting two distinctly different plant and animal communities and the physical characteristics that support those communities.

But these zones are more than just zones of transition. They are areas of disturbance, catalyzed by the differences in the two ecosystems, and they are often zones of conflict as well. The word’s etymology derives from a combination of two Greek words: eco(logy) and—tone, from tonos or tension; ecologies in tension. Ecotones are not merely the blending of two habitats and their characteristics, but actually a third thing. “Although ecotones share some characteristics and species with the habitats on either side of them, ecotones also have their own distinct characteristics and species.” [Read more]

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Envisioning Small...or Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd

by Another Trope 1/19/2012 - 10:57 pm

A recent IBM commercial had a man opening a office door to an empty room save for a group of people lying on the floor. The man asks, “what are you doing?” One the people on the floor answers, “We’re ideating.”  “Well,” the man responds, “good luck with that” and closes the closes the door, leaving the group to their ideation activities.  [Read more]

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