Seems Putin and his corrupt government cracking down on any and all forms of freedom get a little love among progessive circles these days.

I'm curious where folks here stand.

Oh, and let me add this video from Human Rights Watch documenting violence against GLBT community in Russia as vigilantes have been given blessing by the government to persecute gay people.

WARNING: Contains disturbing images of violence.

#t=85

Yesterday, there was a link to a discussion about college degrees. Although the article was saying we're doing a disservice to the less fortunate by telling them higher education is a ticket out of poverty, the thread also seemed to veer into "education is not the key to prosperity".

Now today we have a thread saying "we shouldn't try to follow our dreams and do what we love--we should take that shitty sales job or become a garbage collector."

These are symptoms that our economic and education systems have been fucked up for far too long.

I will be telling my son to explore many paths in life and find out what he is good at and loves doing. He should try to make a career of that and get proper education to do so. I will be telling him how important higher education is in our increasingly complex world. To me, education in college programs is a great antidote to the lack of critical thinking skills in high school and the faith-based bullshit of religion.

I have no problem that others really like working on cars and they really want to go to a trade school to learn how to work on cars. It can be a nice living. But unless there are unions to protect jobs, that person is a specialist at the mercy of capital. As soon as the ownder jerks the job away to a new area, that person may find themselves unemployed with a very difficult way back into the work force.

No matter what people say, you SHOULD look for things that interest you and make you feel good about life while paying the bills. For some, that means being a biochemist looking for new cures. For others, that may mean building homes or working in landscape design.

Do not allow yourself to be a mindless cog in the machine of capitalism.

I offer you a great list of lists. In my original post here, I include a link to Norwegian Book Club's list of 100 top works of literature. After reviewing ones from The New York times, Le Monde, BBC, and others, I felt this one was a little more fair to authors regardless of country or ethnicity.

The Norwegian Book Club chose not to rank each book in its relative place in the top 100 other than to say Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes received 50% more votes than other books and is at #1. The rest appear in alphabetical order.

http://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/28


1.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry...


1984 by George Orwell

The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literature


Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during,...


The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature.


The Aeneid by Virgil

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor....


Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage...


Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner...


Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on...


Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city


The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

The Book Of Disquietude or The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego in Portuguese), published posthumously, is one of the greatest works by Fernando Pessoa.


Selected works also included on the list are:

Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ramayana by Valmiki
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Hilariously boring. This guy writes under the byline of pjcomix as well as his real name, P.J. Gladnick at Newsbusters. He loves to eat and loves to buy in bulk.

Here's just a sample of this guy's work. He tells us..."keep an eye on November 9, 2013". I googled it. Nothing. So this guy's not Nostradomus. But he does like traditional print media and just wants to share.

Last December/January I ended up compiling a pretty good list of "top books" to recommend to a teenager. After that, it spurred me to do a fair amount of research on the subject and ended up with a good list to offer to my teenage daughter. She's really been reading a lot this past year which is great.

So now....

What are the top 5 books you've personally read that moved you and stuck with you the most and you would easily recommend to other adults to read? I will compile everyone's results again this year. This one is much more wide open. Doesn't have to be geared toward a specific audience. Doesn't have to be fiction or nonfiction.

I will list mine in there at some point as well, but I don't want to steer the discussion in any particular direction.

This woman has some good thoughts on why it might be the saner course to get back toward moderation and compromise to actually move this country forward.



http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/09/12/moderates-democrats-republicans-politics-column/2806517/

Admittedly, this is from 2012 election when Romney was still fighting for the right to get ass handed to him by Obama, but this commentator brings up some good history on moderation and why some in modern times seem to think it is aptly used as a weapon such as here on DU and on other message boards of the opposite political persuasion.

It was Barry Goldwater in 1964 who said:



And then he promptly got HIS ass handed to him by LBJ. The vast majority of Americans are centrist. That's just a fact.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/01/opinion/greene-moderate/

I find this experiment quite interesting regarding recent topics about moderates vs. liberals or more strongly held or ideologically pure views.



http://www.news.illinois.edu/news/12/1102abstract_thinking_JessePreston_DanielYang_IvanHernandez.html

The Economic Policy Institute reveals the drop in employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) for over a decade--something that has nothing to do with Obamacare. This is a critical point to cite when discussing this issue with conservaderps.



http://www.epi.org/publication/bp337-employer-sponsored-health-insurance/

For overall reference, here is a link to a Kaiser Family Foundation table about who is covered by what types of insurance in the U.S. population. The breakdown is as follows by percentage


Employer 149.4 48.5%
Medicaid 50.6 16.4%
Uninsured 48.6 15.8%
Medicare 40 13.0%
Individual 15.4 5.0%
Other Public 3.8 1.2%
------------------------------------------
TOTAL 307.8 100.0%


Quickly, this means for over 81% of the population (with employer sponsored, Medicare, Medicaid, or other public insurance) there will be virtually no changes.

For those who are already in private insurance market and uninsured, it will be a mixed bag. Some will qualify for expanded Medicaid. Others will be able to obtain insurance for the first time in a long time and not be denied coverage or priced out of the market. Others who purposefully choose not to be insured will be compelled to, and some younger healthier people in private insurance market will have to pay more (in many cases because the cheap policies they have cover virtually nothing).

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-population/

It looks like this whole debt ceiling thing is shaping up to be a huge "BLAME REPUBLICANS" drama if the GOP really goes through with their continued cycle of taking the nation all the way to the brink of shutdown and default. There will be no negotiating or capitulation on this. The only negotiation should be: "I'll give you a couple of small cuts only if you agree to raise the top tax bracket to 50%. End of discussion, clowns."



More at:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-hostages-20130926,0,407114.story