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Victory and success for the local T-Birds was had last night during trivia @ The Eddy in Saxapahaw.  Our team won and it was a really good time.  I made Valentines for my new good neighbor friends.  Modgepodge and magazine cutouts, crafts zone at my house was inspired by riding by The Sparrow House (a house down the road that should be named the Peacock House) and seeing hearts and lights everywhere.

Traditionally, I’m not a fan of Valentines day, so I go into work and use the Hallmark occasion to make a few extra bucks.  I’ve been a waitress, bartender, dishwasher, or cook since I was 14.  Valentines day is so ridiculous because we should be giving love in such an obscene way EVERY DAY!!

In other news, in 1920 on this day The League of Women Voters was established in Chicago.  Also, Feb. 14, 1847, Anna Howard Shaw, one of the most influential leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, was born.  The coalition for Fair (publicly funded) Elections is made up of many organizations, mine being one of them (Democracy Matters) and the League of Women Voters is another.  I am very happy to be able to say that I a m a part of such an amazing coalition, working for change in this country.  Getting private and corporate wealth out of the election system is our goal – as it stands right now, all politicians (no matter how wonderful or terrible they may be) are indebted to the people who pay for their elections and the SUPERPACs that support them.  On Valentines today in New York, Valentines are being distributed to elected officials for their support of Fair Elections and we will hopefully see some substantial changes, and soon.

Craving, if you were wondering is the name of today’s post for two reasons: 1. I’m hungry, this is to be mediated shortly. and 2. I was missing the voice of my dear friend who just moved to Thailand.  I spoke to her this morning and it was a delight.

H.Bear

Sending Valentines love from across the world is a lovely way to start your day.  I also received a very special e-mail from my sweetheart telling me how sweet I am and how much he loves me, he doesn’t just do this on Valentines day. So I’m pretty lucky. 🙂  I made him a card last night too, a hilarious one that is not only a hand-made card, but it’s an awesome, hand-made pop-out card.

So happy V-Day everyone, from your local, typical and loving,

Scrooge

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I watched the Presidential State of the Union address last night, and went to bed rather deflated.  I was impressed by his bold nature, but I wish he would have talked about Syria and all the violence going on around the world.  Drones would have been a topic I would have liked to hear more about.  I am glad he talked about gun violence.  I am happy he talked about raising minimum wage.  It would have been nice to hear a stand AGAINST the environmentally dangerous process of fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline and FOR publicly financed elections.  He did give a shout out on how corporations and rich individuals are flooding politics, but we need MORE than a shout out, and that’s where all of us come in…. so on to today…  In 1960, France detonated its first nuclear bomb and last year on this day, Washington state become the 7th state to legalize same-sex marriage.  GO WASHINGTON STATE!  I’ve always said that when EVERYONE can get married, then I’ll think about it.

…This morning, around 4am EST I awoke to pee and then went back to bed.  I don’t think I slept very much after that, in and out of dream land where everything is cloudy, yet very clear.  Dreams are things that remain an enigma to me, when I wake up I wish sometimes that the dreams were real.  Sometimes when I wake up, I’m thanking my lucky stars that it was only a dream.  I dream violent and murderous dreams, where I’m fighting a battle with an old enemy – one that in waking life truly ruined my family.  Sometimes when I’m not battling, I am creating and flying and doing things that I have never done.  In my waking dreams I dream

about being like Mother Teresa and inspiring hope and love on all things and making the world a better place, all the while highlighting injustice in the world.

I dream about having a garden that I eat from and also feed others.  I dream about having a solar garden too, that helps cut down on energy costs.  I dream about living in a hole in the ground, with a big, round, and wooden door.

Image

 

I dream about graduating and receiving my Masters degree and I dream about speaking Spanish.  Sometimes I think I dream in a language I’ve never heard of.

 

(((((((((((((((((This is me (pictured to the right) with BIG dreams!)))))))))))

 
When I awoke again around 9 this morning, I looked out the window and saw a beautiful red cardinal.I dream about raising children (not my own) who have no parents and giving them love.  I dream about making music and being badass, singing around a fire of loved ones.

 

With a huge smile I made up my bed (while still in it of course), placed Cornelius and Hobbes in their rightful places above my flannel covered pillows, and put on today’s clothes: a re-sweatshirt made by Jill Boogie and my favorite jeans.  I lit a stick of smelly-good incense, thought of a fond memory, smiled, then went downstairs to see that I’d
This song is also amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=4_GgE7zF3wo&feature=fvwp “Sun”received sweet message from Jill.  I love her.  She sent me lyrics to a Donovan song – First There is a Mountain.  This reminded me of this song, that I love so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H19qNpG46A8 “Catch the Wind”

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Online classes you can take for free from really amazing universities…

This is the one that piqued my interest the most: The Challenges of Global Poverty https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/14.73x/2013_Spring/about

ABOUT THIS COURSE

This is a course for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Are the poor always hungry? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? How do we deal with the disease burden? Is microfinance invaluable or overrated? Without property rights, is life destined to be “nasty, brutish and short”? Should we leave economic development to the market? Should we leave economic development to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene? And many others. At the end of this course, you should have a good sense of the key questions asked by scholars interested in poverty today, and hopefully a few answers as well.

PREREQUISITES

This course is intended to be an introduction to the issues of global poverty, as conceptualized by leading economists and political scientists. Previous exposure to economics would be beneficial, then, as concepts such as income vs. substitution effects, Engel curves, and utility functions will be discussed. Similarly, some experience with statistics will also be helpful: we will be examining, for example, empirical evidence in the form of regression results.

That said, these prerequisites are not critical to understanding and learning from the course. Links will be provided, as much as possible, on background issues and further reading to allow all participants to gain from the course.

COURSE STAFF

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

Abhijit Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the government of India.

Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “Forty under 40” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010.

Collaboration

Professors Banerjee and Duflo, together with Prof. Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University, founded theAbdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003. In 2011, their book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

FOR MORE CLASSES GO TO:

https://www.edx.org/?utm_source=Rubicon&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=Dec12_home_300x250

This is my I’m badass and learning shit face.IMG_1832

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Today, in 1809 Abraham Lincoln was born.  He is celebrated in this country because of his efforts as a president to: emancipate slavery and, among other things, officially dub Thanksgiving day the last Sunday of November.  He also gave the Gettysburg address during the Civil War, at the turning point when the North began to win over the South.  I remember learning about ole Honest Abe in school, how awesome he was.  After having read People’s History by Howard Zinn, I gained another perspective of Lincoln.lincoln-beard

Provided by Zinn, here are quotes from the politician, Abraham Lincoln: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnslaem10.html

Zinn says, “In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps depending on how close it was to the election). Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said:

Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.

Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience:

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.. 
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

What I have gained from this information is this:  History is written by the victor.   This not to say that all history is a bogus concoction of rhetoric meant to defy the faith of the learner (not always..)  but to say that if someday we are going to challenge this oppressive system we are living in, and it IS oppressive no matter how many TV channels you have, we MUST find a different history to use as our tool to a new future.  We MUST create for ourselves a community of skeptic citizens who yearn for a different version of what truth we have been given, to dig deeper.  What we’re taught in school isn’t adequate to inform us about what is and has been really going on in the world. I think that Abe Lincoln was a person, just as Barack Obama, just as Nixon and Gengrich, as Clinton and Romney: they are all in a long line of people who have brought up and continued a system which at is heart is exploitative and hurtful to “the people”.  They say what they need to say to us to be elected. Here’s the Gettysburg Address: Read this as you would any politician who wants to be elected:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

PS – Disclaimer: People take others’ opinions personally if they differ from own.  Please don’t do this, it makes for difficult discussion.

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On a different note, today in 1947 For Sentimental Reasons, by Nat King Cole topped the charts.  I love that song. Here is a link to a beautiful live version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs8wKxezNn8 I wonder what Nat King Cole thought about Abe Lincoln.