The Battleship Potemkin

Student Loan Debt Suicides

The Ones We've Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides

C. Cryn Johanssen

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-cryn-johannsen/student-loan-debt-suicides_b_1638972.html

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Suicide is the dark side of the student lending crisis and, despite all the media attention to the issue of student loans, it's been severely under-reported. I can't ignore it though, because I'm an advocate for people who are struggling to pay their student loans, and I've been receiving suicidal comments for over two years and occasionally hearing reports of actual suicides. More people are being forced into untenable financial circumstances as outstanding student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. And people simply aren't able to pay all the money they owe. In the past few years, the rate of defaults for federal loans has increased at an alarming rate. According to the Department of Education, those recent graduates who began repayments in 2009, 8.8 percent had already defaulted on their federal loans. That compares to 7 percent in 2008. Currently, 36 million Americans have outstanding federal loans. I can't help but wonder how many of those millions are feeling distressed or suicidal, or how many have attempted suicide because of all that debt hanging over their heads.

[…]

We know, but don't believe

Climate Change: ‘This Is Just the Beginning’

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/climate_change_this_is_just_the_beginning_20120703/

By Amy Goodman

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The phrase “extreme weather” flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked. If our news media, including—or especially—the meteorologists, continue to ignore the essential link between extreme weather and climate change, then we as a nation, the greatest per capita polluters on the planet, may not act in time to avert even greater catastrophe.

More than 2,000 heat records were broken last week around the U.S. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency that tracks the data, reported that the spring of 2012 “marked the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States.” These record temperatures in May, NOAA says, “have been so dramatically different that they establish a new ‘neighborhood’ apart from the historical year-to-date temperatures.”

In Colorado, at least seven major wildfires are burning at the time of this writing. The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs destroyed 347 homes and killed at least two people. The High Park fire farther north burned 259 homes and killed one. While officially “contained” now, that fire won’t go out, according to Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management, until an “act of nature such as prolonged rain or snowfall.” The “derecho” storm system is another example. “Derecho” is Spanish for “straight ahead,” and that is what the storm did, forming near Chicago and blasting east, leaving a trail of death, destruction and downed power lines.

Add drought to fire and violent thunderstorms. According to Dr. Jeff Masters, one of the few meteorologists who frequently makes the connection between extreme weather and climate change, “across the entire Continental U.S., 72 percent of the land area was classified as being in dry or drought conditions” last week. “We’re going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we’re seeing from this series of heat waves, fires and storms. ... This is just the beginning.”

Fortunately, we might be seeing a lot more of Jeff Masters, too. He was a co-founder of the popular weather website Weather Underground in 1995. Just this week he announced that the site had been purchased by The Weather Channel, perhaps the largest single purveyor of extreme weather reports. Masters promises the same focus on his blog, which he hopes will reach the much larger Weather Channel audience. He and others are needed to counter the drumbeat denial of the significance of human-induced climate change, of the sort delivered by CNN’s charismatic weatherman Rob Marciano. In 2007, a British judge was considering banning Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” from schools in England. After the report, Marciano said on CNN, “Finally. Finally ... you know, the Oscars, they give out awards for fictional films, as well. ... Global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen.” Masters responded to that characteristic clip by telling me, “Our TV meteorologists are missing a big opportunity here to educate and tell the population what is likely to happen.” 

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations.

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June 29 in Seoul

Slavoj Žižek Responds to His Critics

by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK on JULY 3, 2012

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/07/slavoj-zizek-responds-to-his-critics/

[…]

Anything whatsoever can be proven with such superficial pseudo-Marxist homologies—these homologies, together with Gray’s numerous tendentious distortions, are sad indications of the level of intellectual debate in today’s media. It is Gray’s work which fits perfectly our ideological late-capitalist universe: you ignore totally what the book you are reviewing is about, you renounce any attempt to somehow reconstruct its line of argumentation; instead, you throw together vague text-book generalities, crude distortions of the author’s position, vague analogies, etc.—and, in order to demonstrate your personal engagement, you add to such bric-a-brac of pseudo-deep provocative one-liners the spice of moral indignation (imagine, the author seems to advocate a new holocaust!). Truth doesn’t matter here—what matters is the effect. This is what today’s fast-food intellectual consumers crave for: simple catchy formulas mixed with moral indignation. It amuses you and makes you feel morally good. Gray’s review is not even less than nothing, it is simply a worthless nothing.

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In a recent review of Less Than Nothing (Guardian, Saturday 30 June), Jonathan Rée reaches a new depth in moralistic insinuations:

[Žižek] never discusses poverty, inequality, war, finance, childcare, intolerance, crime, education, famine, nationalism, medicine, climate change, or the production of goods and services, yet he takes himself to be grappling with the most pressing social issues of our time. He is happy to leave the world to burn while he plays his games of philosophical toy soldiers.

How can someone write this about an author who recently produced a whole series of books dedicated to precisely these topics is beyond my comprehension—even in Less Than Nothing, a book on Hegel, there is an extensive discussion of socio-political problems in the books conclusion.

We must change our destiny