Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

I don't do holiday gifts, that requires a level of planning and coordination i'm simply not able to initiate, let alone sustain, at the moment.

I am liable to occasionally giving certain people money or something expensive, or just paying for dinner more often than not.

After reading the first hundred pages of Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, i was moved to examine my own behavior a bit. (There is tons and tons in the book to think and write about that is much more important than self-reflection, but this is easier to write.)

In short, education reform is a good cause. Experimentation is good -- and some of the best charter schools today have experimented in what could be valuable ways. But the push, coming from Wall Street and the extremely wealthy, for this specific form of charter schools, for this specific way of funding them [a thirty-nine percent New Markets tax credit from the federal government], is part of both short-term and long-term drives for profit that will accrue to the wealthiest while weakening the middle class.

the big expensive false reports tend to be generated and propagated by big moneyed interests. Ideally, skepticism should be applied accordingly. It’s not even that this science is more likely to be wrong (though that may be). It’s that the consequences may be more expensive. Here, as elsewhere, the smell of money should sharpen your bullshit filter

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/how-to-set-the-bullshit-filter...