"On Forgetting the Obvious"

Article by Robert Kaplan about the Military-Civilian divide in the US.

Labor Standards and Corporate Responsibility

NYU Wagner podcast here, reporting research by Richard Locke, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Political Science at MIT, into Nike's monitoring mechanisms of its suppliers and the impacts (or lack thereof) on labor treatment.

Monitoring doesn't work well. Relationships between retailers and suppliers (frequent visits to factories) do work well. Cultures in corporations need to change - that's when things take off. Also, upstream effects of ordering habits of large retailers.

"...the discourse of amoral managers in exotic lands, you know, is just one piece of it; maybe we can clean up our house at home and have a pretty interesting impact."

Tea Party debate on NPR

"...if the tea party movement ever sends a signal that the gay agenda is okay with them, that same sex marriage is okay with them, that abortion is okay with them, the energy's gonna bleed out of the movement because that's not where the rank and file are that make up the tea party movement at the grassroots level."

A telling quote from a debate between a couple tea party leaders disagreeing on the basic tenets of the movement. Though fiscal conservativeness is at the core of their platform, it comes bound as a package with all this other sh*t.