Valuing workers pays off

See this story highlighting how some businesses pay their employees better with benefits and their sales are beating the competitors who treat employees like shit. One example is QuikTrip, a convenience store that's entry level salary is $40,000 with benefits. Their sales per hour is 2/3 higher than competitors and they are expanding. Sales per square foot are over 50% higher. When you treat employees well they have a stake in their job and the company and pass along better customer service.

Rifkin: nuclear is a bad investment

See his answer about nuclear energy at the Wermuth Asset Management 5th Annual Investor Event:

That Mormon can dance

Here's a Mormon missionary in a dance off with a Michael Jackson impersonator.

Krugman on Obama in the Rolling Stone

Krugman has never hesitated to criticize the President when necessary. And yet in his recent Rolling Stone article he gives credit where it is due. While Obamacare is not ideal, it is better than things were and what the regressives would have done (nothing), and it is performing better than expected. Financial reform also has not gone as far as progressives would like, but it is effective in some ways. And again, a damn sight more that regressives would have done (nothing). Same with the economic recovery. Not as good as we'd hope, but despite every regressive obstruction we're doing better than many other countries that don't have the same regressive self-destruct in their legislature. No, Obama hasn't been the progressive ideal, but given the circumstances he's done "one heck of a job," to quote Dubya.

Salon interviews Senator Warren

In this link. An excerpt:

"If Barack Obama had not been president of the United States we would not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Period. I’m completely convinced of that. And I go through the details in the book, and I could tell them to you. But he was the one who refused to throw the agency under the bus and made sure that his team kept the agency alive and on the table. Now there was a lot of other stuff that also had to happen for it to happen. But if he hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have gotten the agency.

More on eros/agape

Continuing from this post, and in response to some FB posts:

I prefer Mark Edwards' notions on eros/agape and agency/communion. See his "Through AQAL Eyes" series at integral world for his distinctions. For him eros/agape is the ascending/descending currents in each line in each quadrant. But the individual and social have their own holons, each with 4 quadrants and 8 zones, each with both agency and communion aspects on the interior and exterior. So he too makes the same distinctions you mention David, but expands it in the above way.

In terms of ascending and descending currents though (eros/agape), he sees them as occurring simultaneously, where when any particular line in any quadrant ascends or evolves it also descends or involves by the integrations of the junior levels. Granted Wilber says this too, but he also has the 'universal' involution/evolution holon of everything theme,* where one happens first, then the other. It is the latter metaphysical frame which tends to infect the more practical frame of transcend and include, or eros/agape dynamic, for each level. Hence that infection expresses in what several others are noticing, the Hegelian dialectical notion of subsumption of the lower in the higher.

Attorney General Holder on voter suppression

See the AG's impassioned plea against voter ID laws. He cites the Government Accountability Office's recently released study showing that states with restrictive voter ID laws have "sharper reductions in election turnout than those that did not." Those reductions "came disproportionately from African Americans and young people." And the regressives that create such voter suppression laws are well aware of this fact and is the true reason they do it. They also know that their purported reason for such laws, voter fraud, is itself a fraud but it plays well with their ignorant base. Their agenda is quite clear; they know they cannot win on facts so they must not only manipulate the narrative with lies but prevent as many people as possible from voting, especially the demographic above that votes predominantly Democrat.

Eros and agape

Balder started an IPS thread on this here. It contains only a few posts of the FB discussion, so see that for more commentary. My comment is included below.

We could approach this question from other angles, or parabolas if you prefer curves. In Wilber's involutionary myth (see excerpt A, footnote 26), the process is indeed a linear trajectory in both directions but in alternating space-time frames: Spirit involves 'downward' in space-time and then evolves back 'upward' in space-time. Granted Wilber notes the reverse trip back up also follows the laid down morphogenetic gradient on the return so as to allow for creative and novel evolutionary forms. But that is a red herring because the template is still one of only one of those things happening at a time in the holon of everything space-time. And this dynamic is exactly of the nature of what above comments have noticed, one of a linear dialectic that presupposes a holon of everything Spirit at both ends of the dialectic, or a deus ex machina pulling the strings. Also see Frank Visser's Integral World essays on evolution.

Now if we take Desmond's post-dialectical metaxological notion of the mutual interpenetration of involution and evolution (or any typical complementary pair), they are always occurring simultaneously in space-time. He argues against a Hegelian dialectic, which inevitably subsumes difference in a never-ending series of higher integrations and unitary sameness. This is what Bruce and others are pointing out in AQAL/IT theory. Whereas for Desmond the 'between' in/of in/evolution is the glue that both binds and separates them is a different relationship that that of the sort of Hegelian dialectic Wilber and other developmentalists use.

What Koch $ buys

See Robert Reich lay it out in 3 minutes.

The rise of neo-integrative worldviews

Subtitle: Toward a rational spirituality for the coming planetary civilization? This is a chapter by Roland Benedikter and Markus Moltz in a book on critical realism and spirituality. I'll be back after I read it.