10 amazing truths you already suspected, Mark Morford

[madokie]

10 amazing truths you already suspected
Go ahead, pretend you didn't know. Pretend it wasn't obvious. (Volume II!)
By Mark Morford

As with Volume I, we shall start easy.

We'll begin with a truth so forehead-smackingly obvious you might worry that its very presence will cause you some sort of concussion o' blatancy. Which is, ironically, just about right ...

1) Your semi-rhetorical question du jour: What do basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey, lumberjacking and "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" all have in common? That's right, none of them causes nearly as much brain damage as America's most beloved sport-of-thugs: football. It is, without doubt, the most violent and sadistic gladiator game we have ever invented for giant, vaguely homoerotic males who weigh more than 250 pounds. Except for boxing.

Witness Malcolm Gladwell's half-stunning, half-obvious piece in a recent New Yorker, summed up thusly: nearly every football player in America, from high school on up through the NFL -- especially there -- will suffer some level of brain damage and head trauma, from moderate to severe to early-onset dementia, even after just a year or two of play, even if he never turns pro at all. Turns out the human skull simply cannot endure that many blows and concussions and not have the brain ripped, torn, bounced, pounded into a damaged lump of spasm and drooling and memory loss. The game is just that brutal. ...

(click here to read the rest)

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/10/28/notes102809.DTL&nl=fix)

[Auggie]

1. #'s 4 and 5:

4) Here's an astonishing fact: China just surpassed the United States as the world's largest automobile market. Are you surprised? What's more, they will easily outsell the U.S. this year in sheer units moved, upwards of 13 million cars (the U.S. will move about 11 million).

But that's not the amazing part. It's this: They say that in a mere five or six years that number will almost double, to about 20 million cars per year, a simply staggering amount the wimpy little U.S., once the car capital of the world, has never, ever matched, and never will. And the Earth went, groan.

5) Wait, it gets better -- and scarier. Behold, the single most stunning China-related stat I've read in ages: "China is expected to build more square feet of real estate in the next 15 years than the United States has built in its entire history, and it has no green building codes or green building experience," says everbleak Foreign Policy mag. Yes, everything we have built in more than 200 years, surpassed by China by the time your newborn hits high school. Amazing. Disorienting. Oddly disturbing.

[CrispyQ]

2. Wish I could rec this 100 times.

Read the article & the links in the article.

"Earth is yours. Take it, rape it, it's yours." I think most people are repulsed by that Coulter quote & yet most have little understanding or concern how their daily activities contribute to that philosophy. I have more of a 'glass half empty' outlook, but I don't see how humanity is going to survive this age of greed & gluttony. And in all honestly, we probably don't deserve to.

[Delphinus]

7. Oh,

shit, you're kidding, right?! Coulter actually said that? O.M.F.G.!

[CrispyQ]

8. She did.

“God gave us the earth. We have dominion over
the plants, the animals, the trees. God said,
‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

– Ann Coulter on the Hannity & Colmes show, June 20, 2001

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter

[Quantess]

10. She's almost a parody of herself.

[Greybnk48]

3. K&R

[Fumesucker]

4. K&R

[Luminous Animal]

5. K & R

Morford is great. If the Chron had kept him in the print version, they might have retained some of their dead tree readership.

[baldguy]

6. China has become an industrial giant BECAUSE THEIR GOVT PLANNED FOR IT!

If left to their own resources, China's private industry would've stayed in the 16th century. The Chinese govt diverted money & resources to modernize & expand their industrial & manufacturing base to compete with the US and Europe. And how has the US govt responded?

We've instituted policies TO HELP CHINA! We've encouraged our manufacturing corporations to close plants here and to move them to Shanghai and Guangdong.

We've even allowed our banks & financial institutions to sell the mortgages for our own homes to China.

America has no national manufacturing policy. We have no national industrial policy. We have no national development policy. We have no national policy to help people reduce their personal debt. Our energy policy has no plans for us to be self sufficient, and does not include plans to develop methods for renewable energy production.

Basically, we've allowed multinational corporations to run things for their own benefit - and they've screwed us over.

But the policies of the Chinese govt don't benefit multinational corporations THEY BENEFIT MAJORITY-OWNED CHINESE CORPORATIONS.

[mdmc]

11. --

[slay]

9. K&R

good stuff in here