Kyle Hebert

"While we spend trillions on Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chinese capitalists are becoming the largest suppliers of infrastructure to Africa. What’s wrong with this picture?" - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"Make no mistake, as the local, heritage, humane, ecological, sustainable—call it what you will (anything but organic since the government now owns that word)—food system takes flight, the industrial food system is fighting back. With a vengeance. By demonizing, criminalizing, and marginalizing the integrity food movement, the entrenched powers that be hope to derail this revolution." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"I have great hopes for the Obama presidency, even in his first term, and especially if he could have two terms to realize the exciting new things he aspires to do in the White House. But I would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

1. Yo La Tengo (12) 2. Gordon Gano (11) 3. Ra Ra Riot (11) 4. Mike Doughty (3) 5. Dosh (3) - Kyle Hebert

"Calm energy is difficult to find because it’s not a matter of pulling a single lever, like the coffee lever or the deadline lever, or the beat the competitors lever.  Calm energy requires that a whole system be in good working order: health, clarity of mind, good intention, ability to enjoy good things when they come along, etc." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"Aside from the fact that it’s a giant pain in the ass and that it makes winter that much more godawful (sunsets at 3 p.m. in the afternoon), there are just so many reasons to dump Daylight Saving Time — or, at least, to dump the twice-a-year-time-change (we probably want to leave the clocks where they are during the summer)." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"You know, I was part of the back to the land thing. In fact, I guess I encouraged a fair amount of it with the Whole Earth Catalogue in the '60s and '70s. And most of us went back to the land then and bounced pretty hard, and came back to town within two or three years having learned all sorts of important things." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."" - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"A coalition of mega-bands and singers outraged that music — including theirs — was cranked up to help break uncooperative detainees at Guantanamo Bay is joining retired military officers and liberal activists to rally support for President Barack Obama's push to shutter the Navy-run prison for terrorist suspects in Cuba. Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails are among the musicians who have joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, which launched Tuesday." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

I was there among them -- the blacker and fatter -- and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all -- and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor -- the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm. - Kyle Hebert

Reuters had an interesting story this week on a phenomenon known in Kenya as "flashing." It's not what you think. To the uninitiated, to "flash" someone is to dial their cell phone, let it ring for a split-second, then hang up before they can pick up. That way you don't get charged for the call, and it's an implicit message to the other person that they should call you. According to Andrew Heavens of Reuters, this practice happens all over Africa and goes by different names -- "missed call" in Sudan, "beeping" in Rwanda, etc. The skyrocketing cellphone market in Africa now has 200 million users -- the vast majority of whom buy their airtime in small, prepaid increments. Unlike in the U.S., you don't get charged for receiving calls, only for making them. So flashing is an easy way to keep that last bit of credit going on your account by getting the other person to pick up the cost of the call." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"How the late-night talk-show host handled his extortion crisis says a lot about the peculiar mix of function and dysfunction that got him in, and (for now) out, of the mess." - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

"Jean Perry, a woman who lost her job and could no longer afford health-care insurance. She was reduced to entering a lottery held by the Arlington Free Clinic. Average premiums go up because health-care reform won't let insurers lock people like Perry out of the system. Is that really the reason Republicans want to give for why they can't support this bill?" - Kyle Hebert from Bookmarklet

1. Band of Horses (13) 2. Radiohead (5) 3. The Strokes (3) 4. Thom Yorke (3) 5. Interpol (3) - Kyle Hebert

Band of Horses because snow was falling outside my window. Everything else jumped off from a Genius list based on Radiohead's 'Sit Down, Stand Up' which came up in another Genius list based on a song I can't remember. - Kyle Hebert