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In search for life, more planet 'candidates' are found.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

If finding Earth-size planets orbiting other stars at distances hospitable for life is the holy grail for planet hunters, teams of astronomers are uncovering a lot of potential chalices.

 

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Take It Easy

The economy is shit right now. It certainly is for me. I am living in the village of Ordot, in Guam, feeling little to no control over life. I take anxiety medication and it was literally destroyed in a record flood. I tried to call back home to my parents, whose idea it was that I come here, but the time difference and a different sort of difference (I call it indifference) kept me from getting my medication on time. 

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We Don't Need Jobs

Here is the big, big problem with digital technology - it is shutting down employment without shutting down the demand. People still want things - it's just that nobody is getting paid for it anymore. Everybody still wants to be employed because this is what we've been told that we need going back for centuries:

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A Really Angry Piece On Modern American Slavery

It's a little surprising and relieving to see that a writer has created a brave book like Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. The writer, Ross Perlin, has written an entire book about the exploitation of interns.

It is true that a great deal of these interns come from some sort of background of privilege and financially sound upbringing. While interning at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, this was most definitely the case. However, for each WASP who fills in a new position, there are the children recent immigrants, middle class kids and others who are just trying to beef up their resume.

The Heritage Foundation at least paid me, even if it wasn't great money. However, across the country, especially in cities, there is the strange phenomenon of people being hired for unpaid jobs. A war was fought in this country to abolish forced slavery but it seems that voluntary unpaid labor goes on unabated. It goes well beyond student interns and has begun to crawl into the actual media work force. Magazines like The Stranger in my hometown Seattle, Washington, have often “employed” photographers, writers and many others without any pay or very little. The Huffington Post, a supposed bastion of progressive thought, doesn't pay its writers at all, with the excuse being that their writers are earning “exposure.”

Local newspapers also often pay around $35 to $50 for articles for writers. At a certain level, I can't blame them for being mean as hell with cash, since it's not exactly flowing for them, but suffice it to say when I tell people with normal, profitable careers like garbageman, janitor or McDonald's manager what they pay in the publishing world, they are horrified.

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Health Scare

A couple of years ago, I was a bastard. In every sense of the word. I had a girl I'd met who had professed love to me and I dumped her on the grounds that she was going to be across the country for quite a while. Of course, while across the country myself, the next girl I was interested in did exactly the same. Karma.

The sort of person that I was, who would behave like that like it was rational or good, seems as if he was raised in another solar system, as is the person who would whine and complain about never knowing his father. 

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Guam's Animal Abuse Problem

Guam politics are a really interesting thing. Unlike on the mainland, there isn't as strong of a Republican/Democratic division and policies and attitudes don't seem to become rock solid based on one's party affiliation. 

Ray Tenorio, the lieutenant governor of the island, has made himself unpopular with quite a few people due to his political maneuvers. Among these has been preciding over and enacting a law that would attack the laissez faire treatment of animals on the island:

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Poverty

My trip to Guam has been a learning experience of the harder kind. I had falling outs, confusion, health scares and other unexpected events take my natural anxiety up a notch. Friends from stateside who have comforted me through all of this have told me that the whole thing is making me into a better, more productive and independent person and I suppose that growth doesn't occur without some growing pains.

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Falling Upwards: A Crazy Update

"I don't make dumb mistakes, only clever ones."

That is what a card I received from my mother in the mail said. It was delivered to me here in Guam, where I'm staying indefinitely, so it seems.

My mother is an extremely private person and I respect her privacy, so her name won't be mentioned. I was living with her for the last six months, taking online college courses and doing minor writing work. I think I was a general pest, and the idea of sending me off to see my uncle in Guam kept coming up. It eventually came about that I ended up in Guam.

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Naive Policy In Afghanistan?

The Jefferson Hour is a public radio show recorded and released by the The New Enlightenment Radio Network, a project of a hyper-educated individual named Clay Jenkinson.

Jenkinson went a whole hour talking with Major Robert Baran with the United States Air Force. According to Jenkinson, Baran had sent in a great commemorative letter and package which stood out in its personal nature as well as its in depth familiarity with the Jeffersonian philosophy espoused every week on that show.

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