This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We need to be as well prepared to defend ourselves against public health dangers as we should be to defend ourselves against any foreign danger.
New research in childhood development establishes that a child's environment affects everything from IW to future behavior patterns. These studies confirm the importance of breast-feeding infants, of setting aside time for family meals, and of empowering parents to shield their children from predatory marketing and the violent and sexually explicit media that contribute to aggressive behavior, early sexual experimentation, obesity, and depression. The case for quality early childhood education and programs like Head Start is stronger than ever, and we should expand them. According to a study conducted by Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and conducted by Nobel laureate economist James Heckman, high-quality preschool programs are among the most cost-effective public investments we make, lowering dependency and raising lifetime earnings.
Behavior | Childhood | Children | Education | Family | Future | Parents | Public | Research | Reserve | Study | Time |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs.
Compassion | Consciousness | Greed | News | Public |
This is very personal for me. It's not just political, it's not just public — I see what's happening. We have to reverse it.
Public |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.
Cost | Culture | Decision | Distrust | Extreme | Fear | Labor | Money | Need | People | Personality | Position | Prejudice | Public | Society | Work | Society |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
R. B. Cunninghame Graham, fully Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham
Poverty, many can endure with dignity. Success, how few can carry off, even with decency and without baring their innermost infirmities before the public gaze!
Public |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.
Public |
Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL
One man by delay restored the state, for he preferred the public safety to idle report.
Better to bear a false accusation in silence, than by speaking to bring the guilty to public shame.
Rather skin a carcass for pay, in the public streets, than lie idly dependent on charity.
Public |
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
People are intelligent beings capable of responding rationally to new knowledge particularly if it can be shown to be directly relevant to their own circumstances. For this reason, the eco-footprint concept resonates better with the public than do more abstract and impersonal sustainability indicators. In particular, people appreciate the way EFA draws them into reflecting on their personal consumption habits as illustrated by the popularity of EFA-oriented web-sites that offer simple calculators that visitors can use to estimate their personal eco-footprints. Attributes of EFA that help to communicate biophysical reality to the public include the following: The method is conceptually simple and intuitively appealing. Even sceptics recognize that that they have a positive ecological footprint. EFA personalizes sustainability by focusing on consumption—everyone is a consumer and must ultimately take responsibility for his/her own ‘load’ on the planet. EFA consolidates measurable energy and material flows into a single concrete variable, the corresponding appropriated land/water (ecosystem) area. Land itself is a powerful indicator. Everyone understands ‘land.’ (Popular understanding of the ecological crisis is prerequisite to any politically viable solutions.) Eco-footprint estimates can be compared to finite local and global ‘supplies’ of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (i.e., people and populations can compare their demands to available bio-capacity). The ‘ecological deficit’—the difference between domestic bio-capacity and a larger eco-footprint—requires little explanation and many people see it as more important than the fiscal deficits with which their governments are often preoccupied! EFA appeals to both the ecologically and socially conscious. For example, it reflects gross material inequity but also shows that growth is not a sustainable option to relieve it. Perhaps as important as any other factor, ‘ecological footprint’ is a powerfully evocative metaphor—would people be as quickly captivated by the concept had it been called the ‘human impact index’ instead?
Abstract | Better | Energy | Global | Growth | Important | Knowledge | Little | Method | People | Popularity | Public | Reality | Responsibility | Understanding | Crisis |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks...the public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road and it can only do so when in full possession of the facts.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
Amusements | Public |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
The public must decide whether it wishes to continue.