Morning Cup of Lava -- I Meant Java. Java.

Article on debt and individualism by Philip Pilkington, posted at Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith, ending thus:

Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.

The daily howler has a posting on Jim Lehrer, moderator of last week's debate.  It is not flattering.

Jesse Curtis on Christianity and citizenship:

Besides, as some of the earliest Christians showed, the command to submit to government is conditioned upon being able to do so without violating any higher moral principles, such as loving our neighbor and sharing the gospel. Paul may have told the early Christians to submit to Rome, but he didn't tell them to get excited about the armies spreading Roman values on the frontier.

Also, you might want to stop eating rice:

It was no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly ignored. The FDA recently released its own tests, confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and other arsenical drugs.)