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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
Film on the evolution and sustainability, or not, of gaia and homosapiens
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Imaging Life

Book | "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel | A Man for All Tasks and Times
Wall Street Journal - Review b y Martin Rubin - October 10, 2009
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Although less famous than his great-great-grandnephew Oliver, Thomas Cromwell is well-known, thanks to the enduring fascination of Henry VIII and the Tudor court. Cromwell is of course a memorable villain in the play and movie "A Man for All Seasons" ?the royal minister who, cruelly advancing Henry's break with Rome, hounds Thomas More for a loyalty oath that he will not give. Cromwell naturally figured in "King Henry VIII and His Six Wives" (1972), the popular Masterpiece Theater version of these events, and he reappears these days, as dry and determined as ever, in the over-heated HBO series "The Tudors." But for all the portraits of this 16th- century power broker in print and on screen?not to mention in the history books, where he is a central figure in the history of Protestant triumphalism? Cromwell has never before appeared as he does in Hilary Mantel's dense, finely wrought "Wolf Hall," the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize in Britain.

Ms. Mantel has a knack for getting under the skin of her characters and capturing them (one feels) as they must have been, as readers will know who have read her wonderfully imaginative novel about the French Revolution, "A Place of Greater Safety" (1992). So convincing is she with "Wolf Hall" that it is easy to feel that we are seeing the real Cromwell before us, transforming himself from the battered child of an abusive London blacksmith? the boy is bruised and bloodied in the novel's wrenching opening scene?into a cosmopolitan, accomplished Renaissance man. We see the watchful, feeling person behind the statesman as he grieves movingly for the young wife taken from him by fever and as he observes, not without pity, the ordeals of those around him. Make no mistake: In the shark-tank that was Henry's court, Cromwell was as skilled and as deadly as any. But in "Wolf Hall" he is the one whose motives we come to understand. And since we know what makes him tick better than we do any of the other players in the drama, we come under his spell and begin to see events from his point of view.

The Afghanistani Quagmire

Op-Ed | NoEscalation.org: Can the Peace Movement Reach President Obama?
Truthout - By Robert Naiman - Saturday, October 24, 2009
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If there were ever a time when the peace movement should be able to have an impact on US foreign policy, that time should be now. If there were ever a time for extraordinary effort to achieve such an impact, that time is now.

The war in Afghanistan is in its ninth year. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's proposal could continue it for another ten years, at a likely cost of a trillion dollars, and many more lives of US soldiers and Afghan civilians. The contradiction between domestic needs and endless war was never more apparent. Congress fights over whether we can "afford" to provide every American with quality health care, but every health-care reform proposal on the table will likely cost less than McChrystal's endless war. A recent CNN poll says 6 in 10 Americans oppose sending more troops.

Democratic leaders in Congress are deeply skeptical: as far back as June, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) and Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wisconsin) voted for Rep. James McGovern's (D-Massachusetts) amendment demanding an exit strategy, and that was before the Afghan election fiasco, when international forces failed at their key objective of providing security, and before McChrystal demanded a 60 percent increase in US forces, on top of the 50 percent increase approved earlier this year. Our troops are "exhausted," Murtha says.

Dear Mr. President - Don't derail your presidency by bungling Afghanistan
The Nation - By William Polk - September 30, 2009
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Although we were separated by more than a decade, we lived a few steps apart in Hyde Park and were both professors at the University of Chicago. There I established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Before going to Chicago, during the Kennedy administration I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia. A Democrat, I was an early supporter of yours. So I hope you will accept the following analysis and proposals as being from a friend as well as a person with considerable experience on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In recent events I see an opportunity to accomplish American objectives while avoiding a course of action that could derail plans for your presidency, just as the Vietnam War ruined the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

According to press accounts, you are being told that America can win the war against the Taliban by employing overwhelming military power. Just like President Johnson's generals, yours keep asking for more troops. You are also being told that we can multiply our power with counterinsurgency tactics. Having made a detailed study (laid out in my book Violent Politics) of a dozen insurgencies, ranging from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, and fought by the British, French, Germans and Russians in America, Europe, Africa and Asia, I doubt that you are being well advised. When I was in government, we were told we could achieve victory in Vietnam by the same combination of force and counterinsurgency recommended by your advisers in Afghanistan. But as the editors of the Pentagon Papers concluded, the "attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality.... [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures.... [were] marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed dismally."

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United States Government

Op-Ed | The Administration | Stop the Getaway Car
Truthout - By Eugene Robinson - Saturday, October 24, 2009
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Washington - Slashing executive salaries, bonuses and perks at the seven bailed-out companies that gorged most gluttonously at the public trough is emotionally satisfying, but it shouldn't be. It's like arresting jaywalkers while ignoring the bank robbery that's happening in broad daylight down the block.
Don't get me wrong. The Obama administration's "pay czar," Kenneth Feinberg, is right to put a lid on compensation at the Not-So-Magnificent Seven: Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, GMAC, Chrysler Financial, and the unforgettable AIG. Twenty-five of the biggest earners at each of those firms will have their overall pay cut roughly in half, and most of that compensation will come as restricted company stock, not cash. This means that what they ultimately reap, when they are eventually allowed to sell the stock, will depend on how well the company performs -- which will depend on how well the executives do their jobs.

Tying pay to performance: What a concept.

Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

US | The Coalfield Uprising
The Nation - By Jeff Biggers - September 30, 2009
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When the Environmental Protection Agency declared this year on September 11 that all pending mountaintop removal mining permits in four Appalachian states stood in violation of the Clean Water Act and required further review, Lora Webb didn't have time to join in any celebrations. As she and her husband, Steve, a coal miner, packed up their possessions and left his family's ancestral property outside Lindytown, West Virginia, Lora was more concerned about finding a place to sleep that night.

For the past few years, ever since a massive twenty-story dragline landed on a ridge near their home, the Webbs had endured twice-daily, bone-rattling explosions and the quasi-apocalyptic storms of coal dust and fly rock that blanketed their home and garden. Lindytown's creeks and mountain hollows no longer exist, and a once-thriving community has been reduced to a ghost town. "It's unreal. It's like we're living in a war zone," Lora Webb told a local newspaper last fall.

By the spring of this year, the Webbs were one of the last holdouts in the area. Hoping to avoid displacement, they pleaded with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) and various federal agencies to enforce mining laws. Lora Webb even toted a jar of coal dust to Capitol Hill. In the end, though, they threw up their hands in bewilderment at the government's inaction and sold their beloved home to Massey Energy, the Richmond-based corporation that runs the nearby Twilight mountaintop removal site. Then they were issued a sixty-day order to evacuate.

The temporarily homeless Webbs are a stark example that mountaintop removal does more than "likely cause water quality impacts," as the EPA has determined. More than 3.5 million pounds of explosives rip daily across the ridges and historic mountain communities in West Virginia; a similar amount of explosives are employed in eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee. Mountaintop removal operations have destroyed more than 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of forest in our nation's oldest and most diverse range, and jammed more than 1,200 miles of streams with mining waste.

In cautious but no uncertain terms, the Obama administration has finally acknowledged these hazards, and has taken some important steps toward mitigating the damage. On June 11 the Council on Environmental Quality chief, Nancy Sutley, declared that the administration "has serious concerns about the impacts of mountaintop coal mining on our natural resources and on the health and welfare of the Appalachian communities."

Yet, while officials are framing the issue as a manageable environmental problem, mountaintop removal has also caused considerable human suffering and one of the largest displacements of US citizens since the nineteenth century, a fact the government has not adequately addressed. The Webbs are just one family among an untold number of Americans over the past four decades who have been forced by the coal industry to relocate. And the death of 22-year-old Joshua McCormick--who succumbed to kidney cancer on September 23 in the Prenter Hollow area in West Virginia, one of the most notorious coal slurry-contaminated and Clean Water Act-violated places in the nation--was a reminder to area residents of the growing death toll in the coalfields.

HS Editor - Repeat - "Yet, while officials are framing the issue as a manageable environmental problem." at the same tme that the US Constitution provides for a government "of the people, by the people and for the people". Think about it.

US | Veterans traveling to NH to support congressional climate bill
Forbes - By Holly Ramer - October 23, 2009
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CONCORD, N.H. -- When Americans fill up their cars with gas, Mike Breen wants them to picture terrorists filling their guns with bullets paid for with their money.

Breen, a former Army captain from Portsmouth, has been traveling the country with Operation Free, a coalition of veterans and national security groups working to raise public awareness about climate change and the importance of building a clean energy economy that is not tied to fossil fuels. The group's bus tour traveled through New Hampshire on Friday, with stops in Nashua ( NSHA - news - people ), Manchester and Concord.

Breen, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he wasn't surprised that his unit was vastly outnumbered by insurgent forces in Afghanistan, but was shocked to learn how such a poor nation acquired such extensive weapons, training and logistical support. The primary source of funding was private contributions from wealthy people in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Coast states who made their fortunes in the oil industry, he said.

"So as a result of our dependence on foreign oil, when you pay at the pump, a fraction of that money, literally, is putting bullets in the magazines of insurgent weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "I thought there's got to be a way to break this cycle, because these terrorist organizations are essentially acting as parasites on the American way of life, and we've got to unplug from that."

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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The Many Faes of George Washington
Art News - By Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Amanda Lynn Granek and Amelia Chaney - October 2009
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Chinese copies of Gilbert Stuart?s portrait of America?s first president were denounced by the artist, desired by collectors?and ended up in some important museums. It?s an international exercise in intrigue,? said Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.
He was speaking about a painting that was recently donated to the museum and is now on exhibition. The label reads: ?George Washington c. 1800?1805.? The work is a copy of a Gilbert Stuart painting attributed to a Chinese artist named Foeiqua?who, like other artists in China, made a number of reverse paintings on glass. (The artist paints on the back of the glass so that the image can be seen from the front.)

?The painting was donated by a Connecticut woman, Caroline N. Dealy,? Hyland said. ?She said her mother had died and that members of her family wanted to give the painting in memory of their mother. Since we are the oldest museum of American art in the United States, we were really thrilled. The museum has wanted to acquire a portrait of George Washington for many years.

?As soon as it went on display, it became the subject of a great debate: Should it be at an American art museum? Is it an American work of art? The truth is that it?s a copy of a Stuart made by a Chinese artist for an American collector. It?s a compelling story. It was painted 200 years ago, and 200 years later we?re dealing with the same issues. There are still works being pirated in China today?movies, books, CDs.?

Stuart had to deal with the issues in 1802, when there was, according to Carl Crossman in his book The China Trade (1972), ?a mania for Washingtoniana.?

Government and Corporate Crime - The Linkage without the Citizenry

US | Why Wall Street Reform Is Stuck in Reverse
Truthout - By Robert Reich - Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. ?We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,? he said.

Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.

Today, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.

What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for ten months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now.

Second, the banks keep paying off Congress. The big guns on Wall Street increased their political donations last month after increasing their lobbying muscle. Morgan Stanley's Political Action Committee donated $110,000 in September, for example, of which Democrats got $43,000.

Official Wall Street PAC donations are piddling compared to the tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street executives dole out to candidates on their own (or with a gentle nudge from their firms). Remember -- the Street is where the money is. Executives and traders on the Street have become the single biggest sources of money for Democrats as well as Republicans. And with mid-term elections looming next year, you can bet every member of Congress has a glint in his or her eye directed at the Street.

That's why the President went to Wall Street to raise money Tuesday night, gleaning about $2 million for the effort. He politely asked the crowd to cooperate with reform -- ?If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms" -- but those were hardly fighting words. It's hard to fight people you're trying to squeeze money out of.

Which is the essential problem.

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
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US | This Year's Biggest Hoax Is Tim Geithner's 'Solution' for the Economy, Not the Balloon Boy
Alternet - By Robert Scheer - October 22, 2009
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Environment and Sustinability

350 Has a Whole New Meaning - It isn?t just a number anymore -- it?s a movement.

350 parts per million (ppm) is what scientists consider the safe upper limit for the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. We're now at a flirting-with-disaster 387 ppm. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need get down to 350, and quick. The science is settled -- now we just need the political momentum to get it done.

Food and Nutrition

US | America?s Food Revolution
City - By Jerry Weinberger- Summer 2009
Urban revival, globalization, and some world-class chefs have created one of the world?s great culinary scenes.
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In a 1769 letter to the naturalist John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin observed that while lots of people like accounts of old buildings and monuments, ?I confess that if I could find in any Italian travels a receipt for making Parmesan cheese, it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript of any inscription from any old stone whatsoever.?
Had Old Ben written this letter 50 years ago, in 1959, it?s doubtful that many Americans would have agreed. Back then, a gourmet American dinner might have included tomato aspic (gelatin with canned tomato juice), crab casserole (canned crab with canned cream-of-mushroom soup and canned fried onions), and cherries jubilee (canned cherries heated in a chafing dish with brandy and sugar, ?flamb?ed,? and poured over vanilla ice cream). Or maybe the entr?e would have been beef Wellington (beef tenderloin and p?t?, usually steamed gray in a gooey blanket of dough) or oysters Rockefeller (oysters broiled with melted cheese and bread crumbs). Ethnic food came in two varieties: Americanized Italian (spaghetti with meatballs and red sauce, with grated ?Parmesan? cheese from a green cylindrical box) and Americanized Chinese (fried rice and shrimp with lobster sauce). For the everyman, there was steak (well done) and mashed potatoes and canned peas, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and canned peas, and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned peas. Or the newfangled but repulsive TV dinner.

Sure, there were a few notable exceptions, like the Four Seasons in New York and Le Trianon in San Francisco. Opened by JFK?s former chef, Ren? Verdon, Le Trianon offered traditional French haute cuisine (escargot in garlic butter, saut?ed sweetbreads, sole meuni?re, and so on), along with a mostly French wine list that few diners understood. And there was some good regional cooking in the South. But for the most part, food didn?t matter in America, and being a chef was like being a plumber?a perfectly respectable vocation but no road to stardom. American food was pretty simple, on par with Britain?s in its blandness.

These days, American food is far more complicated and infinitely better. The U.S. has revolutionized its culinary culture over the last 40-odd years. No longer is it the developed world?s worst food nation; in fact, it?s perhaps the best. And it?s largely thanks to the (currently disputed) genius of America?s entrepreneurial capitalism.

Media

US | 8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization
PR for the GOP? Yes. Platform for right-wing hatemongers? Definitely. But a news organization? Definitely not.
Alternet - By Adele Stan - October 24, 2009
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Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Violence - Civil, Religious and Governmental

US Strikes at Mexican Cartel's Drug-and-Gun Trade
Truthout - By Warren Richey - Thursday, October 22, 2009
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Federal agents have launched a massive assault on the US-based distribution network of a major Mexican drug cartel in an effort to disrupt the flow of drugs into the US and the counter-flow of military-grade firearms to Mexico. The cartel's network was heaviest in California and Texas, but it stretched across the nation to Boston, Seattle, even St. Paul, Minn.

The coast-to-coast take-down was aimed at La Familia Michoacana, Mexico's youngest cartel and one of its most violent. "The sheer level of depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels," said Attorney General Eric Holder in announcing the operation in Washington.

Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
- Slide Show / Audio

Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) ?Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

The Internet Press Room

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Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
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