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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS

***** The Richard Dimbleby Lecture by HRH Prince Charles, titled “Facing the Future”
St James’s Palace State Apartments, London, 7th July 2009 - An Exceptional In-Depth Holistic Call to Wake Up and Act Before It Is Too Late
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NEW | Video Film on Climate Change / Global Warming - Surviving the Dust Bowl in the US
It Happened Before, It Could Happen Again | This Is What It Was Like. - Your HS Editor's Experience of the Dust Bowl on the New Mexico Plains in the 1930s.
- THE AMERICAN 'SAHARA' - Click here and wait for the download.
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Imaging Life

Who Needs the Grid? - A new fuel-cell technology promises to revolutionize access to cheap, clean energy.
The Atlantic - By Lane Wallace - December 2009
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IN THE BOARDROOM at Bloom Energy, a single picture hangs on the wall: a satellite image of the world at night. Clusters of bright lights mark the industrial centers, and thin white lines trace connecting passageways such as the U.S. Interstate System and the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In between, huge swaths lie in shadow.

Standing almost reverently before the image, K. R. Sridhar, the CEO of Bloom, points to the dark areas—places where electricity isn’t accessible or reliable. “This is my motivation for everything,” he says. To improve the lot of the more than 2 billion people living in those dark areas, he says, you have to get them reliable, affordable energy. And if you don’t want to doom the environment in the process, you have to make that energy very clean.

Impossible? No more so than creating enough water and oxygen to keep astronauts alive on Mars. And Sridhar’s already figured out how to do that. In fact, his research on oxygen generators for NASA laid the technical groundwork for his current venture: highly efficient solid-oxide fuel cells that run on everything from plant waste to natural gas and provide electricity while emitting relatively little carbon dioxide.

Such technology might sound far-fetched, but the basic patent behind Sridhar’s cells, which he calls “Bloom boxes,” dates to 1899. Fuel cells—which facilitate a chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel without burning anything—have been used aboard NASA vehicles and Navy submarines for years. The biggest challenge in adapting them for commercial use was making the technology reliable and affordable. That’s where Sridhar’s NASA background gave him a breakthrough advantage.

The Afghanistani Quagmire

Commentary } Why Afghans Dig Empire Graveyards
Consortium News - Nicolas J S Davies - November 23, 2009
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Consortium News Editor’s Note: Many Americans – and especially U.S. media pundits – view the world through a self-absorbed nearsightedness, acting as if the histories of countriesonlybegan when they did something that attracted U.S. attention.

In ancient lands like Iraq and Afghanistan, this American myopia has become very dangerous, by ignoring how and why these countries have resisted past instances of foreign imperialism, as Nicolas J S Davies notes in this guest article:

Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires." But just why do empires keep sending thousands of their young people to die in Afghanistan?

American blood-letting in Afghanistan is generally explained in terms of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but it was the earlier U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (in the 1980s) that led to the emergence of these movements in the first place, not the other way around.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has used al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks to justify much more than simply retaliation for 9/11 or even prevention of some future recurrence of 9/11. The attacks have served as an excuse for U.S. invasions and occupations (including Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11), flagrant war crimes (including torture), and the largest U.S. military budget since World War II.

To accomplish this, the government has persuaded many Americans that their country faces a unique and unprecedented threat that justifies these extreme measures, not least the savage, eight-year war in Afghanistan

United States Government

Should Geithner Resign?

The New Republic - By Noam Scheiber - November 24, 2009

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So far the members of Congress who think the Treasury Secretary should go don't quite constitute a full-blown caucus, much less anything resembling a majority. But they're expressing their opinions with increasing passion. Early this month Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell confessed that she was "not sure" why Geithner still had his job given his too-soft treatment of Wall Street. (A spokesperson later walked back the implication of that statement.) Then, last week, Geithner took some lumps from both Democrats and Republicans in the House. Oregon liberal Pete DeFazio proclaimed that Geithner should resign over his refusal to answer questions about the AIG bailout. At a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee the following day, Texas GOPer Kevin Brady told Geithner that "[T]he public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job" and pleaded, "For the sake of our jobs, will you step down from your post?"

The Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

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

"All suffering is caused by an obstacle in the path of a force. See that you are not your own obstacle." - Elbert Hubbard

Cracking Books and Mags in the Coffee House

Books of the Year - Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks the 25 best in a crowded field
The atlantic - By Benjamin Schwarz - December 2009
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Essay | A Message for Garcia
Roycrofters _ By Elbert Hubbard
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My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off," nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village - in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly - the man who can carry a message to Garcia.

center>The Arts and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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US | The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.
The American Scholar - By William Deresiewicz - Summer 2008
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It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

US | The Decline of the English Department in Higher Education
How it happened and what could be done to reverse it
The American Scholar - By William M. Chace - Autumn 2009
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During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.

Communities and Species

"Produce great people - the rest follows." - Epigram that graces the front door of the Roycroft Inn

Corporate "Crooks"

"The manner in which a man lies about a fact may be more interesting than the fact itself. - Elbert Hubbard

Corporate Crime and Government - The Linkage

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
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Energy

US | Commentary | Wherefore Art Thou, Green Obama
The Journal of American Enterprise Institute -- By Jon Entine - Saturday, November 21, 2009
Those hoping for a green jolt to the economy must come to grips with three serious misconceptions.
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First, green stimulus works slowly. New York State illustrates the problem. Of the $25 billion allocated for energy efficiency in the U.S. package, it collected $394 million. By October, the government estimated, it had produced 43 New York jobs. It doesn’t mean the money has been wasted; it does mean the green investment strategy must be understood as a long-term commitment, and not mis-marketed, as the administration is doing, as a quick fix. Retrofitting an aging energy infrastructure takes time and planning (and, ironically, is being brought to a crawl because it is embedded in a bureaucracy created by activists determined to vet every detail against preservation rules and bureaucratic environmental regulations).

Most of the new wind and energy manufacturing jobs created by the European and American stimulus grants are going to overseas manufacturers.

Second, most of these anxiously anticipated green jobs won’t pay much. The biggest engine of job creation over the past two decades was the technology industry. But let’s face it: the majority of those jobs consist of manipulating tiny chips into circuit boards. They’re low wage jobs, which is why they’re concentrated in Thailand, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Although the term “green jobs” may conjure up images of dazzling high-tech solar panels and glass-sheathed new buildings, the nuts and bolts of turning the world green is making nuts and bolts, but in an energy conscious way. That’s not a solution to the Great Jobs Depression in the U.S. or any industrialized country.

Third, the green jobs that we do get, whatever they might pay, cost a lot to create. As a candidate, Obama estimated each green job would cost $30,000 to create. Even his political allies mocked that total. A study sponsored by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, released in 2008, estimated that each job would cost $50,000. That estimated the number of jobs that might be added if the government spent more money on clean energy. It didn't count jobs that might be lost elsewhere in the economy if the country shifted to alternative energy, which is costlier than traditional sources. Alternative energy projects will clearly lead to higher energy prices in the short to medium term and put a drag on the economy. But those numbers were pies in the sky. There are some hard figures on green-job creation in Europe, and the story is sobering.

center>Humor in Humorless Political Times

"The man who says, " Money isn't everything," is probably in arrears to his landlady. - Elnert Hubbard

"Lovers: Unconscious comedians. - Elbert Hubbard

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
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Life Style

"Do not dump your woes upon people - keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them. - By Elbert Hubbard

"Fear not that your life should come to an end, but rather fear that it may never have a beginning. - Elbert Hubbard

"Don't be a passenger - get busy helping this craft along! - Elbert Hubbard

Journalism and Media

"Who's making all that dam noise - Elbert Hubbard

Nazi Germany / Islamic Near East - Hate Radio
The long, toxic afterlife of Nazi propaganda in the Arab world
The Cronicle Review - By Jeffrey Herf - November 22, 2009
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Between 1939 and 1945, shortwave radio transmitters near Berlin broadcast Nazi propaganda in many languages around the world, including Arabic throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and Persian programs in Iran. English-language transcripts of the Arabic broadcasts shed light on a particularly dark chapter in the globalization of pernicious ideas. The transcripts' significance, however, is not purely historical. Since September 11, 2001, scholars have debated the lineages, similarities, and differences between Nazi anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of Islamic extremists. These radio broadcasts suggest that Nazi Arabic-language propaganda helped introduce radical anti-Semitism into the Middle East, where it found common ground with anti-Jewish currents in Islam.

Virgin Islands | Journalism in Your Face
The award-winning Virgin Islands Daily News is committed to aggressive watchdog reporting.
American Journaiism Review - By Priya Kumar - August/September 2009
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Want paradise? Try radiant sunshine, pristine beaches and cerulean Caribbean waters. Want journalistic bliss? Try hard-hitting investigations, public records battles and award-winning coverage.
Want both? Try the U.S. Virgin Islands and its largest newspaper, the Virgin Islands Daily News. Since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1995, the powerhouse paper with a news staff of 20 has racked up three dozen awards in categories such as breaking news, beat, crime, education, sports and investigative reporting.

"The Daily News is a scrappy paper," says reporter Tim Fields, 41. "It is no holds barred. It is, at times, journalism in your face."

Religion and Philosophies - The Crash with State

"Churches, like Department Stores, carry the wares that are asked for." - Elbert Hubbard

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

The Atlantic - By Hanna Rosin - December 2009

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America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Social Issues

Satchmo and the JewsCommentary Magazine - By Terry Teachout - November 2009
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In addition to being the greatest jazz musician of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong was also the most beloved. “I never met anybody that didn’t love him that ever saw him work or ever has encountered him, had any connection or any business with him,” said Bing Crosby. The secret of Armstrong’s charm lay in the straightforward openness of his character. Though his personality was more complex than his fans realized, his public and private sides were essentially identical. One of his friends described him as “down-to-earth, natural, completely unpretentious, simple in the best sense of the word.”

Armstrong’s openness was not limited to his fellow blacks. To be sure, he had no illusions about the racism of the society into which he had been born. A colleague once dropped in on him after a performance and asked what was new. “Nothin’ new,” he replied. “White folks still ahead.” Yet he never yielded to the temptation to treat white musicians as he had been treated by whites. He was devoid of personal prejudice, and the All Stars, the band he led from 1947 until his death in 1971, were integrated at a time when it was still uncommon for a working jazz group to be racially mixed—especially one whose leader was black. “Those people who make the restrictions, they don’t know nothing about music, it’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow,” he said

Violence - Civil and Governmental

The Fall of Mexico
The Atlantic -
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In the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, border towns in Mexico have turned into halls of mirrors where no one knows who is on which side or what chance remark could get you murdered. Some 14,000 people have been killed in that time—the worst carnage since the Mexican Revolution—and part of the country is effectively under martial law. Is this evidence of a creeping coup by the military? A war between drug cartels? Between the president and his opposition? Or just collateral damage from the (U.S.-supported) war on drugs? Nobody knows: Mexico is where facts, like people, simply disappear. The stakes for the U.S. are high, especially as the prospect of a failed state on our southern border begins to seem all too real.

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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