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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
- Video ^

US | Surviving the Dust Bowl - A Documentary Film on Climate Change in the 1930s
It Happened Before, It Could Happen Again - An environmental and human catastrophe in mid-America that prompted FDR's New Deal in the midst of the Depression.
- THE AMERICAN 'SAHARA' - ^

US | Did Dust Storms Make 1930s Dust Bowl Drought Worse?
ScienceDaily - May 4, 2008
- LINK ^

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Note:The symbol ^ denotes that that article continues at the link.

Imaging Life

Climate Warming will 'wipe out billions' - We're talking about humans, you know.
MOST of the world's population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK's most senior climate scientists has warned.
Scotsman - By Jenny Fyall - November 29, 2009
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Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet's population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.
Anderson's warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century. Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were "terrifying".

"For humanity it's a matter of life or death," he said. "We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.

Maldives | Climate change special: Twelve days to save the world

We face a threat as terrible as that posed by Hitler, says Johann Hari. Now we must rise to the challenge.

The Independent - Wednesday, December 2, 2009
- LINK ^
The vanishing Maldives - Mohammed Nasheed knows what global warming means, because he sees it every day. He survived years of imprisonment and torture to lead his country – the Maldives – to democracy. But now, as its President, he is being forced to watch as his homeland is wiped from the map. With each year that passes, the rising sea claims more land, and at the current rate it will claim everything.

He knows why. We know why. It is because we have released massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we aren't stopping. Unless we turn around – fast – the Maldives will be gone. Today, he has a final plea. President Nasheed says: "Copenhagen can be one of two things. It can be an historic event where the world unites against carbon pollution in a collective spirit of co-operation and collaboration, or Copenhagen can be a suicide pact. The choice is that stark."

***** Breaking News Alert

***** Op-Ed | The Angst of a Liberal
Truthout - By William Rivers Pitt - Tuesday 01 December 2009
- LINK ^

An old friend of mine, a long-time Democrat and fully credentialed political wizard, wrote me the other day and asked a question I have been asking myself for several months now: what do you really think of Barack Obama? On the eve of the speech that will signal a significant escalation of the Afghanistan conflict, Mr. Obama and his first year in office have been much on my mind.
To be fully honest, I don't really know how I feel, which is weird, considering that I might be the only one in America without a fully coherent opinion on the man. A lot of people think he walks on water no matter what, a lot of liberals hate him for a variety of reasons to the point that they will declare him a failure after 10 months, and the far right ... well...let's just say they are pining deeply for the good old days of Jim Crow.

I remember where Bill Clinton was at this point in his presidency: getting rolled on gays in the military and the Travelgate scandal, in the process of screwing up health care reform so deeply and profoundly that its legacy requires Obama's current push, championing NAFTA which helped unleash two decades of economic catastrophe we have recently come to reap, and on the verge of presiding over a historic GOP sweep of Congress which became the straight-line 1-to-1 reason why the George W. Bush administration was so unutterably damaging.

So pound for pound, I can't say Obama's first ten months have been worse than the previous Democratic administration. In fact, a solid argument can be made that the man has done more good in his first term than any president since FDR.

Beyond that, I also know that he has taken office in a time of unprecedented challenges, and anyone who refuses to incorporate this simple truth into their opinion of his performance is someone who has made up their mind to dislike him no matter what. My opinion of his performance takes this deeply into account, because I have spent the last ten years chronicling on a daily basis the disasters he inherited:

Obama's speech on Afghanistan

The Full text of the U.S. President's remarks delivered at West Point military academy Iuesday, December 1, 2009


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Video | Obama's hard sell of war policy
Al Jazeera - December 1, 2009
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Commentary | Afghanistan is now Obama's war

The Guardian - y Olivia Hampton - December 2, 2009
In announcing his long-awaited Afghanistan troop decision on Tuesday night, Barack Obama donned the mantle of wartime president for good with the escalating conflict threatening to overshadow his tenure in the White House.


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By upping the stakes and sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Obama has donned the mantle of wartime president

As part of the careful and treacherous balance he straddled in unveiling his revamped strategy, involving the accelerated deployment of 30,000 more troops on top of the 21,000 he dispatched shortly after taking office earlier this year, President Obama was careful to outline his plans to "finish the job" and finally extricate the US from one of its longest wars, starting in July 2011. To avoid being sucked into a quagmire in a war he did not start, the president must take heed of the lessons of history, where infusing more forces has yet to grant victory for the occupier in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires.

The Afghanistani and Iraqi Quagmire

UK | The Iraq war was illegal
Then Attorney General Goldsmith was 'pinned to the wall and bullied into keeping quiet' while the Prime Minister kept the Cabinet in the dark
The Independent - By Brian Brad - November 29, 2009
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UK / Iraq | Commentary - Who else is guilty in the greatest scandal of our times?
Daily Mail - By Peter Oborne - November 29, 2009
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Already it is obvious that the four-man panel that constitutes the Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion of Iraq is patently not up to the job. Everything suggests that they were deliberately chosen by Gordon Brown in order to avoid any properly forensic investigation into the greatest military disaster since Suez. For a start, Sir John Chilcot himself appears to be on much too good terms with the witnesses. He seems incapable of asking any probing questions. One of his inquiry team, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, is also deeply compromised by comments he made in 2004, the year after the invasion, when he ludicrously argued that Tony Blair and George W. Bush could one day be as greatly admired as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill. The third member of the inquiry team, Baroness Prashar (a crossbench peer and chairwoman of the judicial appointments commission), has so far not provided any extra muscle to the investigation.

Only the final member of the Chilcot quartet, the historian Sir Lawrence Freedman, has shown any political insight — yet he, too, is compromised by the fact that he supported the invasion of Iraq. Also, it should be remembered that he was asked in 1999 by Blair’s aides about his views on military intervention overseas. His written reply then formed the basis of the former PM’s landmark foreign policy speech at the height of the Kosovo crisis, which set out a case for robust military interventions abroad (so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’).

And yet, despite the patsy nature of the inquiry panel, Sir John has already heard a great deal of devastating evidence. Witnesses this week have revealed that the intelligence services never produced any hard evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that, on the eve of war, Whitehall was receiving credible reports that he didn’t possess any at all. These testimonies are deeply damning of Blair’s decision to go to war and have dealt a knock-out blow to the former Prime Minister’s reputation.

It is now beyond doubt that Blair consistently lied to the British public and to Parliament ahead of the war.

US / Afghanistan | U.S. had Osama Bin Laden in their grasp but failed to strike, says Senate report

Daily Mail - By Paul Thompson - November 29, 2009Osama bin Laden was cornered by American troops in the Afghan mountains in 2001 but U.S. leaders did not deploy enough troops to kill or capture him, according to a U.S. report.


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A Senate Foreign Relations Committee study to be released tomorrow will reveal the military failings in the bid to capture the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center in America on September 11, 2001. And it says the failure to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader has had massive consequences that has left the American people ‘vulnerable’ to terrorism. The report blames U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. military commander General Tommy Franks for the blunder.

US / Afghanistan | Rumsfeld decision allowed Bin Laden to escape: Senate report

Yahoo News - by Andrew Gully Andrew Gully – November 29, 2009

- LINK ^
Osama bin Laden was "within the grasp" of US forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements, a US Senate report says. Dated for release Monday, the hard-hitting study comes as President Barack Obama prepares to announce a major escalation of the Afghan conflict, now in its ninth year, with the expected deployment of some 34,000 more US troops.

US / Afghanistan | Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base<


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The New York Times - By Alissa Rubin - November 28, 2009
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KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

Detainess say they were isolated at the Bagram jail. The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.
“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

Editor - Does Obama have a permanent condition of split logic? Increasingly he seems subject to this personality "irrationality". In sum, this amounts. no less. to a weakness of leadership. Do we have a president or an in-White House "yes-man" to the non-elected out-house powers?

Opinion | Barack Obama: Change We Can Deceive In* - A critique from the Left

Citizens for Legitimate Governmen - By Lori Price - August 19, 2009


- LINK ^

President Barack Obama is selling out the left wing of his party - those who contributed $750 million to his campaign for 'change' - quicker than a Blue Cross rate rise in August. Mr. Obama won the Democratic nomination -- and the presidency -- on a wave of anti-Bush sentiment and the promise of 'change we can believe in.' But when the assertions and actions of the Obama Administration are critically examined, a conclusion can be drawn that the key difference -- thus far -- between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is their choice in breed of White House pet. 'Bipartisanship,' the bane of Obama's first eight months as president, is providing the groundwork for an extended (albeit educated, charming) Bush-light Administration. Those of us on the left are fearing a Bush-ultra Administration, wrapped in populist rhetoric, and disguised as everything but the same.

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Carrumpah-Lobo - The Homosapiens.ki Blog
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International

The mystery of Zomia
In the lawless mountain realms of Asia, a Yale professor finds a case against civilization.
- LINK ^
Picture a map of the world color-coded to represent not countries, but altitude. In North America, Appalachia would be a long, topographical peninsula between the densely settled Eastern Seaboard and the fertile plains of the Midwest. In South America, the western population centers would be an elevated archipelago above malarial lowlands; in Northern Europe, the Benelux plains and polders would be difficult to discern from the North Sea.

And in southern Asia, stretching from the Vietnamese highlands up into the Tibetan plateau and as far west as Afghanistan, would be a single sprawling mountain realm that is home to more than 100 million people. This is Zomia.
Zomia is a rugged swath of Asia that for 2,000 years has remained culturally aloof from the traditional centers of power and the pull of empires. Its inhabitants, Asia’s “hill people,” have earned a reputation for egalitarianism, insurrection, and independence. Up until the second half of the 20th century, many of the societies there remained nonliterate and supported themselves through trade, smuggling, and Iron-Age practices like slash-and-burn agriculture.

Though never seeing itself as a country apart, this distinctive zone has recently begun to gain broader attention. The historian Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam coined the name Zomia in 2002, as a way of challenging the continent’s traditional geographical boundaries. And this fall, the Yale political scientist James Scott has published a book making

a far more ambitious argument: Zomia, he says, offers a sort of counter-history of the evolution of human civilization.

In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry.

What Zomia presents, Scott argues in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,” is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace.

“The reason why some people didn’t become civilized, why some people didn’t ‘develop,’ may not be a question of them not having the talent, or being backward and so on, but may be historically produced by their desire to avoid what they saw as the inconveniences of states,” says Scott. - Continued... ^

- LINK ^

United States

Fed Up With Federalism

How America's commitment to states' rights is undermining our economic recovery.

The American Prospect - By Harold Meyerson - December 2, 2009
- LINK ^

By accident of its birth -- a collection of separate colonies that slowly came together to form an independent union and revolted against the remote power of the British government -- the United States has an enduring bias toward localism, an aversion to centralized government that is part of its DNA. For some on the left, this has been seen as a positive. "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote.

Even though progressives such as Brandeis have celebrated our federalism, it's important to remember that Brandeis lived and worked at a time when the federal government was icebound in conservative orthodoxy and the cause of social justice could be advanced only in a small number of states and cities. Segregationists like George Wallace and Richard Russell have celebrated our federalism, too, arguing for states' rights at a time when the national government was moving to abolish the Jim Crow laws throughout the South.

Conversely, liberals have argued for the right of the nation to move beyond its federalist constraints during those periods when they controlled the national government (the 1930s and, especially, the 1960s). And during the late, lamentable Bush presidency, conservative justices on the Supreme Court frequently forbade the states from enacting stricter regulations on business than those that Bush's administration had put in place.

The love of federalism is a sometime thing; its critics and champions switch places depending on who is in power at which level of government. But the problem with our allegedly ingenious federal system is not simply that half the time, if not more, it is an effective way to protect all that is biased and unfair in the American nation. The problem is also that federalism inherently subverts a coherent national response to many fundamental challenges the United States faces, at a time when other major nations -- our competitors in an increasingly global economy -- face no such structural impediment.

Given the sheer size of America and the distinct cultural identity of its many regions, federalism has always made a certain amount of sense. The abolition of the slave trade and the legalization of gay marriage had to begin somewhere. As the rise of national government, transportation, and media have eroded regional identities, traditions, and isolation, however,

But even though federalism is more often the refuge of reactionaries than of visionaries, it has an even deeper flaw: setting the nation at cross-purposes with itself, and never more so than during a recession.

Food Stamp Use Soars Across U.S., and Stigma Fades

The New York Times - By Jason DeParle Gebeloff - Npovember 29, 2009
- LINK ^

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

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

Topical Sections


The Arts and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
- LINK ^

Climate Change / Global Warming

***** World on course for catastrophic 6° rise in temperature, reveal scientists
Fast-rising carbon emissions mean that worst-case predictions for climate change are coming true
The Independent - By Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
- LINK ^

Arctic | Canadian researcher says arctic ice is thinning
Google News / AP | November 27, 2009
- LINK ^

The permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared, a Canadian researcher said Friday. University of Manitoba Arctic researcher David Barber said experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding, but the thick, multiyear frozen sheets have been replaced by thin ice that cannot support the weight of a polar bear.

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
- LINK ^

Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
- LINK ^

UK | £850bn: official cost of the bank bailout
(and still RBS is demanding another £1.5bn in bonuses)
The Independent - By Andrew Grice, Political Editor - Friday, 4 December 2009
- LINK ^

Government support for Britain's banks has reached a staggering £850bn and the eventual cost to taxpayers will not be known for years, the public spending watchdog says today. The National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that £107m will be paid to City advisers called in to work on the rescue because the Treasury was too "stretched" to cope with the sudden financial crisis which broke in the autumn of last year.

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

Journalism and Media\

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

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
- LINK ^

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

Religion and Philosophies - The Crash with State

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

Swiss minaret ban reflects European fear of Islam
The Swiss vote to ban minarets comes at a time when Muslim populations are growing and Europeans worry about losing traditional Christian culture.
Christian Science Monitor - By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent of The Monitor - November 30, 2009
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Wiesbaden, Germany - The Swiss vote yesterday to ban the construction of minarets in their alpine country is rippling across Europe. The vote reflects a fear that some of the oldest Christian societies are becoming Islamicized, but is at odds with efforts to integrate the continent's roughly 20 million Muslims. Churches and mainstream political parties urged the Swiss to turn down the proposal, brought by the rightist Swiss People's Party (SVP). But 57 percent of voters in Sunday's referendum defied expectations that they would allow a new kind of religious symbol – the tall, slender tower attached to a mosque – to increasingly punctuate Europe's skyline where steeples once reigned.

Editor - Perhaps a more sensible approach would have been to iake the legal point of view that all religions would be treated equally and that no future religious buildings of worship would be permitted above the height of the tallest existing spire, steeple or tower of the predominant religion in Switzerland. Such a law would thereby treat all religions equally, without favor.

Outrage on Swiss minaret vote, but how do Muslim states handle churches?
Swiss minaret vote leads to Muslim anger, but the Swiss aren't alone in restricting religious freedom.

Christian Science Monitor - By Dan Murphy | Staff writer - November 30, 2009

- LINK ^

Muslim reaction across the world to Sunday’s Swiss referendum banning the construction of further minarets for mosques in the tiny Alpine nation has been almost entirely negative. Yet the referendums outcome pales in comparison to restrictions on non-Muslims who aim to practice their faith in Muslim lands. In fact, the vote only brought Swiss legal practice closer to that of many majority Muslim states that also place limits on the construction of houses of worship.

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
- LINK ^

The Cyber-Threat Grows
We’ve got a lot of catching up to do before we’re secure.
City Journal - By John P. Avlon - Autumn 2009
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Kenya: Peasant with no formal schooling becomes paleontologist célèbre
Kenyan paleontologist Kamoya Kimeu's mom warned him that digging up bones could bring on curses. But now he has two primates named for him.
Christian Science Monitor - By Kipchumba Some - Decembe r 1, 2009
- LINK ^
TUALA, KENYA – When Kamoya Kimeu told his mother he had found a job as a fossil finder, he got a stern caution: He was inviting a curse upon himself and his family. But spurred on by a curiosity of what “digging up human bones” entailed, Mr. Kimeu took his chances. Reflecting on that teenage decision in 1959, Kimeu says with a chuckle that it might have been the “best” offense he ever committed.

“Digging human bones was associated with witchcraft,” he says. “It was a taboo in African custom. But I was just a young adventurous man, eager to travel and discover things.” That bold decision led to his becoming a celebrity of sorts in paleontology. It enabled him to travel to lands he’d only dreamed of and even earned him an invitation to the White House.

Kimeu is credited with the famous discovery of a Homo habilis skeleton in 1959, as well as that of an almost complete Homo erectus skeleton known as Turkana Boy in 1984. But he is celebrated much more abroad than at home. Kenya’s history books have credited all his findings to the Leakeys, the Kenyan aristocratic family of British descent for whom Kimeu was working. The Leakeys are renowned for their paleontological and wildlife conservation interests. In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan invited Kimeu to the White House

Social Issues

We May Be Born With an Urge to Help

The evolutionary roots of altruism are complex.


The New York Times - By Nicholas Wade - November 30, 2009
- LINK ^

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.
But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

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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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
- Video ^

US | Surviving the Dust Bowl - A Documentary Film on Climate Change in the 1930s
It Happened Before, It Could Happen Again - An environmental and human catastrophe in mid-America that prompted FDR's New Deal in the midst of the Depression.
- THE AMERICAN 'SAHARA' - ^

US | Did Dust Storms Make 1930s Dust Bowl Drought Worse?
ScienceDaily - May 4, 2008
- LINK ^

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Note:The symbol ^ denotes that that article continues at the link.

Imaging Life

Climate Warming will 'wipe out billions' - We're talking about humans, you know.
MOST of the world's population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK's most senior climate scientists has warned.
Scotsman - By Jenny Fyall - November 29, 2009
- LINK ^

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet's population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.
Anderson's warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century. Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were "terrifying".

"For humanity it's a matter of life or death," he said. "We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.

Maldives | Climate change special: Twelve days to save the world
We face a threat as terrible as that posed by Hitler, says Johann Hari. Now we must rise to the challenge.
The Independent - Wednesday, December 2, 2009
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The vanishing Maldives - Mohammed Nasheed knows what global warming means, because he sees it every day. He survived years of imprisonment and torture to lead his country – the Maldives – to democracy. But now, as its President, he is being forced to watch as his homeland is wiped from the map. With each year that passes, the rising sea claims more land, and at the current rate it will claim everything.

He knows why. We know why. It is because we have released massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we aren't stopping. Unless we turn around – fast – the Maldives will be gone. Today, he has a final plea. President Nasheed says: "Copenhagen can be one of two things. It can be an historic event where the world unites against carbon pollution in a collective spirit of co-operation and collaboration, or Copenhagen can be a suicide pact. The choice is that stark."

***** Breaking News Alert

***** Op-Ed | The Angst of a Liberal
Truthout - By William Rivers Pitt - Tuesday 01 December 2009
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An old friend of mine, a long-time Democrat and fully credentialed political wizard, wrote me the other day and asked a question I have been asking myself for several months now: what do you really think of Barack Obama? On the eve of the speech that will signal a significant escalation of the Afghanistan conflict, Mr. Obama and his first year in office have been much on my mind.

To be fully honest, I don't really know how I feel, which is weird, considering that I might be the only one in America without a fully coherent opinion on the man. A lot of people think he walks on water no matter what, a lot of liberals hate him for a variety of reasons to the point that they will declare him a failure after 10 months, and the far right ... well...let's just say they are pining deeply for the good old days of Jim Crow.

I remember where Bill Clinton was at this point in his presidency: getting rolled on gays in the military and the Travelgate scandal, in the process of screwing up health care reform so deeply and profoundly that its legacy requires Obama's current push, championing NAFTA which helped unleash two decades of economic catastrophe we have recently come to reap, and on the verge of presiding over a historic GOP sweep of Congress which became the straight-line 1-to-1 reason why the George W. Bush administration was so unutterably damaging.

So pound for pound, I can't say Obama's first ten months have been worse than the previous Democratic administration. In fact, a solid argument can be made that the man has done more good in his first term than any president since FDR.

Beyond that, I also know that he has taken office in a time of unprecedented challenges, and anyone who refuses to incorporate this simple truth into their opinion of his performance is someone who has made up their mind to dislike him no matter what. My opinion of his performance takes this deeply into account, because I have spent the last ten years chronicling on a daily basis the disasters he inherited:

Obama's speech on Afghanistan
The Full text of the U.S. President's remarks delivered at West Point military academy Iuesday, December 1, 2009
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Video | Obama's hard sell of war policy
Al Jazeera - December 1, 2009
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Commentary | Afghanistan is now Obama's war
The Guardian - y Olivia Hampton - December 2, 2009
In announcing his long-awaited Afghanistan troop decision on Tuesday night, Barack Obama donned the mantle of wartime president for good with the escalating conflict threatening to overshadow his tenure in the White House.
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By upping the stakes and sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Obama has donned the mantle of wartime president

As part of the careful and treacherous balance he straddled in unveiling his revamped strategy, involving the accelerated deployment of 30,000 more troops on top of the 21,000 he dispatched shortly after taking office earlier this year, President Obama was careful to outline his plans to "finish the job" and finally extricate the US from one of its longest wars, starting in July 2011. To avoid being sucked into a quagmire in a war he did not start, the president must take heed of the lessons of history, where infusing more forces has yet to grant victory for the occupier in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires.

The Afghanistani and Iraqi Quagmire

UK | The Iraq war was illegal
Then Attorney General Goldsmith was 'pinned to the wall and bullied into keeping quiet' while the Prime Minister kept the Cabinet in the dark
The Independent - By Brian Brad - November 29, 2009
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UK / Iraq | Commentary - Who else is guilty in the greatest scandal of our times?
Daily Mail - By Peter Oborne - November 29, 2009
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Already it is obvious that the four-man panel that constitutes the Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion of Iraq is patently not up to the job. Everything suggests that they were deliberately chosen by Gordon Brown in order to avoid any properly forensic investigation into the greatest military disaster since Suez. For a start, Sir John Chilcot himself appears to be on much too good terms with the witnesses. He seems incapable of asking any probing questions. One of his inquiry team, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, is also deeply compromised by comments he made in 2004, the year after the invasion, when he ludicrously argued that Tony Blair and George W. Bush could one day be as greatly admired as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill. The third member of the inquiry team, Baroness Prashar (a crossbench peer and chairwoman of the judicial appointments commission), has so far not provided any extra muscle to the investigation.

Only the final member of the Chilcot quartet, the historian Sir Lawrence Freedman, has shown any political insight — yet he, too, is compromised by the fact that he supported the invasion of Iraq. Also, it should be remembered that he was asked in 1999 by Blair’s aides about his views on military intervention overseas. His written reply then formed the basis of the former PM’s landmark foreign policy speech at the height of the Kosovo crisis, which set out a case for robust military interventions abroad (so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’).

And yet, despite the patsy nature of the inquiry panel, Sir John has already heard a great deal of devastating evidence. Witnesses this week have revealed that the intelligence services never produced any hard evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that, on the eve of war, Whitehall was receiving credible reports that he didn’t possess any at all. These testimonies are deeply damning of Blair’s decision to go to war and have dealt a knock-out blow to the former Prime Minister’s reputation.

It is now beyond doubt that Blair consistently lied to the British public and to Parliament ahead of the war.

US / Afghanistan | U.S. had Osama Bin Laden in their grasp but failed to strike, says Senate report
Daily Mail - By Paul Thompson - November 29, 2009Osama bin Laden was cornered by American troops in the Afghan mountains in 2001 but U.S. leaders did not deploy enough troops to kill or capture him, according to a U.S. report.
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A Senate Foreign Relations Committee study to be released tomorrow will reveal the military failings in the bid to capture the terrorist mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center in America on September 11, 2001. And it says the failure to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader has had massive consequences that has left the American people ‘vulnerable’ to terrorism. The report blames U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. military commander General Tommy Franks for the blunder.

US / Afghanistan | Rumsfeld decision allowed Bin Laden to escape: Senate report
Yahoo News - by Andrew Gully Andrew Gully – November 29, 2009
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Osama bin Laden was "within the grasp" of US forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements, a US Senate report says. Dated for release Monday, the hard-hitting study comes as President Barack Obama prepares to announce a major escalation of the Afghan conflict, now in its ninth year, with the expected deployment of some 34,000 more US troops.

US / Afghanistan | Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base<
The New York Times - By Alissa Rubin - November 28, 2009
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KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

Detainess say they were isolated at the Bagram jail. The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

Editor - Does Obama have a permanent condition of split logic? Increasingly he seems subject to this personality "irrationality". In sum, this amounts. no less. to a weakness of leadership. Do we have a president or an in-White House "yes-man" to the non-elected out-house powers?

Opinion | Barack Obama: Change We Can Deceive In* - A critique from the Left
Citizens for Legitimate Governmen - By Lori Price - August 19, 2009
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President Barack Obama is selling out the left wing of his party - those who contributed $750 million to his campaign for 'change' - quicker than a Blue Cross rate rise in August. Mr. Obama won the Democratic nomination -- and the presidency -- on a wave of anti-Bush sentiment and the promise of 'change we can believe in.' But when the assertions and actions of the Obama Administration are critically examined, a conclusion can be drawn that the key difference -- thus far -- between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is their choice in breed of White House pet. 'Bipartisanship,' the bane of Obama's first eight months as president, is providing the groundwork for an extended (albeit educated, charming) Bush-light Administration. Those of us on the left are fearing a Bush-ultra Administration, wrapped in populist rhetoric, and disguised as everything but the same.

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International

The mystery of Zomia
In the lawless mountain realms of Asia, a Yale professor finds a case against civilization.
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Picture a map of the world color-coded to represent not countries, but altitude. In North America, Appalachia would be a long, topographical peninsula between the densely settled Eastern Seaboard and the fertile plains of the Midwest. In South America, the western population centers would be an elevated archipelago above malarial lowlands; in Northern Europe, the Benelux plains and polders would be difficult to discern from the North Sea.

And in southern Asia, stretching from the Vietnamese highlands up into the Tibetan plateau and as far west as Afghanistan, would be a single sprawling mountain realm that is home to more than 100 million people. This is Zomia.
Zomia is a rugged swath of Asia that for 2,000 years has remained culturally aloof from the traditional centers of power and the pull of empires. Its inhabitants, Asia’s “hill people,” have earned a reputation for egalitarianism, insurrection, and independence. Up until the second half of the 20th century, many of the societies there remained nonliterate and supported themselves through trade, smuggling, and Iron-Age practices like slash-and-burn agriculture.

Though never seeing itself as a country apart, this distinctive zone has recently begun to gain broader attention. The historian Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam coined the name Zomia in 2002, as a way of challenging the continent’s traditional geographical boundaries. And this fall, the Yale political scientist James Scott has published a book making a far more ambitious argument: Zomia, he says, offers a sort of counter-history of the evolution of human civilization.

In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry.

What Zomia presents, Scott argues in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,” is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace.

“The reason why some people didn’t become civilized, why some people didn’t ‘develop,’ may not be a question of them not having the talent, or being backward and so on, but may be historically produced by their desire to avoid what they saw as the inconveniences of states,” says Scott. - Continued... ^
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United States

Fed Up With Federalism
How America's commitment to states' rights is undermining our economic recovery.
The American Prospect - By Harold Meyerson - December 2, 2009
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By accident of its birth -- a collection of separate colonies that slowly came together to form an independent union and revolted against the remote power of the British government -- the United States has an enduring bias toward localism, an aversion to centralized government that is part of its DNA. For some on the left, this has been seen as a positive. "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote.

Even though progressives such as Brandeis have celebrated our federalism, it's important to remember that Brandeis lived and worked at a time when the federal government was icebound in conservative orthodoxy and the cause of social justice could be advanced only in a small number of states and cities. Segregationists like George Wallace and Richard Russell have celebrated our federalism, too, arguing for states' rights at a time when the national government was moving to abolish the Jim Crow laws throughout the South.

Conversely, liberals have argued for the right of the nation to move beyond its federalist constraints during those periods when they controlled the national government (the 1930s and, especially, the 1960s). And during the late, lamentable Bush presidency, conservative justices on the Supreme Court frequently forbade the states from enacting stricter regulations on business than those that Bush's administration had put in place.

The love of federalism is a sometime thing; its critics and champions switch places depending on who is in power at which level of government. But the problem with our allegedly ingenious federal system is not simply that half the time, if not more, it is an effective way to protect all that is biased and unfair in the American nation. The problem is also that federalism inherently subverts a coherent national response to many fundamental challenges the United States faces, at a time when other major nations -- our competitors in an increasingly global economy -- face no such structural impediment.

Given the sheer size of America and the distinct cultural identity of its many regions, federalism has always made a certain amount of sense. The abolition of the slave trade and the legalization of gay marriage had to begin somewhere. As the rise of national government, transportation, and media have eroded regional identities, traditions, and isolation, however,

But even though federalism is more often the refuge of reactionaries than of visionaries, it has an even deeper flaw: setting the nation at cross-purposes with itself, and never more so than during a recession.

Food Stamp Use Soars Across U.S., and Stigma Fades
The New York Times - By Jason DeParle Gebeloff - Npovember 29, 2009
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With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

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

Topical Sections

The Arts and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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Climate Change / Global Warming

***** World on course for catastrophic 6° rise in temperature, reveal scientists
Fast-rising carbon emissions mean that worst-case predictions for climate change are coming true.
The Independent - By Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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Arctic | Canadian researcher says arctic ice is thinning
Google News / AP | November 27, 2009
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The permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared, a Canadian researcher said Friday. University of Manitoba Arctic researcher David Barber said experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding, but the thick, multiyear frozen sheets have been replaced by thin ice that cannot support the weight of a polar bear.

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
- LINK ^

UK | £850bn: official cost of the bank bailout
(and still RBS is demanding another £1.5bn in bonuses)
The Independent - By Andrew Grice, Political Editor - Friday, 4 December 2009
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Government support for Britain's banks has reached a staggering £850bn and the eventual cost to taxpayers will not be known for years, the public spending watchdog says today. The National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that £107m will be paid to City advisers called in to work on the rescue because the Treasury was too "stretched" to cope with the sudden financial crisis which broke in the autumn of last year.

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

Journalism and Media\

"Who's making all that dam noise - 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

Religion and Philosophies - The Crash with State

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

Swiss minaret ban reflects European fear of Islam
The Swiss vote to ban minarets comes at a time when Muslim populations are growing and Europeans worry about losing traditional Christian culture.
Christian Science Monitor - By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent of The Monitor - November 30, 2009
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Wiesbaden, Germany - The Swiss vote yesterday to ban the construction of minarets in their alpine country is rippling across Europe. The vote reflects a fear that some of the oldest Christian societies are becoming Islamicized, but is at odds with efforts to integrate the continent's roughly 20 million Muslims. Churches and mainstream political parties urged the Swiss to turn down the proposal, brought by the rightist Swiss People's Party (SVP). But 57 percent of voters in Sunday's referendum defied expectations that they would allow a new kind of religious symbol – the tall, slender tower attached to a mosque – to increasingly punctuate Europe's skyline where steeples once reigned.

Editor - Perhaps a more sensible approach would have been to iake the legal point of view that all religions would be treated equally and that no future religious buildings of worship would be permitted above the height of the tallest existing spire, steeple or tower of the predominant religion in Switzerland. Such a law would thereby treat all religions equally, without favor.

Outrage on Swiss minaret vote, but how do Muslim states handle churches?
Swiss minaret vote leads to Muslim anger, but the Swiss aren't alone in restricting religious freedom.
Christian Science Monitor - By Dan Murphy | Staff writer - November 30, 2009
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Muslim reaction across the world to Sunday’s Swiss referendum banning the construction of further minarets for mosques in the tiny Alpine nation has been almost entirely negative. Yet the referendums outcome pales in comparison to restrictions on non-Muslims who aim to practice their faith in Muslim lands. In fact, the vote only brought Swiss legal practice closer to that of many majority Muslim states that also place limits on the construction of houses of worship.

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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The Cyber-Threat Grows
We’ve got a lot of catching up to do before we’re secure.
City Journal - By John P. Avlon - Autumn 2009
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Kenya: Peasant with no formal schooling becomes paleontologist célèbre
Kenyan paleontologist Kamoya Kimeu's mom warned him that digging up bones could bring on curses. But now he has two primates named for him.
Christian Science Monitor - By Kipchumba Some - Decembe r 1, 2009
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TUALA, KENYA – When Kamoya Kimeu told his mother he had found a job as a fossil finder, he got a stern caution: He was inviting a curse upon himself and his family. But spurred on by a curiosity of what “digging up human bones” entailed, Mr. Kimeu took his chances. Reflecting on that teenage decision in 1959, Kimeu says with a chuckle that it might have been the “best” offense he ever committed.

“Digging human bones was associated with witchcraft,” he says. “It was a taboo in African custom. But I was just a young adventurous man, eager to travel and discover things.” That bold decision led to his becoming a celebrity of sorts in paleontology. It enabled him to travel to lands he’d only dreamed of and even earned him an invitation to the White House.

Kimeu is credited with the famous discovery of a Homo habilis skeleton in 1959, as well as that of an almost complete Homo erectus skeleton known as Turkana Boy in 1984. But he is celebrated much more abroad than at home. Kenya’s history books have credited all his findings to the Leakeys, the Kenyan aristocratic family of British descent for whom Kimeu was working. The Leakeys are renowned for their paleontological and wildlife conservation interests. In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan invited Kimeu to the White House

Social Issues

We May Be Born With an Urge to Help
The evolutionary roots of altruism are complex.
The New York Times - By Nicholas Wade - November 30, 2009
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What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.
But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

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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