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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS

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Note-- The symbol ^ denotes that that article can be read in full at the link. Articles with titles in italics are repeated from a recent issue.

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CBC Hourly News
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CBC World at Six News - "What's Going On Out There?"
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Animation | Pelosi and Reid in 'BabbleHeads' - O-Man vs the Status Quo!
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Music to accompany you on your cyber-visit
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Imaging Life

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. — Patrick Henry

Inter-species Collaboration - Why can't the rest of the world get along?
Posted by Mope - Email of January 28, 2010 - Origin not known.

In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.
The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother's cub's, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species, will take on the care of a different species. The only 'orphans' that could be found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops??

Now, please tell me one more time ........? Why can't the rest of the world get along?

Editor - Apropos the above question, if you missed Obama's encounter with the Republican Caucus in Baltimore this week, you can catch it here. >

President Obama's Speech at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore
Daily Radar / C-Span - January 29, 2010http://www.
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Breaking News

Russia | Putin and Medvedev tangle over democracy in heated meeting
Christian Science Monitor - By Fred Weir, Correspondent - January 28, 2010
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At a meeting, President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appeared to disagree over whether Russia is democratic enough, with an eye on the freewheeling politics of their neighbor, Ukraine. An open and unfettered presidential election is under way in Ukraine, to be settled in a final round between the two top contenders next week and no one can predict what the result will be. A healthy display of democracy in action? Not, it seems, if you're a Kremlin leader.

A "Ukrainian scenario" for Russia was one of the possibilities firmly ruled out in a meeting last week, widely covered in the Russian media, between President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Also in the room were selected political leaders at the Kremlin. The topic? The vexed issue of reforming the country's widely distrusted electoral system.

In the midst of an unprecedentedly sharp dialog, Mr. Medvedev appeared to agree with opposition parliamentarians that the growing dominance of a single political party, the pro-Kremlin United Russia, has brought unrepresentative and in some cases dysfunctional government to many Russian regions, and that may pose a serious impediment to future economic progress. But both Medvedev and Mr. Putin insisted nothing is basically wrong with the system and rejected claims that United Russia's supremacy is due to official sponsorship, blanket support from the state media, and outright electoral fraud, as many opposition leaders allege.

"It's important to point out that this was an amazing event, the first time we've ever seen top leaders confronted with this kind of criticism to their faces," says Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "That, in itself, is an optimistic thing and gives rise to hopes of real change."

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The Haiti Earthquake

Google Minute By Minute Rolling Updates
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Haiti | The Historic Context

***** What the U.S. government isn't telling you
ANSWER - Current
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Global News

Worldwide the U.S. Is One of Two Countries Where Kids' Educational Attainment is Lower Than Their Parents'

U.S. students today are also less likely to earn technical degrees. Courses of study are rising elsewhere with the advent of the digital age.
AlterNet - Posted by Daniela Perdomo - January 8, 2010
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According to a recent report, Americans aged 25–34 have attained less education than their parents' generation. If the data cited by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) commission report is correct, the United States and Germany are the only two nations in the world where this holds true.

Indeed, while the United States ranks second among all nations in the proportion of population aged 35-64 with a college degree, we rank tenth in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate's or high school degree.

To make matters worse, there's been a steady decline in American students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- while places like China and India are investing heavily in the infrastructures to support premier programs in those courses of study.

Global Regions

Middle East | US congressmen urge end to Gaza siege
Al Jazeera - By Ayman Mohyeldin - January 27, 2010
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Two congressmen in the United States are among the first to publicly call for end to an Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza. Congressmen Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Jim McDermott (D-WA) sent a letter, signed by over 50 members of the US Congress to President Barack Obama urging him to ease the humanitarian suffering of the people of Gaza by lifting Israel's siege on the coastal territory. In the letter, the congressmen urged the president "to press for immediate relief of the suffering of the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts".
The letter states that the crisis triggered by the siege on Gaza "has devastated livelihoods, entrenched a poverty rate of over 70%, increased dependance on erratic international aid". And that should the siege continue "the humanitarian and political consequences of a continued near- blockade would be disastrous"

Nstional News

Canada's military spending ranks 13th highest in the world
Report - Canadian Military Spending 2009 by Bill Robinson
Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives - December 10, 2009
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Read full report at link below;

Canadians could be forgiven for thinking that they spend a mere pittance on their military: politicians and pundits constantly bombard us with the claim that Canada is a military miser. But a new CCPA report by defence analyst Bill Robinson sets the record straight. Canadian Military Spending 2009 shows that Canada’s rising National Defence spending is $21.185 billion in 2009-2010, making Canada’s rank 13th highest in the world, and 6th highest among NATO’s 28 members, dollar for dollar. By comparison, the Department of the Environment was allocated only $1.064 billion. Click here to read more and download the full report.
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Iran Green Movement promising big February protests
Christian Science Monitor - By Iason Athanasiadis Correspondent, January 27, 2010
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The opposition Green Movement in Iran is planning a series of large protests in early February, culminating in an attempt to co-opt a massive pro-regime march to commemorate the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Opposition Green Movement activists in major cities around Iran are playing a cat-and-mouse game with authorities seeking to shut down their operations ahead of Feb. 11, a revolutionary anniversary that the activists are hoping to use for the country's largest street protests yet..

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United States Government

Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning
Consortium News - By Ray McGovern - January 27, 2010
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No longer is it possible to suggest that Obama was totally deprived of good counsel on Afghanistan; Ambassador Eikenberry got it largely right. Sadly, the inevitable conclusion is that, although Obama is not as dumb as his predecessor, he is no less willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for political gain.

In the cable he sent to Washington on Nov. 6, 2009 Eikenberry explains why, “I cannot support [the Defense Department’s] recommendation for an immediate Presidential decision to deploy another 40,000 here.” His reasons include:

--Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not “an adequate strategic partner.” His government has “little to no political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance. … It strains credulity to expect Karzai to change fundamentally this late in his life and in our relationship.”

US | Analysis - The state of the union
The Atlantic - By Clive Crook - January 28, 2010
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Little sign of a reset that I could see. The speech emphasized jobs and the economy over healthcare reform, but that would have made sense even if the political landscape had not shifted. As for the poll numbers, as for Massachusetts, they might never have happened. He mentioned Scott Brown's victory only obliquely, and in way that denied it any significance.

I know it's an election year. And after last week, it is clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern.

He conveyed almost no sense that the country was sending him a message and that he was paying attention. He shuffled priorities-but goals and methods had not changed. The tone was uncompromising and often combative. "We don't quit. I don't quit." If you admire tenacity, there was a lot to like.

Obama to Party: Don’t ‘Run for the Hills’
The New York Times - By Sheryl Gay Stolberg - January 27, 2010
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WASHINGTON — President Obama vowed Wednesday night not to give up on his ambitious legislative agenda, using his first State of the Union address to chastise Republicans for working in lock-step against him and to warn Democrats to stiffen their political spines.

Mr. Obama appealed for an end to the “tired old battles” that have divided the country and stalled his efforts on Capitol Hill. He promised to focus intently on the issue of most immediate concern to the nation, jobs. And with his top priority, a health care overhaul, delayed in the wake of the recent Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts, he offered a pointed message to both parties.

“To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills,” Mr. Obama said in his nationally televised speech. “And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.”

The speech, Mr. Obama’s third to a joint session of Congress, comes at a particularly rocky point in his presidency, with many Americans — including some fellow Democrats — complaining that the president has lost sight of the priorities of ordinary people. And Mr. Obama acknowledged their doubts, conceding that some of his political setbacks “were deserved,” a striking admission for any president.

Top Democrats at war - with each other
How to lose the elections this year
Politico - By Glenn Thrush and John Bresnahan - January 27, 2010
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***** Obama Ready to Do Battle
Real Clear Politics - By E.J. Dionne - Jsnuary 28. 2010
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There was an unexpected poignancy to the moment . Barack Obama, who once strode across the political landscape as a master of the persuasive arts, found himself needing to prove that mastery all over again. In a single speech, his task was to: prevent the result of one special Senate election from calling into question his agenda or his power; respond to the discontent that poured forth from and after Massachusetts; reestablish his popular standing; and, in the process, both ignite the left and win back the center.

A speech he once hoped to give in celebration of a victory on health-care reform became instead a passionate plea to save his policy dream from political oblivion. So, in his State of the Union address, Obama sought to pass a political math test by solving several simultaneous equations. He distanced himself from Wall Street but also reassured the businesses of Main Street. To independents, he insisted he still seeks a Washington that can work across partisan lines, but he also challenged Republicans to end their obstructive ways.

Faux Contrition: Obama Blames the Public
Real Clear Politics - By George Will - January 28, 2010
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WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party's brain. The seam separates that brain's John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe.

The dominant liberal lobe favors Adams' dictum that politicians should not be "palsied by the will of our constituents." It exhorts Democrats to smack Americans with what is good for them -- health care reform, carbon rationing, etc. -- even if the dimwits do not desire it. The other lobe whispers Freud's reality principle: Restrain your id -- the pleasure principle and the impulse toward immediate gratification. Settle for deferred and diminished but achievable results.

Obama was mostly in Adams' mode Wednesday. His nods to reality were, however, notable.

Such speeches must be listened to with a third ear that hears what is not said. Unmentioned was organized labor's "card check" legislation to abolish workers' rights to secret ballots in unionization elections. Obama's perfunctory request for a "climate bill" -- the term "cap-and-trade" was as absent as the noun "Guantanamo" -- was not commensurate with his certitude that life on Earth may drown in rising seas.

Op-Ed | United We Rant
Editor - I debaied whether this article belonged in this section or in the "Humor" section. In the end, a new section. "US Government - Dark and Dirty" won out.
The New York Times - By Gail Collins - January 28, 2010
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My fellow Americans, the state of the union is angry. Also strong. Presidents usually say the state of the union is strong. But this year you would have to go with strongly angry.»

In his speech on Wednesday night, President Obama actually dropped that traditional state-of-the-union-is rhetoric completely in honor of the new irascibility. “We all hated the bank bailout,” he said in one of his first big applause lines.

Yes, the one good thing you can say about our highest elected officials is that they are ticked off at so many people that sooner or later they’ve got to climb up on some common ground. The House hates the Senate. The liberal Democrats hate the moderate Democrats. The normal conservative Republicans hate the hyper Tea Party-types. The Tea Party-ists are having so many internal fights that there’s a definite danger of broken crockery.

And, of course, everybody hates the bankers, except the Republicans who sat on their hands when the president called for taxing them.

Obama does not really do angry. Peeved, yes. He looked pretty peeved when he was being interviewed by Diane Sawyer of ABC News the other night. If he can’t manage mellow with Diane Sawyer, what’s he going to do on Friday when he has scheduled a meeting with the House Republicans? Have you ever seen all the House Republicans in one place? It’s like a herd of rabid otters.

Looking out at the motley crew seated before him for the big speech, the president seemed at times to be pretending that he had never seen these people before in his life. “Washington has been telling us to wait for decades,” he complained at one point, as if he was a visitor from the heartland with a petition that he wanted to deliver if only he could get an appointment with someone on the appropriations committee.
Editor - This is material for a 'sit-down-com'. Why not? Noone is standing up to the job at hand.

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Topical News

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Activism at the Ground Level

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."
-- Mark Twain

US | Catholic Bishops to Congress: Ditch the Politics, Pass Health Care
Politics Daily - By David Gibson - January 27, 2010
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In a strongly worded appeal that will test their political influence, especially with their pro-life and Republican allies, the Catholic bishops of the United States have told Congress to put politics aside and focus on the "moral imperative" of passing universal health care.

"The health care debate, with all its political and ideological conflict, seems to have lost its central moral focus and policy priority, which is to ensure that affordable, quality, life-giving care is available to all," the three bishops who are leading the lobbying effort for the Catholic hierarchy write in a letter sent Tuesday to all 535 senators and representatives. "Now is not the time to abandon this task, but rather to set aside partisan divisions and special interest pressures to find ways to enact genuine reform.

Arts & Culture

Lhasa De Sela Concert - Haunting. Chilling. The late singer Lhasa, performing La Frontera in a concert recorded in October 2004
Canada Live - January 15, 2010
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Bookworms Between the Pages

Reading Under the Covers | Iran and the Future of Liberalism
The Liberal - By Danny Postel - n.d.
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As an authority against authoritarianism, liberalism is undergoing a renaissance in Iran, and reflecting back to the West its radical roots.

IN her 2003 memoir <Reading Lolita in Tehran, the Iranian literary scholar Azar Nafisi tells the story of a group of her female students who surreptitiously gathered in her living room once a week to discuss works of Western literature deemed unfit for classroom instruction by the Islamic Republic’s censors. Over a period of close to two years in the mid-1990s, the women snuck into their teacher’s home every Thursday morning, removed the veils they are legally required to wear in public, and mixed it up over Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Henry James and Saul Bellow.

Reading Lolita is about how these women experienced internal freedom amidst external repression – about a struggle to carve out a space for the imagination under the crushing weight of a regime committed to administering the totality of public and private life alike. It’s a story about the transformative power of great literature, its ability to connect and transport its readers to an outside world – in this case, a world that is prohibited, closed, off-limits. It is an attempt to contravene, however momentarily and precariously, what Andrei Codrescu calls “the disappearance of the outside”.

As Nafisi shows, the encounter with books under such conditions has a transformative effect not only on those who read them, but on the works themselves. The women in Nafisi’s clandestine book club see things in these novels that people on the outside are unlikely to see. Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading resonates differently for readers in the Islamic Republic of Iran than for those, say, in North America or Western Europe.

In turn, I think it’s fair to say that we in the West can discover a great deal about our own literature by seeing it reflected back through the prism of an outsider. Nafisi poignantly captures this two-way street by explaining that the West’s “gifts to us have been Lolita and Gatsby”, while Iran’s gift to the West “has been reasserting those values that they now take for granted…”. My contention here is that this insight may be applied to international politics.

Climate Change

The Melting of America
The Nation - By Orville Schell - January 7, 2010
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Lately, I've been studying the climate-change-induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet's most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the 2 billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems--the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim--that arise in these mountains isn't much of an antidote to malaise either.

If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you--the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet, and no one knows what to do about it.

Constitutional and Legal Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
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***** US | Video | Rep Donna Edwards Intros ConstltutionalAmendment to Undo Corporate "Free Speech"
You think you live in a democracy? Not now. The Supreme Court has just trumped the Found ing Fathers.
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Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
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Davos 2010: Soros calls for break-up of big banks
BBC News - By Tim Weber, Business Editor - January 27, 2010
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Food and the Yuck in It

Meat safety: How well done?
Chicago Tribune [ By Steve Mills and Monica Eng, Tribune reporters - January 21. 2010
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Recent outbreaks of food-borne illnesses linked to contaminated meat — followed by massive recalls and pledges of cleaner processing — have proved eye-opening for many consumers. Dangerous pathogens cause 76 million cases of illness and 300,000 hospitalizations a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ground beef, usually made by combining meat products from many sources, is identified as a culprit in many cases.

Health and Fitness

US |10-Billion-Dollar Vaccine Pledge by Gates Hailed
IPS - By Jim Lobe - January 30, 2010
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WASHINGTON - The pledge by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide 10 billion dollars over 10 years on vaccines aimed at reducing child mortality in the world's poorest countries was hailed by global health organisations around the world Friday.

Politcal Issues

Real Cleat Politics Daily Rundown
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***** US | Video - Jonathan Tasini on Lessons from Massachusetts
Democrat for US Senate in NY - Current
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Here is a piece of unconventional wisdom: President Obama’s problem is not that he has tried to do too much. It’s that he hasn’t gone far enough. He hasn’t truly taken on the abusive corporate special interests who have drained the wealth of our country into the hands of a few over the past 30 years.

About Jonathan
Jonathan Taasini - Current
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Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Video | Book publishers embrace Apple's iPad
The Australian - By Mike Harvey - January 28, 2010
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AFTER all the hype, Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, took to a stage in San Francisco to demonstrate his latest toy. Among his disciples, the thin, sleek iPad was greeted with applause and cheers. Others were more circumspect. The iPad is Apple's bid to revolutionise the way that we use the internet, play computer games and read electronic books. Apple hopes that the portable computer, with its multi-touch screen and user-friendly software, will also transform the way we listen to music and watch television.

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Sound and Fury

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