<$BlogRSDUrl$>
Narsys Logic
Impossible solutions for imaginary zeitgeists
October 21, 2005
Honen Shonin believed that true Buddhism should be able to be practiced easily anywhere and at any time
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051107/cooper
you cannot maintain a republic and empire simultaneously. The Romans couldn't do it. The Brits could only manage it up to a certain point, but then ended up going broke. The Venetians were an empire, and the United States. And in each case the republics were lost.
October 20, 2005
There is nothing noble about being superior to some other men. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. -Hindustani proverb
http://www.iwilltryit.com/fixed1.htm
Computer Expert Testifies Elections In Florida Were Fixed 'Computer programmer Clinton Curtis testified at the December 13th, 2004 Congressional hearing in Columbus, Ohio naming Republican Congressman Tom Feeney as the person who hired him to prepare vote-rigging software. 'The programmer claims that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. 'Clint Curtis, 46, claims that he built the software for Feeney in 2000 while working at a sofware design and engineering company in Oviedo, Florida (Feeney's home district). 'Curtis, in his affidavit, says that as technical advisor and programmer at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) he was present at company meetings where Feeney was present "on at least a dozen occasions".'
Former CIA Analyst: Government May Be Manufacturing Fake Terrorism<
Spanish judge issues arrest warrant for US troops
Pentagon defends targeting hotels filled with journalists
Colin Powell Insists 'U.S. Is Not Doing Bad at All'
China economic growth threat to environment
Natural gas prices take toll on agriculture
Health insurance imploding
Personal bankruptcy filings hit new record
High school teacher fired for refusing to display flag in class
Anti-recruitment ad triggers debate
Climate Model Predicts Dramatic Changes Over Next 100 Years
Link Between Tropical Warming And Greenhouse Gases Stronger Than Ever
Edges of the Antarctic ice sheets slipping into the ocean at unprecedented rate, raising fears of global surge in sea levels
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4275729.stm
Scientists say they have "compelling" evidence that ocean warming over the past 40 years can be linked to the industrial release of carbon dioxide. US researchers compared the rise in ocean temperatures with predictions from climate models and found human activity was the most likely cause. In coming decades, the warming will have a dramatic impact on regional water supplies, they predict. Details of the study were released at a major science meeting in Washington DC. The conference is the annual gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "This is perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that global warming is happening right now and it shows that we can successfully simulate its past and likely future evolution," said lead author Tim Barnett, of the climate research division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. "If you take this data and combine it with a decade of earlier results, the debate about whether or not there is a global warming signal here and now is over at least for rational people." The team fed different scenarios into computer simulations to try to reproduce the observed rise in ocean temperatures over the last 40 years. They used several scenarios to try to explain the oceanic observations, including natural climate variability, solar radiation and volcanic emissions, but all fell short. "What absolutely nailed it was greenhouse warming," said Dr Barnett. This model reproduced the observed temperature changes in the oceans with a statistical confidence of 95%, conclusive proof - say the researchers - that global warming is being caused by human activities.
http://www.321energy.com/editorials/freeman/freeman032105.html
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a stake and place it in a clearing. Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal but still unalterable greed. Pirsig uses the story to illustrate the problem of value rigidity. The monkey cannot properly evaluate the relative worth of a handful of food compared to its life. It chooses wrongly, catastrophically so, dooming itself by its own short-term fixation on a relatively paltry pleasure. America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oilto quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilizationor to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force. As with Pirsigs monkey, the alternative consequences of each choice could not be more dramatic. Weaning ourselves off of cheap oil, while not easy, will help ensure the vitality of the American economy and the survival of its political system. Choosing the route of force wil l almost certainly destroy the economy and doom Americas short experiment in democracy. To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by force. The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan, globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time left to change this choice before its consequences become irreversible.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4391835.stm
The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations. The report says the way society obtains its resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading the natural processes that support life on Earth. This will compromise efforts to address hunger, poverty and improve healthcare. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over a period of four years. ... More land was converted to agriculture since 1945 than in the 18th and 19th Centuries combined. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilisers - first made in 1913 - ever used on the planet were deployed after 1985. The MA authors say the pressure f or resources has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth, with some 10-30% of the mammal, bird and amphibian species currently threatened with extinction. The report says only four ecosystem services have been enhanced in the last 50 years: increases in crop, livestock and aquaculture production, and increased carbon sequestration for global climate regulation (which has come from new forests planted in the Northern Hemisphere). Two services - fisheries and fresh water - are said now to be well beyond levels that can sustain current, much less future, demands. ... Modelling of future scenarios suggests human societies can ease the strains being put on nature, while continuing to use them to raise living standards. But it requires, says the MA, changes in consumption patterns, better education, new technologies and higher prices for exploiting ecosystems.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4346211.stm
Melting glaciers in the Himalayas could lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people, the conservation group WWF has warned. In a report, the WWF says India, China and Nepal could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades. The Himalayas contain the largest store of water outside the polar ice caps, and feed seven great Asian rivers. The group says immediate action against climate change could slow the rate of melting, which is increasing annually. "The rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing widespread flooding," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the WWF's Global Climate Change Programme. "But in a few decades this situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India." The glaciers, which regulate the water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15m (33-49ft) each year. Hundreds of millions of people throughout China and the Indian subcontinent - most of whom live far from the Himalayas - rely on water supplied from these rivers. Many live on flood plains highly vulnerable to raised water levels. And vast numbers of farmers rely on regular irrigation to grow their crops successfully. The WWF said the potential for disaster in the region should serve to focus the minds of ministers of 20 leading industrialised nations gathering in London for two meetings on climate change. "Ministers should realise now that the world faces an economic and development catastrophe if the rate of global warming isn't reduced," Ms Morgan said.
October 19, 2005
Although we may feel separate from the original uncreated reality, through awareness we can contact this essential part of ourselves. -Tarthang Tulku
http://www.sebimeyer.com/?p=1229
Im short the dollar, Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told Charlie Rose in an interview late yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The ol dollar, its gonna go down. Gatess concern that widening U.S. budget and trade deficits are undermining the dollar was echoed in Davos by policymakers including European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The dollar fell 21 percent against a basket of six major currencies from the start of 2002 to the end of last year. The trade deficit swelled to a record $609.3 billion last year and total U.S. government debt rose 8.7 percent to $7.62 trillion in the past 12 months.
a. Awareness practice
b. Heart practice
c. The orientation and feedback with community/teacher to the Right View. (This part is what teachers/gurus are for.)
Without one of the three above, realization is missing either depth, understanding, or intimate connection.
According to sampling data from the Environmental Protection Agency, sediment left over from Katrina's floodwaters harbors fuel components, metals, pesticides and other chemicals. Many contaminants could potentially cause acute and chronic health effects, including nervous system damage and cancer, and some are steadily evaporating into the air that residents are breathing. Wilma Subra, a local environmental chemist, conducted her own testing in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish last month. She found several carcinogenic toxins, including the probable carcinogen Benzo(a)pyrene, along with concentrations of arsenic up to 75 times greater than the EPA residential safety standard. Subra also detected heavy metals, like lead, and hazardous petrochemicals. (...) "If it was a Superfund site," said Subra, "and the concentrations were at the levels we're finding, they wouldn't allow people to go back and live there. They would require that that material be removed, treated, detoxified." "Not only is the government allowing these folks to be in areas that we now know have extreme contaminants, but that they're not even giving people information about these contaminants."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000525AD-1223-1354-922383414B7F0000The latest and most detailed climate model of the continental U.S. predicts temperatures so extreme by the end of the century they could substantially disrupt the country's economy and infrastructure. The climate simulation, churned out by supercomputers at Purdue University, factors in dynamic environmental variables previously unaccounted for and analyzes them at a resolution twice as fine as previous models. The results indicate an increase in heat, heavier rainfalls and shorter winters, which could strain water resources for people and crops and cause a catastrophic loss of life and property, among other things.
"Climate change is going to be even more dramatic than we previously thought."
British military officer in Iraq investigating abuse of Iraqi civilians found dead
Man will wipe out rare creatures of the deep
October 17, 2005
There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting. - Buddha
The upshot: the flooding that devastated much of Central New Orleans may not have been, as the lawyers say, an act of God.
http://www.energybulletin.net/4514.htmlThe coming oil shock is not the only reason why the prospects for the global market economy and for civilisation as a whole look poor. A complex system, such as a car or a human body, tends at the end of its life to fail in many different ways at about the same time. A second sign of systems failure is climate change. Thirdly, there is the complex and still poorly-understood issue of how a mature market economy can, even under ideal conditions, sustain the perpetual economic growth which is an essential condition for its stability: along with Richard Douthwaite and others I argue that it simply cannot do so. Fourthly, there is the increasingly intense phenomenon of disengagement a failure of participation, consent, shared values, social cohesion in short, a failure of social capital which ultimately matures into insurgency, both from dissidents on the outside of modern society and from within it. The system is failing in many other ways: soil fertility, water, hormone disruptors, the collapse of fisheries but that is enough for now. If we put all these together, then we find ourselves looking at the climax of the market economy, followed by its comprehensive failure, very high unemployment and an atrophy of government revenues, leading towards what could be called hyperunemployment - that is, unemployment so high that government cannot fund subsistence payments and pensions. Unemployment on this scale means no income. No income means no food. No food means the collapse of urban populations on the scale experienced by former civic societies the Romans and some two dozen other accomplished civilisations in the closing phase of their life-cycles. I hope I am wrong or, rather, that it doesn't come to this. But it does seem obvious to me that the opportunity is rapidly passing in which it will be possible to avoid the high levels of mortality that have been associated with the collapse of other civic societies.
http://museletter.com/archive/154.htmlCivilizations collapse. That is the rule that we learn from history, and it is a rule whose implications deserve careful thought given the fact that our own civilization - despite its global extent and unsurpassed technological prowess - is busily severing its own ecological underpinnings. Thus we should pay close attention when Jared Diamond, one of the world's most celebrated and honored science writers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, devotes his newest and already best-selling book to the subject of how and why whole societies sometimes lose their way and descend into chaos. Diamond uses his considerable popular non-fiction prose-writing skills - carefully honed in the crafting of scores of articles for Natural History, Discover, Nature, and Geo - to trace the process of collapse in several ancient societies (including the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse colony) and show parallels with trends in several modern nations (Rwanda, Haiti, and Australia). One theme quickly emerges: the environment plays a crucial role in each instance. Resource depletion, habitat destruction, and population pressure combine in different ways in different circumstances; but when their mutually reinforcing impacts become critical, societies are sometimes challenged beyond their ability to respond and consequently disintegrate. The ancient Maya practised intensive slash-and-burn horticulture, growing mostly corn. Their population increased dramatically, peaking in the eighth century C.E., but this resulted in the over-cutting of forests; meanwhile their fragile soils were becoming depleted. A series of droughts turned problem to crisis. Yet kings and nobles, rather than comprehending and responding to the crisis, evidently remained fixated on the short-term priorities of enriching themselves, building monuments, waging wars, and extracting sufficient food from the peasants to support their ostentatious lifestyles. The population of Mayan cities quickly began a decline that would continue for several centuries, culminating in levels 90 percent lower than at the civilization's height in 700. The Easter Islanders, whose competing clan leaders built giant stone statues in order to display their prestige and to symbolize their connection with the gods, cut every last tree in their delicate environment to use in erecting these eerie monuments. Hence the people lost their source of raw materials for building canoes, which were essential for fishing. Meanwhile bird species were driven into extinction, crop yields fell, and the human population declined, so that by the time Captain Cook arrived in 1774 the remaining Easter Islanders, who had long since resorted to cannibalism, were, in Cook's words, "small, lean, timid, and miserable." Regarding the Anasazi of the American Southwest, who left behind stone ceremonial centers that had been integrated into a far-flung empire, I can do no better than to quote Diamond's own summary: "Despite these varying proximate causes of abandonments, all were ultimately due to the same fundamental challenge: people living in fragile and difficult environments, adopting solutions that were brilliantly successful and understandable in the short run, but that failed or else created fatal problems in the long run, when people became confronted with external environmental changes or human-caused environmental changes that cities without written histories and without archaeologists could not have anticipated."
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/02/21If Saudi Arabia have damaged their fields, accidentally or not, by overproducing them, then we may have already passed peak oil. Iran has certainly peaked, there is no way on Earth they can ever get back to their production of six million barrels per day (mbpd). ... A whistleblower in Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's oil company, was first reported in The Washington Post. He had claimed that Aramco had been overproducing the giant Gharwar field and that if they did not slow down, they would damage the reservoirs. The committee, which swore witnesses in under oath, produced over 1400 pages of documentation on the subject, it included some specialist advice which advised cutting Saudi production to 4mbpd to maintain production levels. ... The faster you pull a reservoir, the faster you pull out all of the easy-to-produce oil. What happens is that you lose massive amounts of what the oil industry calls oil-left-behind still inside the field. These issues, as you can see, have been known about for years. If you look at what Iran is doing, they are actually going to inject natural gas to the tune of 2bcf (billion cubic feet), through a 72in pipe into their Aghajari oilfield. It is a $2bn project. This is in order just to boost production from 200,000bpd to 300,000bpd. In the 1970s Aghajari was producing 1mbpd. It has been overproduced. ... This is dangerous stuff. If we say they have not peaked and then they choose to further increase production, they will only hasten their field decline, and waste huge amounts of valuable oil into the bargain. And oil, as we are only now coming to realise, is the world's most precious resource.
War criminals: US troops use starvation of civilians as a method of warfare
Bush told Blair of going beyond Iraq
Judges liken terror laws to Nazi Germany
Planet sees warmest September on record
Century of droughts predicted
Noam Chomsky Voted #1 Global Public Intellectual
85-year old Seattle woman recruited by Marines
G8 summit police lied, says report
2005 on track to be the hottest year on record
September oil production lowest since 1943
October 14, 2005
One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a human. - Goethe
http://www.synearth.net/2005/05/09.html#a3942
America is like Wile E. Coyote after he's run out a few paces past the edge of the cliff he'll take a few more steps in midair before he looks down. Then, when he sees that there's nothing under him, he'll fall. Many Americans suspect that they're running on thin air, but they haven't looked down yet. When they do ... Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, a pillar of the Establishment with access to economic information beyond our reach, wrote recently: "Circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember. ... What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do anything about it" (quoted in <I>The Economist</I>, April 16, p.12). Volcker chooses words carefully: "dangerous <I>and intractable</I>," "willingness <I>or capacity</I>." He's saying: The situation is probably beyond our powers to remedy. Gas prices can only go up. Oil production is at or near peak capacity. The U.S. must compete for oil with China, the fastest-growing colossus in history. But the U.S. also must borrow $2 billion a day to remain solvent, nearly half of that from China and her neighbors, while they supply most of our manufacturing ("Benson's Economic and Market Trends," quoted in <I>Asia Times Online</I>) so we have no cards to play with China, even militarily. (You can't war with the bankers who finance your army and the factories that supply your stores.) China now determines oil demand, and the U.S. has no long-term way to influence prices. That means $4 a gallon by next spring, and rising $5, then $6, probably $10 by 2010 or thereabouts. Their economy can afford it; ours can't. We may hobble along with more or less the same way of life for the next dollar or so of hikes, but at around $4 America changes. Drastically. The "exburbs" and the rural poor will feel it first and hardest. Exburbians moved to the farthest reaches of suburbia for cheap real estate, willing to drive at least an hour each way to work. Many live marginally now. What happens when their commute becomes prohibitively expensive, just as interest rates and inflation rise, while their property values plummet? Urban real estate will go up, so they won't be able to live near their jobs and there's nowhere else to go. In addition, thanks to Congress' recent shameless activity, bankruptcy is no longer an option for many. What happens to these people? Exburb refugees. A modern Dust Bowl.
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/05/energy.html
From Washington to New Delhi, Caracas to Moscow and Beijing, national leaders and corporate executives are stepping up their efforts to gain control over major sources of oil and natural gas as the global struggle for energy intensifies. Never has the competitive pursuit of untapped oil and gas reserves been so acute, and never has so much money as well as diplomatic and military muscle been deployed in the contest to win control over major foreign stockpiles of energy. To an unprecedented degree, a government's success or failure in these endeavors is being treated as headline news, and provoking public outcry when a rival power is seen as benefiting unfairly from a particular transaction. With the officials of numerous governments coming under mounting pressure to satisfy the needs of their individual countries -- at whatever cost -- the battle for energy can only become more inflamed in the years ahead. This struggle is being driven by one great inescapable fact: the global supply of energy is not growing fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand, especially from the United States and the developing nations of Asia. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), global energy consumption will grow by more than 50% during the first quarter of the 21st century -- from an estimated 404 to 623 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) per year. Oil and natural gas will be in particular demand. By 2025, global oil consumption is projected to rise 57%, from 157 to 245 quadrillion BTUs, while gas consumption is projected to have a 68% growth rate, from 93 to 157 quads. It appears increasingly unlikely, however, that the world's energy firms will actually be able to deliver such quantities of oil and gas in the coming decades, whether for political, economic, or geological reasons. With prices rising all over the world and serious shortages in the offing, every major consuming nation is coming under increasing pressure to maximize its relative share of the available energy supply. Inevitably, these pressures will pit one state against another in the competitive pursuit of oil and natural gas. ... It is important to recognize that energy-related pressures are bound to increase as global demand continues its upward course and the supply of oil and natural gas fails to keep pace. The Bush administration, in particular, is aware of these pressures, having analyzed the global energy equation in its May 2001 report on U.S. energy requirements. While administration officials have repeatedly denied that oil played any role in the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, they clearly believed that control of the country would provide the United States with enormous advantages in any coming struggle with competitors like China over Persian Gulf energy. Indeed, once a problem like energy security has been tagged as a matter of national security, it passes from the realm of economics and statecraft into that of military policy. Then, the generals and strategists get into the act and begin their ceaseless planning for endless "contingencies" and "emergencies." In such an environment, small incidents evolve into crises, and crises into wars. Expect a hot couple of decades ahead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4520727.stm
Boosting the body's levels of natural antioxidants could be the key to a long life, according to US scientists. Mice engineered to produce high levels of an antioxidant enzyme lived 20% longer and had less heart and other age-related diseases, they found. If the same is true in humans, people could live beyond 100 years.
October 13, 2005
"Meditation must not be made into a business." Acharya Rajneesh 1971
Bartlett tried to make his colleagues understand that the United States must change drastically to accommodate the coming scarcity of oil. His speech received scant coverage and prompted no action. Bartlett summed up the problem and suggested the solution. "Oil companies have admitted that their estimates of the reserves were exaggerated." Demand for oil is outpacing supply and refining capacity. This will cripple our economy's ability to grow. "We have a debt that we cannot service. It will be essentially impossible to service that debt if our economy does not continue to grow." Government itself, then, will be severely hampered. "At $100 or $200 a barrel" other oil sources, like Canadian sand tar, may become economically viable, but that will take an enormous investment (and, a point he did not make, a great deal of time to get up and running, so scarcity in the short term will occur anyway). "We're also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizer to grow food." "The green revolution" (advances in agribusiness that enable us to feed so large a population) has been "very largely the result of our intensive use of oil." "We live in a plastic world," Bartlett noted, "and all that plastic is made from oil." Look about you and notice everything made of plastic. All that's about to change.
Viewing language as a binding agent of reality, it only takes one further step to realize that the language one possesses forms a border of reality. In a culture that communicates primarily thru written words, alphanumerical symbols comprise a frontier of the imaginable. What one does not possess words for, one cannot intelligently articulate in the local symbol system. Concepts exist, but beyond an accessible border. The Burroughsian concept of language as virus seems particularly illustrative in this regard. The rapid self-replication of such recently created language memes such as war on terror, 9/11, abortion isnt birth control, intelligent design and (perhaps most dangerous) reality as a misnomer for the consensus reality offered to middle America by mass media stand as striking evidence of the malleability of ones personal reality thru language. On September 10, 2001 the term war on terror would make about as much sense as war on anger. Yet a mere four years after the attack on the WTC and Pentagon nearly everyone in the western world has a grasp of what war on terror means. Indeed, some pundits even suggested that this linguistic construction helped the Texas Taliban coast thru to their second term of office by consciously avoiding use of the word Iraq.
Workers watch as pensions disappear
In August of 2004 the World Bank's board of directors rejected a proposal from a consultant it had hired. This consultant was not some wild-eyed radical -- he was the former environment minister of Indonesia under Suharto, Emil Salim. Among Salim's suggested proposals -- drawn up after three years of global consultations with business, civil society and government officials -- was a recommendation to stop investing in coal immediately, and phase out of oil by 2008. Salim reasoned that these fossil fuels are among the most carbon-intensive of fuels, and contribute significantly to climate change, which as we see in New Orleans just as we see in Bangladesh or Sudan, threaten the poorest the most. After rejecting this straight-forward advice, a truly surprising thing happened at the meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) industrial countries in Gleneagles, Scotland in July: The World bank was asked by the G8 "to lead the way around a new framework on climate change." The World Bank's legacy of hypocrisy and inaction when it comes to addressing the problem of climate change within its own institutional walls is astonishing. (...) In addition to climate change as a final, deadly consequence of fossil fuel combustion, studies show investing in the extractive industries in developing countries only fosters corruption, poverty, human rights abuses and environmental degradation -- all the things the Bank claims it is fighting while doing nothing to deliver energy to the two billion poor living in rural areas the Bank claims to serve. (...) World Bank-watchers have seen how poorly the Bank has done in carrying out any sincere efforts to diminish its own significant climate impact. In fact, the Bank has yet to calculate the full -- and significant -- global warming impact of its own investments, though it can tell you down to a ton of carbon how much it is saving through its paltry renewable energy portfolio.
Supplements containing the mineral chromium may be useful in treating some cases of depression
Abundant evidence suggests industrial civilization must be "downsized" to curb damage to the ecosphere by the "technosphere". Trends behind this prospect include prodigious population growth, urbanization, cultural dependence upon ravenous use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, consequent air pollution, and global climate change. Despite prolonged Cold War distraction and entrenched faith that technology could always enlarge carrying capacity, these trends were well publicized. But there remain eminent writers who persist in denying that human carrying capacity (Earth's maximum sustainable human load) has now been or ever will be exceeded. Denials of ecological limits resemble anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognize their paralysis). Some denial literature resembles their confabulations (elaborately unreal stories concocted as rationalizations). Denial by opponents of human ecology seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defense against intolerable anomalous information.
In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus tried to inform people that a human population, like a population of any other species, had the potential to increase exponentially were it not limited by finite support from its resource base. He warned us that growth of the number of human consumers and their demands will always threaten to outrun the growth of sustenance. When Charles Darwin read Malthus, he recognized more fully than most other readers that the Malthusian principle applied to all species. And Darwin saw how reproduction beyond replacement can foster a universal competitive relationship among a population's members, as well as how expansion by a population of one species may be at the expense of populations of other species. ... Most of us can remember learning in school to dismiss Malthus as "too pessimistic." Technological progress and the economic growth resulting therefrom, we learned to assume, can always provide the essential consumables (or substitutes) that have permitted exuberant population growth. ... Malthus was not wrong in the ways commonly supposed. From his 18th century perspective he simply had no basis for seeing the human ability to "overshoot" carrying capacity. It was inconceivable to Malthus that human societies could, by taking advantage of favorable conditions (new technology, abundant fossil fuels), temporarily increase human numbers and appetites above the long-term capacity of environments to provide needed resources and services. But it is inexcusable today not to recognize the way populations can sometimes overshoot sustainable carrying capacity and what happens to them after they have done it. Human economic growth and technology have only created the appearance that Malthus was wrong (in the way we used to learn in school). What our technological advances have actually done was to allow human loads to grow precariously beyond the earth's long-term carrying capacity by drawing down the planet's stocks of key resources accumulated over 4 billion years of evolution.
The Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is giving back into space, according to a new study by climate scientists in the US. They base their findings on computer models of climate, and on measurements of temperature in the oceans. The group describes its results as "the smoking gun that we were looking for", removing any doubt that human activities are warming the planet.
October 12, 2005
Detachment is a state, it is not a totalisation of achieved indifferences. -Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei
The secular Left softened up the philosophic ground with its cheap relativism and is now shocked that the Right gives us Intelligent Design
Desperately poor Africans put up with governments that are corrupt and capricious. Does poverty make bad government, or the reverse?
Journal editor to young academic: "We'll publish your article, maybe, but you need more citations of articles from our journal. And my editorials. Just a suggestion"
Already reeling from record gas prices, American consumers could soon face soaring costs caused by a diesel shortage.
George W. Bush's Supreme Court nominee thinks the president is too cool for school.
Vonnegut speaks repeatedly of having finished his life's work and of the surprise of being still alive. And death is coming not just to him; in person and in the slim new volume of his collected recent essays entitled A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut pronounces a requiem for the Earth itself, saying the world is going to come to an end sooner or later, but most probably sooner.
New research suggests that fish may indeed be brain food, at least those varieties that have low levels of mercury.
Living in the country may be good for your respiratory health, according to a study conducted in Scotland, which suggests that rural as opposed to urban dwelling is associated with a lower prevalence of asthma.
Pathological exploiters: Making money off of wrecking the planet
UK: Cold winter could spark energy crisis
Living Too Large In Exurbia: Big houses. Big cars. Now, bigger bills. A lifestyle built on cheap energy and cheap credit is in jeopardy
GM crop 'ruins fields for 15 years'
Shortages could close factories and shut down schools
Pentagon wants power to spy on U.S. citizens
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101577_pf.html"Does it worry you," NBC's Matt Lauer is asking him at a construction-site interview in Louisiana, that prosecutors "seem to have such an interest in Mr. Rove?" Bush blinks twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more. He starts to answer, but he stops himself. "I'm not going to talk about the case," Bush finally says after a three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial break. (...) But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC's broadcast during Bush's 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere. The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was "trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression," Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt. When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling. (...) As Lauer went through his introduction, the presidential eyes zoomed left, then right, then left and right again, then center, down and up at the interviewer. The presidential fidgeting spiked when Lauer mentioned the Democratic accusation that Bush was performing a "photo op." Bush pushed out his lower front lip, then licked the right corner of his mouth. Lauer's query about whether conservatives "are feeling let down by you" appeared to provoke furious jiggling of the right leg.
The First Half of the Age of Oil now closes. It lasted 150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand six-fold. The financial capital was created by banks with confidence that Tomorrows Expansion, fuelled by oil-based energy, was adequate collateral for To-days Debt. The Second Half of the Age of Oil now dawns, and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital. It heralds the collapse of the present Financial System, and related political structures, speaking of a Second Great Depression.
Pregnant women who witnessed the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 passed on biological signs of stress to their babies, researchers suggest. Scientists from Edinburgh and New York say tests on infants when they were a year old showed they had low levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Their mothers also showed low cortisol levels, a sign someone is affected by PTSD the researchers say.
October 10, 2005
The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. -II Corinthians 3:6
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10102005.html
Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate. The hysterical aftermath of September 11 has put into place the main components of a police state. Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely. President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the US, the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention. These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give rein to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness. The judiciary has to some extent defended habeas corpus against Bush's attack, but the protection that the principle offers against arbitrary seizure and detention has been breeched. Whether courts can fully restore habeas corpus or whether it continues in weakened form or passes by the wayside remains to be determined.
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=503
Certainly it could be much worse in America in some respects, but if one drills a bit beneath the surface, the putrid stench of corruption and inhumanity is almost unbearable. The United States of America is governed by an aristocracy with globally imperialistic ambitions that is preparing to sweep away the remaining vestiges of our Constitutional republic. (...) Americas apologists can deny the reality to their dying breath, but the truth is that the United States of America as a democracy, a republic, or a free society is a fraud. (...) In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can't Happen Here, his depiction of a "democratically elected" US president imposing a tyranny on Americans. In 2005, life is imitating art.
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/02/06
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, "Collapse," which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong. "Guns" asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern. Now "Collapse" posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. Because this view, too, is exactly what postmodernism longs to hear, "Collapse" may prove influential as well. ... Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: "Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course." The West, especially, is in peril: "The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital." Calamity could come quickly: "A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power." ... If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged. For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue uninterrupted. Though Diamond endorses "cautious optimism," "Collapse" comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/02/28
Britain's seas are seriously ailing and the species that depend on them suffering as never before. The most comprehensive "health check" ever made of the waters around our shores has revealed that, while Britannia once ruled the waves, now it is helping destroy what lives beneath them. Fish stocks are on the brink of collapse. Species are changing sex because of pollution. Dolphins and porpoises are being killed at unprecedented rates. Water temperatures are rising, and the seabed is being destroyed. In a disturbing insight into the state of our seas, the government-led investigation has found clear proof that the seas around the British Isles are already suffering the effects of global warming - threatening the survival of fish such as cod and raising the risk of a sudden, catastrophic change in weather patterns. The study, compiled by the Department for Food, Environment and the Regions (Defra) after 18 months of reviewing all current marine research, found that water temperatures and sea levels are now rising around Britain, while salt levels are dropping because of melting Arctic ice caps. Meanwhile native plankton species - vital to the survival of many fish stocks - are slowly disappearing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/miller-time_b_8636.html
Greg Mitchell, in http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001263179 Editor and Publisher, asks a nice bunch of questions about the latest turn in l'affaire Plame, the discovery that Judy Miller had previously undisclosed notes about a previously undisclosed conversation with Scooter Libby two weeks before Joe Wilson's op-ed on the Niger uranium claim was published, and the fact that those notes were discovered in the Washington bureau of the NYT. It's a set of wacky coincidences that would make most sitcom writers blush, and Mitchell's money question is this: What's with Miller, after going to jail for 85 days -- purportedly to stand up for a journalistic principle (protecting a source) -- now turning over her notes to the prosecutor, apparently with her newspaper's blessing? She'll go to jail to proect a source, but she'll do what newspapers and television networks have long refused to do--turn over notes (or outtakes). Can we rescind Judy's First Amendment Award yet?
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, you can never have both. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
From Terry Schiavo to global warming, the author of 'The Republican War on Science' explains how conservatives undermine science by whipping up controversy and manipulating the media. the party is committed to catering to two key constituencies, big business and the religious right, who are often coming into conflict with the mainstream scientific view on issues like evolution for the religious right or global climate change for the fossil fuel industry. So you have a systematic attempt by Republican political leaders to appease these interests on the scientific issues that matter to them.
http://www.alternet.org/story/26550/
The right-wing's contempt for science will lead to economic and ecological calamity -- unless we fight back. This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation. Our future relies on our intelligence, but today's Right -- failing to grasp this fact in virtually every political situation in which it really matters, and nourishing disturbing anti-intellectual tendencies -- cannot deliver us there successfully or safely. If it will not come to its senses, we must cast it aside.
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/10/10
In the waning months of 2005, our failure to face the problems before us as a society is a wondrous thing to behold. Never before in American history have the public and its leaders shown such a lack of resolve, or even interest, in circumstances that will change forever how we live. Even the greatest convulsion in our national experience, the Civil War, was preceded by years of talk, if not action. But in 2005 we barely have enough talk about what is happening to add up to a public conversation. We're too busy following Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson, or the NASCAR rankings, or the exploits of Donald Trump. We're immersed in a national personality freak show soap opera, with a side order of sports 24-7. Our failure to pay attention to what is important is unprecedented, even supernatural. This is true even at the supposedly highest level. The news section of last Sunday's New York Times did not contain one story about oil or gas - a week after Hurricane Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs and production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico - which any thought person can see leading directly to a winter of hardship for many Americans who can barely afford to heat their homes - and the information about the damage around the Gulf was still just then coming in. What is important? We've entered a permanent world-wide energy crisis. The implications are enormous. It could put us out-of-business as a cohesive society. We face a crisis in finance, which will be a consequence of the energy predicament as well as a broad and deep lapse in our standards, values, and behavior in financial affairs. We face a crisis in practical living arrangements as the infrastructure of suburbia becomes hopelessly unaffordable to run. How will fill our gas tanks to make those long commutes? How will we heat the 3500 square foot homes that people are already in? How will we run the yellow school bus fleets? How will we heat the schools? What will happen to the economy connected with the easy motoring utopia - the building of ever more McHouses, WalMarts, office parks, and Pizza Huts? Over the past thirty days, with gasoline prices ratcheting above $3 a gallon, individuals all over America are deciding not to buy that new house in Partridge Acres, 34 miles from Dallas (or Minneapolis, or Denver, or Boston). Those individual choices will soon add up, and an economy addicted to that activity will be in trouble. The housing bubble has virtually become our economy. Subtract it from everything else and there's not much left besides haircutting, fried chicken, and open heart surgery. And, of course, as the housing bubble deflates, the magical mortgage machinery spinning off a fabulous stream of hallucinated credit, to be re-packaged as tradable debt, will also stop flowing into the finance sector. We face a series of ramifying, self-reinforcing, terrifying breaks from business-as-usual, and we are not prepared. We are not talking about it in the traditional forums - only in the wilderness of the internet.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4313226.stm
Stem cells from amniotic fluid have been used to repair windpipe defects in unborn lambs while still in the womb. A team at the Children's Hospital Boston used the cells to grow sections of cartilage tube, which were then implanted into the unborn lambs. Details were presented at an American Academy of Pediatrics conference. Windpipe defects in humans are rare, but life-threatening - requiring immediate surgery to cut the risk of neurological complications.
http://energybulletin.net/7902.html
In 1876, Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, offered a prophetic caveat: "Let us not . . . flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. . . . At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature--but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . ." With its never-ending emphasis on production and profit, and its indifference to environment, transnational corporate capitalism appears determined to stand outside nature. The driving goal of the giant investment firms is to convert natural materials into commodities and commodities into profits, transforming living nature into vast accumulations of dead capital. This capital accumulation process treats the planet's life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, rivers, air quality) as dispensable ingredients of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. Consequently, the support systems of the entire ecosphere--the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water, and top soil--are at risk, threatened by global warming, massive erosion, and ozone depletion. An ever-expanding capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course. It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about this. Far worse than denial, they have shown utter antagonism toward those who think the planet is more important than corporate profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists," "EPA gestapo," "Earth Day alarmists," "tree huggers," and purveyors of "Green hysteria" and "liberal claptrap." The plutocracy's position was summed up by that dangerous fool, erstwhile Senator Steve Symms (R-Idaho), who once said that if he had to choose between capitalism and ecology, he would choose capitalism. Symms seemed not to grasp that, absent a viable ecology, there will be no capitalism or any other ism.
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmudgeon/index_NY_Auto_Show.html
If the Devil himself wanted to design a perfect trap for attracting morons, he couldn't have done better than this season's New York International Auto Show at the Jacob Javits Center. ... This huge annual car event happened to be going on during a week in which the price of crude oil jumped above $55-a-barrel for the first time since the late summer of 2004.You'd think that this would be a signal to the American public that it was time to...uh...re-think our national obsession with easy motoring? Not so. At least not among the people I spoke with at random. Their delusions were strikingly florid, in fact, the most common and basic one being that America possesses a bountiful supply of oil -- if only the sundry enviro-freaks and corporate chiselers would let us at it. The facts, sadly, belie that notion. United States oil reserves stand at about 28 billion barrels (if you include natural gas condensates). I am not speaking here of the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is a tiny fraction of this, but of the total amount of crude oil left underground anywhere in the fifty states: 28 billion barrels. Now, Americans use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day. That's 100 million every five days. That's a billion (1,000 million) every fifty days. That's -- give or take -- seven billion barrels of oil a year. If for some reason our oil imports were cut off and we had to depend solely on our own oil, our total reserves would last four measly years. Actually a bit less if you figure that a portion of that oil will never be pumped out for practical and economic reasons. It so happens that we currently import more than two thirds of the 20 million barrels a day we use. Of that, about a quarter comes from our good friends in the Persian Gulf nations. More than ten percent comes from Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, despises America because we have tried to overthrow and kill him more than once. Another hefty percentage comes from West African nations so sclerotic in governance that the work of the oil companies can barely get done amid the political and social chaos. It's not a pretty picture. My own bias, which might as well be revealed succinctly if you haven't already guessed it, is that the global oil peak problem (2006) will change everything about how and where we live, how we allocate and value land, what our economy will be about in the decades ahead, and especially how our social and political relations will sort out. Above all, apropos of the subject at hand, it will lead to a severely diminished presence of cars in our daily lives. And so it was exceedingly strange to find myself circulating around a massive show based on the assumption that the motoring life will continue uninterrupted forever.
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/10/07
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason. Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge. The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason." Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4315968.stm
Predictions vary from the catastrophic to the cataclysmic. Glaciers are melting, the ice caps disappearing into the oceans. Sea levels may rise by many metres as a consequence. Indigenous Arctic peoples will find their food stocks gone, while fresh water supplies in Asia and south America will disappear as the glaciers which provide them melt away; penguins, polar bears and seals will find their habitats gone, their traditional lives unliveable. But how realistic is this picture? Is the world's ice really disappearing, or is it unscientific hot air? Europe's new satellite Cryosat should provide some definitive answers; in the meantime, here is our global snapshot. Huge, pristine, dramatic, unforgiving; the Antarctic is where the biggest of all global changes could begin. There is so much ice here that if it all melted, sea levels globally would rise hugely - perhaps as much as 80m. Say goodbye to London, New York, Sydney, Bangkok, Rio... in fact, the majority of the world's major cities.
October 09, 2005
Nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. -Edmund Burke
http://www.alternet.org/katrina/26349/
Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/26351/
Anxious to be perceived as hot, and reluctant to feel left out of what Levy calls "the frat party of pop culture," FCPs eagerly make sex objects out of other women and themselves, claiming that watching Drew Barrymore whirl around a pole in the Charlie's Angels sequel and posing for Playboy is "empowering." Levy thinks they're kidding themselves, mistaking sexual power for real power and, worse, believing that mimicking the sexuality of strippers, Playmates, and porn stars -- women who are paid to simulate real women's sexuality -- is power in the first place. "'Raunchy' and 'liberated' are not synonyms," she says. True. But they aren't necessarily opposites.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1811332,00.html
THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true. The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect total accuracy from the Bible.
http://www.unknownnews.org/050930a-df.html
One New York state National Guardsman's only exposure was to drive a flatbed truck with disabled tanks back to Kuwait for repair. Sergeant Gerard Darren Matthew became so ill that he received a medical discharge. His daughter was born with a birth defect 12 months after his return to New York She is missing several fingers. Sergeant Matthew has not been asked to testify before any congressional committees about the efficacy of uranium-238. The New York Daily News ran sophisticated exams on nine Iraq war veterans, and found that four of the nine tested positive for U-238. Two states have demanded testing for all returning National Guard troops from their states.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article316682.ece
Iraq war delayed Katrina relief effort, inquiry finds The confidential report, which has been seen by The Independent, details how funds for flood control were diverted to other projects, desperately needed National Guards were stuck in Iraq and how military personnel had to "sneak off post" to help with relief efforts because their commander had refused permission. (...) The report was commissioned by the Office of Secretary of Defence as an "independent and critical review" of what went so wrong. In a hard-hitting analysis, it says: "The US military has long planned for war on two fronts. This is as close as we have come to [that] reality since the Second World War; the results have been disastrous." (...) The report says deployment in the Iraq war led to serious problems. "Another major factor in the delayed response to the hurricane aftermath was that the bulk of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard was deployed in Iraq."
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/05/13
OVERSHOOT: Living Beyond Our Means Because the people of industrial nations did not recognize themselves as hunters and gatherers, they adhered to premises that were becoming more and more false. Franklin D Roosevelt spoke for all believers in those premises in the next-to-last sentence he ever wrote: "The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today". Six years before Roosevelt's final expression of the optimistic faith that had become standard in the Age of Exuberance, one of the world's foremost demographers, P K Whelpton, had written that increasing numbers of people were only compatible with a rising standard of living when a nation either was still underpopulated, or could still call upon technological progress to offset the disadvantages of overpopulation. According to Whelpton, the United States in 1939 was already overpopulated. Technology, which had formerly enlarged carrying capacity, was growing in its power to do just the opposite - to increase per capita resource requirements, and thus aggravate the overload. ... The achievements of Homo sapiens have always required foundations other than the self-assurance and determination to which Roosevelt appealed. Sheer will-power, important as it can be, cannot be implemented without material resources and physical energy, regardless of the institutional expectations of a people.
http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/09/28
As far as retired oil geologists go, Colin Campbell is an important man. After decades spent working for majors in the oil industry, in the 1990s he became a main contributor to the PetroConsultants database of world oil and gas reserves. Then, increasingly disturbed by what he considered inflated, politicized figures produced by the international energy agencies, Campbell essentially became a whistleblower, publishing his own studies in journals such as Scientific American. From his humble home office, surrounded by his collection of fossils, Campbell continues to maintain his own databases. The numbers representing the remaining world energy reserves are perhaps the most significant set of numbers in the world. Unless the energy agencies are running two sets of books, Campbell, within his computer spreadsheets and rows of green folders, may prove to have the most accurate set of these numbers in existence. And the message the numbers are giving him is sending shockwaves through the world. We are, he believes, very close to the ultimate global peak of oil production known most commonly now as Peak Oil. It's a message many people don't want heard, or want to hear. "Most people who come here start going through my bookcase. They're looking for evidence that I'm a crackpot," he told me, in his considered, somewhat disappointingly sane tone, when I visited him at home in Ireland. When world oil prices started rising dramatically over a year ago, Campbell's perspective, until then mostly ignored or written off as simple pessimism, quickly became widely regarded. A woodcut portrait of him featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and when National Geographic devoted a 2004 issue to 'The End of Cheap Oil' they used Campbell's work to question the far more optimistic predictions of the Energy Information Administration.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4286512.stm
Children whose mothers were overly stressed during pregnancy may themselves be more vulnerable to anxiety as a result, research suggests. High levels of stress hormone may cross the placenta and affect the baby in the womb in a way that carries long-term implications, UK scientists believe. A Bristol University team found anxiety in late pregnancy was linked to higher cortisol levels in children aged 10.
http://www.hbns.org/getDocument.cfm?documentID=1123
Teenagers exposed to violence show biological changes that could affect their physical and emotional health for years to come, according to a new study. High school students exposed to violence whether as witnesses or victims had higher blood pressure and heart rates, and higher levels of cortisol (a fight or flight hormone that regulates many vital body functions).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4290340.stm
The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists. They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century. The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years. "September 2005 will set a new record minimum in the amount of Arctic sea ice cover," said Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado. "It's the least sea ice we've seen in the satellite record, and continues a pattern of extreme low extents of sea ice which we've now seen for the last four years," he told BBC News.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Gilardin0921.htm
Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology, meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans. The award winning environmental writer Geoffrey Lean wrote: "Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world . . . will puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster -- destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to flourish over the past 11,000 years."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1585800,00.html
Almost a fifth of all ill health in poor countries and millions of deaths can be attributed to environmental factors, including climate change and pollution, according to a report from the World Bank. Unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene as well as indoor and outdoor air pollution are all said to be killing people and preventing economic development. In addition, says the bank, increasing soil pollution, pesticides, hazardous waste and chemicals in food are significantly affecting health and economies.
http://www.counterpunch.org/baroud10052005.html
Deep down, U.S. President George W. Bush should grasp the seriousness of his debacle. If true, then he must also appreciate the time element in averting the worse-case scenario, which he, along with an increasingly alienated number of ideologues are imposing on their country. Iraq is a multifaceted disaster, and its calamitous effects are hurting America on many levels. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq is creeping up to the 2,000 mark. The figure of those wounded and maimed -- some permanently disabled -- is several folds higher.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/whats-he-doin_b_8421.html
Okay, the last time I called attention to the new-found twitch in President Bush's delivery, it was after the speech introducing now-Chief Justice John Roberts, and many commenters protested that the President was just suppressing laughter at the antics of Roberts' rambunctious son, present at the festivities. That, even though most people's attempts to avoid laughter don't involve a repetitive twitch. Fine. In the intervening weeks, I've watched Bush speeches regularly, and the twitch has remained a constant, although not in extemporaneous appearances. Now, this week, in his press conference announcing the nomination of Harriet Miers, the President has broken through that barrier, and here is the video evidence http://www.huffingtonpost.com/video/bush-miers.mov . As far as we know, the unmarried Ms. Miers didn't bring her non-existent rambunctious son to tempt the President into laughter. Other explanations, of course, are welcome.
Young children experience heightened stress levels when they enter child care, suggests research.
Stress may be making you fat. Theres growing evidence that chronic stress can make you thick around the middle. Studies in rats and monkeys clearly show that a high-stress environment increases risk for accumulating abdominal fat, the type of fat linked with heart disease. And in human studies, stress appears to put normal-weight women at higher risk for excess belly fat.
Children of women who experience stressful adverse life events appear to be prone to develop type 1 diabetes,which arises when the immune system erroneously attacks and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. The thinking is that kids become stressed too, raising their level of the stress hormone cortisol. This could lead to insulin resistance, which in turn may stress the insulin-producing beta cells and thereby trigger a diabetes-related autoimmune reaction in genetically predisposed children.
At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years. The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity. ... In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste. In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations.
I have had a quarter-century of experience writing about, speaking about, and living a life of voluntary simplicity. Based on that, here are other priorities (beyond material frugality) that I have found that characterize this way of living: Sacred relationshipsThose choosing the simple life tend to place a high priority on the quality and integrity of their relationships with every aspect of lifewith themselves, other people, other creatures, the Earth, and the universe. Giving Ones True giftsThis way of living supports discovering and expressing the true gifts that are unique to each of us, as opposed to waiting until we die to discover that we have not authentically lived out our true potentials. Living with BalanceThe simple life is not narrowly focused on living with less; instead, it is a continuously changing process of consciously balancing the inner and outer aspects of our lives, an immensely demanding process in our busy, complex, and confusing world. Life as a MeditationLiving simply enables us to approach life as a meditation. By consciously organizing our lives to minimize distractions and needless busyness, we can pay attention to lifes small details and deepen our soulful relationship with life. All of the worlds spiritual traditions have advocated an inner-directed way of life that does not place undue emphasis on material things. The Bible speaks frequently about the need to find a balance between the material and the spiritual sides of life, such as in this passage: "Give me neither poverty nor wealth." (Proverbs 30 : 8) From China and the Taoist tradition, Lao-tzu said that: "he who knows he has enough is rich." In Buddhism, there is a conscious emphasis on discovering a middle way through life that seeks balance and material sufficiency. The soulful value of the simple life has been recognized for thousands of years. What is new is that world circumstances are changing in such a way that this way of life now has unprecedented relevance for our times.
http://cms.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20050919-000008.htmlEating a daily dose of blueberries, spinach and green algae can protect the brain from stroke damage by as much as 70 percent. When eaten regularly, they may also decrease the likelihood that a person will develop neurological disorders or age-related memory problems. Other studies show that other foods high in antioxidants -- including cranberries and dark leafy greens -- combat memory loss in Alzheimer's disease patients.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/07/a_summer_icefree_arc.htmlAn article in the August issue of EOS (published by the American Geophysical Union) says we're well on our way to a "summer ice-free Arctic Ocean" and the short-term consequences will be catastrophic. The ramifications of a transition to this new system state would be profound. The deglaciation of Greenland alone would cause a substantial (up to 6 m) rise in sea level, resulting in flooding along coastal areas where much of the world's population resides. Shrubs and boreal forest will likely expand northward, further decreasing the albedo. Less certain is the fate of vast stores of carbon previously frozen in the permafrost. Would they be exhaled as carbon dioxide and methane, further accelerating warming? The article also says there's nothing we can do to stop this from happening: The change appears to be driven largely by feedback-enhanced global climate warming, and there seem to be few, if any, processes or feedbacks within the Arctic system that are capable of altering the trajectory toward this "super interglacial" state.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19718...research on global change is pointing toward worst-case scenarios. All of this, of course, is a perverse tribute to industrial capitalism and extractive imperialism as geological forces so formidable that they have succeeded in scarcely more than two centuries -- indeed, mainly in the last fifty years -- in knocking the earth off its climatic pedestal and propelling it toward the nonlinear unknown. The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon. The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer that in one of their sanctimonious ads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-schmeltzer/time-to-evacuate-new-orle_b_8530.htmlThere is serious news breaking today
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/100705/new_sampling001.shtml that independent testing of New Orleans shows highly elevated levels of deadly contaminants, contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Mayor Ray Nagin have been telling people. Wilma Subra, the chemist who performed the testing, told The Advocate, exposure to toxic sediment could cause short-term and long-term health risks, which could include "respiratory problems, asthma, skin rashes and damage to internal organs -- and, potentially, cancer over the long-term." For example, in the infamous 9th Ward, arsenic, a known cancer-causing agent, was found at a concentration 75 times higher than the EPA residential standard. Meanwhile, Ray Nagin is telling people to come back and drink the water too.
http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2005/04/08Even a cursory glance reveals that the world is in turmoil. The daily newspaper and television news reports bring us terrible stories of crime, extreme poverty amidst plenty, the rising incidence of violence and immorality, the abandonment and neglect of children, and much more -- things which indicate a breakdown of moral and ethical responsibilities on the part of individuals as well as society. Concurrently, the world is also witnessing the emergence of the means and conditions that promise a magnificent future for humanity. Advancements in medicine, food production, communication, transportation and many other fields are paving the way for a global human community to begin a new era. A raised consciousness regarding human rights, the protection of the environment and all aspects of the home-village earth is replacing the old narrow mentality. The means for achieving world unity are also rapidly being put in place. These two simultaneous processes are, in the Bahá'í view, the death pangs of the old world order and the birth pangs of the new. Slowly, even while humanity is learning to think of itself as one entity and laying the foundation for permanent peace, it is realizing the deep need for a world-wide spiritual regeneration, a movement toward raising personal moral and ethical standards of conduct that will enable individuals and societies to function the way they should. In spite of the advances in material well-being, people are beginning to realize that all the technology that science brings us will not achieve this spiritual regeneration.
The Bush administration didn't exactly invent that proud political tradition known as cronyism. But they did raise the bar to a level never before seen in U.S. politics, taking unprecedented advantage of the 3000 or so positions that a President can fill to install those loyal to the clan. The appropriateness of many of these appointments have been raising eyebrows on Capital Hill since Bush first ascended to the throne in 2000.
The climatologists who met at the government's conference in Exeter this month heard that a rise of just 2.1 degrees, almost certain to happen this century, will confront as many as 3 billion people with water stress. This, in turn, is likely to result in tens of millions of deaths. But the same calm voice that tells us climate change means mild winters and early springs informs us, in countries like the UK, that we will be able to buy our way out of trouble. While the price of food will soar as the world goes into deficit, those who are rich enough to have caused the problem will, for a couple of generations at least, be among the few who can afford to ignore it.
The technological achievements of the oil and gas industry have been tremendous. But as yet we cannot manufacture oil from raw materials to replace what is in the earth. We can extract it, but we cannot make it as economically as Mother Nature. Thus it is a NON-RENEWABLE resource; once gone, it cannot be replaced at similar cost and volume. It is literally like gold or diamonds; there is only so much of it available on our planet. Now, assuming you have grasped this, lets try and see if you can fathom the world situation. Currently, the big debate is whether the world is at the halfway point in oil and gas consumption, or Peak Oil Production as it has come to be termed. Everyone agrees that in the early 1970s, the United States hit national Peak Oil, and we have been importing oil ever since. The debate now raging is whether the entire world has hit Peak Oil already, or if it will hit in the next 2 to 5 years. In the scheme of things, this debate is pointless. By the time we agree on the date, it will be upon us or have passed. What that means is that it will forever cost more and more for oil and gas. It will become scarcer and more valuable with every gallon or barrel we burn or use.
Even if all greenhouse gases had been stabilized in the year 2000, we would still be committed to a warmer Earth and greater sea level rise in the present century, according to a new study by a team of climate modelers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. The modeling study quantifies the relative rates of sea level rise and global temperature increase that we are already committed to in the 21st century. Even if no more greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere, globally averaged surface air temperatures would rise about a half degree Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit) and global sea levels would rise another 11 centimeters (4 inches) from thermal expansion alone by 2100.
Archives
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
October 2005
November 2005
December 2006
September 2007
November 2007
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
October 2009
November 2009
December 2009
January 2010
February 2010
March 2010
April 2010
January 2014
