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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
