Month: May 2007

The power grid is frozen.

If power utilities were farmers, we would be both poor and malnourished.

The Clean Energy Venture Summit included a session on the Utility of the Future where a panel that included Austin Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Green Mountain Energy, IBM and others discussed installing systems for monitoring and regulation [of course] and optimizing overall efficiency. [worldchanging]

While reading the Summit’s results, weak and self-serving responses to our energy challenges, I noticed a tone and style I’ve heard many times before: 1) Moaning about complexity and overhead. 2) Burden-shifting to the consumer. 3) Delivery of little but a plea for more funding.

Power utilities remain an entrenched position adept at extra billing and fees.

“It won’t be easy to implement – it’s a complicated problem to combine an energy bus and an IT bus for every structure.

“There’s also major load swings we’re just beginning to understand…

“…such as load reduction through pervasive implementation of energy-saving light bulbs

“…and load increase as pluggable hybrids start appearing.

“…once we’ve solved the problem of energy storage.

Our utilities are not prepared. After decades of readiness, this is all we can expect???

How many times have we heard utilities prognosticate? How many pledges have failed? How poorly does this sector perform next to peers in other parts of the economy?

If a new light bulb is needed, it’s needed to brighten up our power companies.

About 1978 I organized seminars for Sacramento’s SMUD power utility and PG&E that introduced remote tiered metering, demand management systems, conservation management for commerce and consumer, as well as separate sessions to explain photovoltaic and wind power options.

After applause and coffee, one decade, two, three pass by.

Time and again, our utility firms have been invited to the game. Time and again, they’ve polished the brass and failed to blow the horn. Optimizing overall efficiency, indeed!

Be forewarned. Let’s not replace our lightbulbs all at once! Our utilities can’t stent the load reduction!

A French bulldog has been nursing a baby tiger as its own at Shirotori zoo in Japan.

[more pics at Reuters]

The answer to this question
will determine whether you are
over the legal limit or not.

Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?

Arun Maira, the chairman of the Boston Consulting Group who is one of India’s foremost leadership gurus, set out three scenarios for how India might end up in this, the Asian Century….

1) Wallowing Buffaloes:
India becomes like a group of buffaloes, wallowing in the mud. Everyone is doing their own thing, making great show of movement and energy, but not actually going anywhere.

2) Peacocks and Wolves:
Quoting an old saying, that ‘when the peacocks have fed we hope there is enough left for sparrows’, Mr Maira made the point that India needs not a ‘trickle down’ of wealth but a flood. The wolves in this analogy are the Naxalite rebels and the increasingly restless disenfranchised poor who are left prowling dangerously on the margins of society.

3) Fireflies:
…the insects can be seen swarming round trees at night in rural India, like natural fairylights. An amazing natural phenomenon. In this world “millions are working together, moving India from darkness into light.”

Peter Foster in New Delhi for The Telegraph asks, “Which, I wonder, will it be?”, and continues, “I’m going to have one final word on the nature of Indian democracy…”

“The fact that India’s impoverished millions vote out incumbent parties every five years because they’ve failed to improve their lives is not an expression of power, or even a demonstration of true ‘democracy in action’.

“On the contrary. Since the people feel that their lives don’t seem to be improving, and that the previous lot of politicians is no better than the next lot, it is the ultimate expression of powerlessness.”

“It’s certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does,” said Linus Torvalds, holder of the Linux trademark.

“If the source code for Windows could be subjected to the same critical review that Linux has been, Microsoft would find itself in violation of patents held by other companies.” [Information Week]

Alternative payment systems seek to cut out credit card companies [and high bank fees].

Though they face formidable competition in the form of the cards’ ubiquity and convenience,

…one company is seeking to overcome that by turning people’s driver’s licenses into debit cards .

Users link their bank account to their driver’s license number and make purchases at participating retailers using the license and a PIN code. (via Payments News)

[via Techdirt]

One of the phenomena of the last many years is evaluating our society by pondering vast systems of economic and government policy. It’s become a populist game of game complexity. But for our economy and our society, what we measure and the policies we argue are increasingly not helping us.

Lately we try to insert perhaps immeasurable factors into social theory such as climate, population, old age, healthcare, religion, resource extraction, globalism, corporatism, elitism, terrorism, corruption, and war.

We revive hero’s invigoration from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and his sidekick Frederich Hayek. We disdain market intervention where it hits the ground as if laissez-faire will release a random invention to save us like a lottery will relieve us.

We assure our correctness by citing periods of growth or decline in terms of a government’s memorable clumsiness or predictive wit. We argue that Rome was not in a day, nor America’s centuries, nor China’s revival, nor migrants crushing over walls. To smooth charts and re-draw irregularities, we look to rules and law not to inspire principals but to sink pirates, as if preserving intellectual property can collect the cash we need in our crowded world.

I think our risk may swing on these armchair abstraction.

As we tweak economic algorithm to save our West, we look to succeed with more than widgets by designing more widgets, by promoting widget propriety, or, Orwell forbid, by enforcing widget pedigree. But none of these are fundamental to where we walk with our widgets along the boulevard of our lives.

To compete with a billion scholars overseas, we will not succeed by trading acres of expensively trained personnel explaining digital services to movie and media consumers. Nor will we sufficiently grow by grabbing a theory in science or a breakthrough in a lab, even if we cajole every genius and savant from every agriculture in our schools. Nor will we sufficiently entice the world to support us by selling only loans, leverage, audits or insurance; nor automated stock acquisition, automated traffic compliance, automated window cleaning.

These approaches are merely trading 19th Century factory industrialism with 21st Century centrist institutionalism. As China and India and others grow, while we are scurrying against terror, we fail to admit to ourselves that the day to day fashion of leaders in the West is to merely worry where our diplomats will be pleasantly greeted.

Most of us are building and rebuilding the wishes we can reach – a workable economy of our own local and regional arrangements. It’s from here where we can build a more effective economy. It is not, I assert, organizing ourselves in a stadium of human waves to compete on behalf of company or government whim. It’s from where we stand that we can support a greater economy worldwide.

There are so many challenges to answer, but before we evaluate our tasks, we should know our targets. When we talk economics and government, we too easily omit our day to day living where we must invent a workable if not pleasant human community.

This recommendation doesn’t ignore macro activity but propels increased activity where it’s acutely required. Most of us have not abandoned usefulness to each other. Most are employed in teams that are smallish and active and smallish and changeable. Most are willing participants in our future.

For us nearby, and for all around us, our new infrastructure makes new economy possible. A better economy may follow a broader understanding of our potential but a less wide way of managing it. Social initiative and healthy community may be our best policy and the first requirement of education.

Our next economic opportunity may be to invent more attractive living. Now, that’s something we can sell!

Each can reach,
so reach to each –
the best restitution
for any institution.

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I was a founder of Community Renewal, Inc., a small 501(c)3, that encouraged county and municipal leaders to focus their efforts less to complying with larger entities and instead to helping their communities reach their potential – to discover and create “the dream” of residents.

From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“If a politician declares that the United States has the best health care system in the world today, he or she looks clueless rather than patriotic or authoritative,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent ethicist at the National Institutes of Health.

The U.S. spends $6,000 per person per year on health care, an amount that is more than 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and more than any other country.

Americans’ average life expectancy of 78 ranks 45th in the world, behind Bosnia and Jordan.

And the U.S. infant death rate is 6.37 per 1,000 live births, higher than that of most developed nations.

President Bush frequently has said Americans have the world’s best health care system. Democrats and Republicans alike have made the “world’s best” claim. [story]

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The U.S. does not have the best health care system in the world – it has the best emergency care system in the world.

Advanced U.S. medical technology has not translated into better health statistics for its citizens; indeed, the U.S. ranks near the bottom in list after list of international comparisons.

Americans are the most dissatisfied with the quality and quantity of their health care. Of the 10 largest industrialized nations, the U.S. ranked dead last in health care satisfaction, with an approval rating of only 11 percent. [more analysis]

The World Health Organization’s ranking of the world’s health systems places France at the top; the USA at #37.

“Freedom dies of too many lies.”

Bill Moyers composes a rhythm in his rant:

Many young reporters thought it inconceivable that a government would lie or manipulate intelligence to go to war.

Why is America forsaking its own revolution?

…we have seen the rise of an ideological partisan press that is contemptuous of reality, serves up right-wing propaganda as fact, and attempts to demonize anyone who
says otherwise.

We are desperate today for cool thinking and clear analysis. What kind of country is it that wants its politicians to play tricks with faith?

What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility’s sake, but for policy’s sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don’t sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you’re in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi’ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill’s definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.

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National humility
If our nation’s commitment to human rights at home and abroad is to be reinvigorated after the dark era we are now living through, it will have to be, as it has been in the past, by Americans acting in cooperation with one another, and with the rest of humanity.

Canada is urged by more than 1,500 scientists from more than 50 countries to strengthen protection of the increasingly threatened boreal forest, a key component in the planet’s battle with climate change.

Only 10 per cent of Canada’s forest is currently protected and the spread of logging, mining and oil and gas operations into Canada’s large northern forest is putting at risk the largest carbon storehouse on Earth.

Russia is harnessing natural resources to create an economic superpower.

Russia’s oligarchs may be trying to buy respectability and shed their robber-baron image by buying into public companies overseas.

Sales from Russia’s enormous reserves of oil and gas have pushed its economy to heights unseen since its dramatic post-communist collapse. From the brink of bankruptcy in 1998, Russia’s foreign reserves, estimated at roughly $330-billion are second only to those of China and Japan.

To my surprise, Chrysler was very close to becoming part of a Russian expansion into western markets.

Toronto’s Globe & Mail is one news source, of only a few I’ve found, that attempted to look closely at the sale of Chrysler.

Why did DaimlerChrysler in effect pay Cerberus to take Chrysler off its hands?

Was there an effort to search for a more preferred buyer? Days before Cerberus stepped over home base, Magna was the top contender. Magna is North America’s largest auto parts consortium. And Magna had recently invited Russian players to join their operations.

Enter stage left: 39-year-old oligarch Oleg Deripaska bought a $1.54-billion piece of car parts giant Magna International Inc. and its dream of acquiring DaimlerChrysler’s U.S. operations.

Deripaska, whose empire includes Russia’s No. 2 auto maker and UC Rusal, the world’s leading aluminum producer, needs foreign technology to build his Russian auto-making company and diversify geographically.

Where is the profit in the automobile sector? Another under reported feature of the Chrysler swap is that Cerberus becomes the nation’s largest finance company for vehicles.

A lot of kids suffer in silence.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/saliva-clue-chronic-bullying-13226.html

Hormones in children’s saliva may be a biological indicator of the trauma kids undergo when they are chronically bullied by peers, according to researchers who say biological markers can aid in the early recognition and intervention of long-term psychological effects on youth.

“Bullying is mainly self-reported either by students or observed by teachers,” said JoLynn V. Carney, associate professor of counselor education at Penn State.

Carney and Richard Hazler, professor of counselor education at Penn State, looked at the hormone cortisol in students’ saliva to evaluate its validity as a reliable biomarker in assessing effects of precursors to bullying. In humans, this hormone is responsible for regulating various behavioral traits such as the fight-flight response and immune activity that are connected to sensory acuity and aspects of learning and memory.

“A lot of kids suffer in silence. When you hear of school shootings, or students who commit suicide as reaction to chronic peer abuse, those are kids who are not coping with the abuse by seeking appropriate support,” said Carney. “They keep their anger and frustration within and fantasize either how they are going to escape the abuse through suicide or how they are going to get revenge on their abusers.”

When a person senses a threat, the cortisol level spikes and learning and memory functions are negatively impacted, Carney said. The body basically focuses the bulk of its attention on surviving the threat. The longer such a spike continues, the more damage it can do to various aspects of a person’s physical, social, and emotional health.

However, when a person undergoes a lengthy period of stress similar to the chronic bullying experience, researchers have found less than normal cortisol reactions that are related to a decreased sensitivity to stress, a sort of numbing or desensitizing effect.

This hypocortisol finding, Hazler noted, has serious physical and psychological implications for kids – both victim and bystander. Research with adults exposed to repeated stressful events has linked hypocortisol with conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Penn State researchers tested the saliva of 94 sixth grade students between ages 9-14, along with a questionnaire on their experience on being bullied or watching someone being bullied, and additional measures of anxiety and trauma.

Since cortisol has a predictable daily pattern of highest levels in early morning and declining levels throughout the day, researchers collected samples of saliva when the students first arrived at school and then again before lunch.

“Lunchtime is one of those less supervised periods when kids are more likely to be bullied. One of the things we are trying to measure is not the reaction immediately following a bullying event, but instead the anticipatory anxiety that takes place with the approach of situations where bullying is more commonly occurs. Even kids who are not bullied suffer from such anticipatory stress because they anticipate watching their friends getting bullied and worry that they might be next,” said Hazler.

“It is this anxiety that we believe is most dangerous because that anxiety stays with you. It is not dependent on the bullying happening on a continual basis,” he added.

Results from the study suggest that while bullying is directly linked to trauma and anxiety, it is indirectly linked to cortisol levels.

“This confirms our theory that while exposure to a one-time or very rare bullying episode might cause higher cortisol levels, exposure to bullying on a chronic basis would be associated with hypocortisol levels,” said Carney and Hazler who recently presented their findings at the American Counseling Association Convention in Detroit.

The Penn State researchers liken their research on bullying to the study of depression, which used to be solely about psychiatric observations and behavioral tests until researchers began to find biological changes.

“All of a sudden depression was not simply a psychological phenomenon, but it also has a physical aspect with potential medication treatments to support counseling,” they noted.

Study ties unfair thoughts to heart health
A study headed up by a London epidemiologist has found that thoughts of unfair treatment can directly lead to a greater risk of coronary problems.

Self-Compassion May be More Important Than Self-Esteem in Dealing With Negative Events, New Studies Show
Why do some people roll with life`s punches, facing failures and problems with grace, while others dwell on calamities, criticize themselves and exaggerate problems?

office space has been shrinking for individual workers. Regardless of overall office size, the amount carved out for you and your colleagues is getting smaller. In 1987, the average executive office was 291 square feet. As of last year it was down to 241 square feet. A “senior professional” is now given an average of 98 square feet to work with, and those poor call centre workers only warrant 50 square feet, according to the International Facility Management Association.

The IFMA said the shrinking trend has slowed a bit, but as of 2006 over half of workers (59 percent) spent their days in a cubicle. Only 7 percent of folks work in open areas with no partitions.

“There has been a strong overall trend to reduce square footage and most companies that had the opportunity, through drivers such as relocations or major reorganizations, have taken advantage of this,” said Melodee Wagen, president of Workspace Strategies Inc., when the data was released. “However, space reduction can only be taken to a certain point and have the individual workspace remain functional.”

Report: Tech’s Gender Gap Widened by Uninviting Workplace

In Technology

New research may shift the view of the gender gap in the tech workplace away from a lack of interest among females to the work environment itself, which women rated as unfavorable.

The opposite sex is much more interested in your face than your body.

The first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to attractiveness, by Marianne Peters from the University of Western Australia, shows that it’s not the body that attracts a mate.

For women rating men, attractiveness is 52 percent face rating, 24 percent for bodies.

When men rated women, attractiveness is 47 percent from her face, 32 percent by her body.

[short blurb at New Scientist]

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When asked what traits they look for in a mate, men and women agreed on the top nine traits. However, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher whereas women placed greater emphasis on honesty, kindness and dependability. [from a national BBC study of more than 450,000 people.]

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Women are better at remembering faces than men, probably because they’re more interested in social aspects of the world than men are. [link to blurb]

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Some women are wary of men who are both attractive and wealthy. A rich, good-looking man seeking a wife might do well to play down his wealth. [link to blurb]

One hundred women meet at a wine bar to recycle unused clothing.

Fun, adventurous, practical.

Offering to help organize events, the Swishing website says its purpose is to help “rustle clothes from friends”.

“The Art of Swishing involves getting your friends together to swap gorgeous clothes and party at the same time.” [story]

A Marine was deployed to Afghanistan.

In a letter from his girlfriend, she explained that she had slept with two guys, wanted to break up, and asked for pictures of herself to be returned.

The Marine asked his buddies for unwanted photos of women and mailed about 25 pictures of various women to his ex-girlfriend with the following note:

“I don’t remember which one you are.
Please remove your picture and send the rest back.”

The Z Backscatter Van is mobile X-ray.

BoingBoing caught the announcement of the Z Backscatter Van that can “slowly drive around and generate real-time x-ray images of cars, revealing weapons, explosives, drugs, and stowaways.”

Wow!

Judges and lawyers in this nation will be grappling with search rules for years and years.

American Science & Engineering asserts on their website that the vehicle reveals:

• Car and truck bombs
• Explosives, plastic weapons, and other organic threats
• Radioactive threats, including nuclear devices and dirty bombs
• Illegal drugs
• Stowaways, such as illegal immigrants and terrorists
• Trade fraud items, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other legal goods smuggled to evade duties

and adds that in ‘Stationary Scan Mode’, operators may elect to scan the occupants of the subject vehicle.

I wonder how surveillance, sovereignty and sensibility will shape our world.

The phrase “may elect to scan” will bother our legal framework for at least a generation.

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The Beatnik Robot Fights Back

There’s new hope to restrain the tyrant, the autocrat and the zealot.

What can minority radicals do if copies of subversive literature are returned to lists of contraband? Where is a hiding place for Mao’s little red book or a diary of vulgar terms or vault of patent drawings that may topple an industry?

There’s one possibly temporary but countervailing solution to the error of broad surveillance equipment.

The Beatnik Robot has been re-discovered. The device was developed by prescient beatniks of the 1960s. The robot “ferrets out the undesirables, including censors, book-burners….”

The LA Times has opened several photo archives [link] which included this anti-jingo, anti-supression robot.

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Wiretap the Internet Day

Today, Monday May 14, is the day that all US network operators are required by US law to install back-doors to make it easier for cops to snoop on their traffic. This has been the law for voice switches for over a decade, where it represents a potential holiday for dirty cops who don’t have warrants use these back-doors (and criminals and corporate espionageists who want to eavesdrop on sensitive calls). Now it’s part of our data infrastructure as well. Nice one, America.

“May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC’s expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.”

To restart the public’s investigation of the principles protecting free individuals and their social stature, island.org points out that “The Hippies Were Right All Along” published in San Francisco’s Chronicle.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness.

It was about how we are all in this together.

It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other.

In 1901, the Newark Daily Advocate published their ideas for 2001.

Now, candidly, wouldn’t you like to know what sayers will be saying, thinkers thinking, writers writing, doers doing and plotters plotting at the end of the next hundred years?

Will airships be provided for messenger boys?

Will lovely woman do the proposing?

Will woman bosses run politics as they now run the home?

From the 1928 Ogden Standard-Examiner:

The mechanical man, brazen-lunged creature of dreadful portent is among us! A few years from now you may rub elbows with him in the subway, turn out in the street to let him pass upon his ruthless way…

Paleo-Future posts visions of the future from the past, many from newspapers and magazines. It’s a fascinating look at our fascination with the future.

Pope Benedict XVI raged with equal fire against Marxism and capitalism, with a t authoritarians..

The IHT story continued:

“Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves,” he said. “And this ideological promise has proven false.”

Marxism, he said, left “a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction.” Capitalism, he said, has failed to bridge the “distance between rich and poor” and is “giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.”

He is not recommending a religious state:

“This political task is not the immediate competence of the church,” he said. “Respect for a healthy secularity — including the pluralism of political opinions — is essential to in the authentic Christian tradition.

“If the church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice.”

What I dislike about web heads and techies is the narrow focus. What I like about eco heads and greenies is the wide focus.

Emergic
Mobile Phones and Economic Growth
of how mobiles helped the Kerala fishermen increase incomes and pay for the mobiles:

Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes. [The Economist]

We are such slowness.

Before the Religious Age, there was the Tribal Age, and we await the Scientific Age.

In a Tribal Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is ancestors, and a person’s individual merit derives from his having “good” ancestors.

In a Religious Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is God’s will, and a person’s individual merit derives from his being approved by God.

In a Scientific Age culture, the moral authority of the laws will derive from the extent to which they improve overall welfare, and a person’s individual merit will derive from the extent to which he serves that end.

How Dangerous Religion Is explores the essence of religion and a warning about religion’s greatest danger: Since religion is faith in and loyalty to absolute power, it too easily claims to be absolutely without error.

But how dangerous is science?
1974 Noble Prize winner F. A. Hayek warned that our knowledge of the world is at best limited, incomplete, and uncertain.

“… a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain.

Analysizing Hayek, Philosophy.com points out “the fatal conceit” that is our “undue faith in the power of reason; that human knowledge is intensely personal and irretrievably distributed throughout the population.”

Remember warnings from Thomas Jefferson?
Where are his warnings that power and government can never know where the next idea or the next necessity will spring; that a light touch enables potency and vigor? Jefferson said no authority would have the wit to discover mankind’s pastoral future; that a free and unencumbered populace was the only assurance that we would find our path forward.

Raising brutish authority, religion’s intolerant belief, or the axim of premature science are the dangers most likely to suppress our agriculture of hope.

A greater respect for each other, cutting across rank and aggrandizement, is the charge of our Constitution.

When we argue for a separation of powers or for a humble distribution of rights, we are arguing for enabling our future.

Dirt is disappearing.

John Allemang reports [subscription] in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail:

“It’s a simple fact that we’re using up our finite supply of good soil faster than it can be made, and whatever our eyes choose to tell us, a crisis is looming.”

And then he says the loss is “…barely perceptible.”

The story swings on David R. Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [who] was quoted as saying,

“We only have a fixed amount of soil – and we’re digging it up.… We’re on track to lose most of our agricultural soils. And even if we solve the water crisis and the climate crisis, if we don’t conserve soil, then that will do us in.”

To help focus calm thinking, Canada’s alert Agnet looks into Montgomery’s new book, ‘Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations’ [review]:

“Montgomery takes pains to demonstrate the key role played by soil degradation in almost every civilization….

“Wrecking soil, he implies, is something humans do, given the opportunity, because we’re programmed to think of immediate issues such as personal survival rather than forgoing our inheritance to benefit the farmers of the future. And one reason we can do this with a clear conscience is our belief that soil is everywhere.”

There is a response to losing dirt that is not summarized in the weekend news.

Agnet points out that to reduce erosion, soil advocates try to persuade farmers to cut down or even cut out the tilling (plowing) of the loose, granular soil, maintain grassy ground cover, practise crop rotation, reduce chemical fertilizer and pesticide use while making better use of manure, introduce windbreaks and work the land along more natural contours.

Conservation tillage and no-till techniques were used on 33 per cent of Canadian farmland in 1991, and on 60 per cent by 2001. By 2004, conservation tillage was practiced on about 41 per cent of U.S. farmland and no-till methods were used on 23 per cent.

South America’s Franke Dijkstra has emerged as one of the most renowned experts in no-till farming.

“My average loss from rain in Brazil was 30 tons a hectare (about 13 tons an acre). I’ve even seen some instances where 300 or 400 tons go down the river with one rain.”

Within 10 years, planting no-till has retained soil and improved raised organic matter to as high as five percent. Yields have also improved dramatically.

Only 5 per cent of the world’s farmland is worked with no-till methods.

These are odd and challenging days as we struggle with global warming, depleted oceans, tainted water, over-population, contentious politics and war. Now where we walk must be included in fresh guidelines for sustainability. What happens to Earth’s earth may well shape the course of civilization.

Our communities and movements must feel and think and act in order to understand and change the world. We must respond with love and empathy to other’s feelings of despair. We must analyze the institutions of death and the path toward life. And we must act to make change happen.

http://www.religioussocialism.com/vision.html

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

the error of the militian is too few adjectives

one scruple equaled 20 grains, and three scruples made up a dram. And of course there were eight drams to an ounce.

wine and good whiskey teach adjectives in a manner

where politics extracts numerous definitions from fewer words and war conjures from fewest

did more than anyone to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into politics and popular culture.

preacherly tone has emboldened all manner of scriptural bureaucrats and self-appointed faith leaders eager for a public voice

bowing to religious thinking and active support for the burgeoning of the faith industry in the political arena is having all kinds of negative consequences.

newfound confidence in religion as an alternative to politics has become de rigueur internationally

link