on a common platform

The death-knell of all fanaticism, not published in the USA where free belief is law and media sells its flames, but by the Mumbai Mirror, Saturday, September 11, 2010.

It was on September 11 in 1893 that the world’s first Parliament of Religions was convened in Chicago and lasted for more than two weeks. On that day, a famous monk began his speech as ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’ and received a deafening standing ovation.

“Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair.

Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”

Entire speech here. Parliaments of the World’s Religions here.

rightness and beauty

From the earliest moments of human awareness, gravity, sunlight, night and day, were obvious.

As well:

That health is more important than disease, that life is more important than death, that honor is preferable to dishonor, that faith and trust are preferable to doubt and cynicism, that the constructive is preferable to the destructive – all are self-evident statements not subject to proof.

Paul Handover is saying, “Truth is not something external to us; it is within us, all the time.”

😉 Plus, of course, what we’re learning from dogs.

fringes and pits

“As Americans, we will not and never will be at war with Islam. It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.” – US President Barack Obama

flaming the ignorance

Each of America’s great political crises have really been about the economy.

In our time it’s about energy coming from devices, as opposed to energy as resources. Resources have  to be transformed by fire to become energy. Devices harness energy from the environment.

There is, in fact, plenty of energy all around us — as much as we could ever use. Coming down from the sky, flowing under the Earth, blowing across our land. What we need are devices that can harness it.

Meanwhile we have a Stupid Economy.

It’s stupid because there is an economic force stifling growth we feel powerless to get past, because that force seems to control our politics. In this case, it’s energy billionaires like the Koch Brothers, the oil power, and to a lesser extent coal.

Look closely at who funds the Republican National Committee, all the ‘wingnut welfare’ groups and Tea Party arcades.

Follow the money where it doesn’t want you to go and it’s the same collection of names — energy men and their bankers.

But their economic time has passed.

Dana Blankenhorn

civilization spew

The outright ‘size’ of humans on Earth, the frenzy, the terrific effort of needs!

Biggest Threat Comes From Stuff We Haven’t Built Yet
With best management of ‘current and committed’ fossil-fuel infrastructure, we just might keep gas concentrations below 450ppm, 496 million tons, which will limit warming at or below 2 degrees C.

The trend is still fossil:
Since 2000 the world has added 416 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, 449 gigawatts of natural gas–fired power plants and even 47.5 gigawatts of oil-fired power plants… new highways, millions of new cars, gas-fired factories… the U.S. still generates half of its electricity via coal burning, and so on.

Carbon-neutral is slow:
Including nuclear & hydro, all carbon-free sources of energy combined provide a little more than 2 of today’s total power of 15 terawatts.

Carbon-neutral must grow:
To keep gas concentrations at today’s level in 2030, we should have installed at least 10 terawatts years ago. To meet demand and keep concentrations near 450ppm by 2050, carbon-neutral sources must reach 30 terawatts.

We have a ‘terawatt challenge’, Mr. Jones.
“What if we never built another CO2-emitting device, but the ones already in existence lived out their normal lives?”

“We found that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would stabilize at less than 430 ppm and the increase of global mean temperatures since preindustrial time would be less than 1.3°C. In light of common benchmarks of 450 ppm and 2°C, these results indicate that the devices whose emissions will cause the worst impacts have yet to be built.”


Arrrgh… wars galore as populations shift, oceans acidify, food chains collapse, gloom and doom, gloom and doom, oh woe. We’re overwhelmed and a’that.

‘Complex Systems’ is a term to truly, truly ponder. Folks sift for dominance of one form or another, others imagine chaos, but tipping points are opposed by reactions, vigorous  reactions…. If we’re diligent, perhaps strong efforts worldwide will meet terrific upcoming challenges.

We’ll need optimism.

Many environmental authors and some scientists use a bully pulpit to thump opportunists and lunatics, already ill equipped to confront good science. We can scare cynics toward good sense, but it’s better to lead the rest of us toward a workable horizon. We’ll need pointers and working prototype.

I shouldn’t be so strong. But I think we’re well past the matter of excess gas; we should be. All slogging toward forward options, discovering our choices, is the premier mission.

boner rollbacks

There is no evidence that tax cuts leads to stronger job creation. Moreover, both the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts were accompanied by huge increases in government spending. Now they’re cutting Food Stamps. by John Keefe:

“I’m a reporter… I called Rep. Boehner’s press people, and they switched me over to his staff. (They call him ‘The Leader’.)

HA!

Paul Krugman:

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be…

Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects.

Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.

our knitwork network

Ladies and gentlemen: the wonderful, and let’s not forget weird, World of Fungi.

At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter’s servers.


The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age is shifting control from bureaucracy to democracy. Based in UK, a strong agenda to loosen government’s grip on data.

“We shall soon see who is more powerful in this country, the elected government or the civil service.”


Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems. Her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child sold millions. She believed that the pain inflicted on children – for their own good – was unconsciously re-enacting trauma that had been inflicted on the parent when they were children.

The cycle of trauma continues down the generations. We do not need to be told whether to be strict or permissive with our children. What we do need is to have respect for their needs, their feelings, and their individuality, as well as for our own.

How do you define the term ‘cruelty’ with respect to children?
I use it to refer to situations where children are not shown the appropriate respect, where they are humiliated, confused, betrayed, and sexually abused. While hardly anyone disagrees with me on these points, I frequently fail to convince people that beating children is in fact a severe case of cruelty.

…someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.

 


“Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful.” —Seneca

Archeology Magazine offers a concise, comfortable essay on the history of Man’s Best Friend. Things you did not know about God, er, Dog.

Quite a different interview of Bill Gates at MIT’s Technology Review. Personal. Thorough. Strong. Not offered by mainstream rags. I don’t know what t0 call tabloids and rags and demographics mongering if major media stops printing, but it’s words equally condemning.

Tracking Macondo’s undersea plume, yes that oil in the Gulf of Mexico, is like the summer clouds above the ship, constantly moving, expanding, and contracting. On the oil trail, the ship’s Conductivity Temperature Depth device relays real-time data measuring fluorescence, beam attenuation, and oxygen levels.

The reason we have God is that we didn’t invent police. People just don’t like to take the law into their own hands.

“Everywhere you look around the world, you find examples of people altering their behavior because of concerns for supernatural consequences of their actions. They don’t do things that they consider bad because they think they’ll be punished for it.”


Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Tracker:

I find myself at something of a loss to track the work of John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I’ve praised him before for stories on physicians’ conflicts of interest, and I’m reduced now to doing more-or-less what I did then: Let Fauber’s stories speak for themselves.

This is first-rate stuff. Read it, learn from it, and see if you can’t attempt something like it yourself. We and our readers and listeners would all be better off if more of us did this sort of thing. It isn’t easy, but it’s gratifying.

The stories, in my view, are textbook cases of investigative reporting–and writing. I can’t think of any higher or more sophisticated thing to say than that these stories are done exactly the way that such stories should be done–and Fauber’s doing them better than almost anybody else.


banners and hate

Margaret & Helen:

If you vote Republican today, what exactly are you voting for?  It’s certainly not smaller government.  If you vote Republican today you are telling “Pastor” Terry Jones that fifty religious fanatics are more important than any chance for world peace.  You are telling  Sarah Palin that when it comes to the presidency – pretty is more important than smart.  You are telling Glenn Beck that honesty isn’t really necessary if you have your own cable news show on Fox.  You are telling Michele Bachmann that hearing voices in your head isn’t cause for alarm.  Hell, if you vote Republican today you might as well just shove a few more dollars in Rush Limbaugh’s pockets and a few more pills in his mouth.  It’s all very entertaining, I’ll give you that.  But considering what they did when we gave them the keys to the car the last time, are you really ready to put them behind the wheel again so soon?  I’m just not sure there are that many more countries we can bomb, world religions we can vilify and oil wells we can drill before the rest of the world calls us on our bullshit.

Here’s a thought. If  Pastor Jones is so dead set on burning a book he should just wait until The George Bush Memoirs come out.

After all, everyone knows the only thing God loves more than a good book burning is a burning Bush.

HA!

changing sentiment

JeffreyGoldberg, The Atlantic, in a rare interview with Fidel Castro:

I’ve seen a lot of dolphin shows. I will also say this: I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.

This snippet:

“How do you train the dolphins to do what they do?”  I asked.

“That’s a good question,” Fidel said.

Garcia called over one of the aquarium’s veterinarians to help answer the question. Her name was Celia. A few minutes later, Antonio Castro told me her last name: Guevara.

“You’re Che’s daughter?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you’re a dolphin veterinarian?”

“I take care of all the inhabitants of the aquarium,” she said.

declining trust

You’re supposed to be the watchdogs over dubious actors. Why aren’t you an exception?

What is the biggest problem with the news media in America today?

Jay Rosen:

I do not think journalists should ‘join the team’.

Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviors, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism.

I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged.

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t ‘wrong’, they’re just limited.

The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and ‘report both sides’ reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they’ve violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

crashing while chewing

I was wondering if this matter would gain traction:

Snacking at the wheel can affect vehicle control to a similar extent as using a hands-free phone, and is actually a causal factor in more crashes. So far, though, there has not been a controlled empirical study of this problem.

Source: “Crash dieting: The effects of eating and drinking on driving performance”
Accident Analysis & Prevention, Vol. 40, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 142-148

cynical favors

Oh the trouble with health care is liberal lawyers chasing personal injury clients, say the coffee shop ideologues of the Republican Party. Tort Reform. Tort Reform. Sloganeering to suck votes from the fired up and uninformed, and juice donations.

Republican tort reform would reduce total U.S. health care spending by only 0.5 percent but destroy liability as we know it. And forty percent of that meager trade-off is a reduction in clinic insurance costs —a cynical favor to well-heeled donors.

“Yes, 40% of the savings just lands in the pockets of docs via premium reductions. Good news for Jaguar dealers, not a lot of bend in the cost curve for anyone else.”

Texas was first to stall medical lawsuits. Gingrich and Republican pulpiteers of polling claimed health care would enjoy a boom. Results are in. Destroying redress fails.

“The Odd Logic of Tort Reform” by Aaron Carroll. “Do you see the increase in coverage? I ask, because I can’t. This claim is actually laughable, because Texas as a state has the highest level of uninsurance in the US.

“Some people believe – just know – that reducing malpractice awards will lead to fewer lawsuits which will lead to a reduction in premiums which will lead to a reduction in defensive medicine which will lead to a reduction in health care costs. It’s a matter of faith. It has to be, because there’s just not that much evidence it will happen.”


hijacked and wrecked

Republicans, at the same time that they are claiming that a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, are pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. That’s a Boehner.

Mark Thoma:

Would we be better or worse off today if the Bush tax cuts at the upper end of the income distribution had been used instead for a decade long program to rebuild infrastructure? My answer won’t be hard to guess.

A comment:

This is not an economic proposal at all. It is an ideological one disguised as an economic one.

Their proposal is based on conservative ideology to shrink government by cutting both government expenditure and revenue.

These are people that think that “government is the problem.” So their solution to governing is not governing and leaving it to ‘the invisible hand’  which is code for the hand in the till. You know, “to the victor belong the spoils.”

A comment:

Unfortunately, without the mechanism that is supposed to be the journalism profession, the public has no chance of getting a clue about the ‘why’ of ‘what’ is happening to them.

A comment:

The Democrats are the party of no ideas, the Republicans are the party of really crappy ideas.

kaboom visitors

NASA says today’s asteroids flying between the Earth and Moon are grazing us by merely 50,000 miles. The Catalina Sky Survey discovered both objects on Sunday.

This near-miss was not detected earlier because these two asteroids are too small for today’s equipment. But smaller asteroids, say just 100 feet across, are dangerous. They’ll explode in the upper atmosphere sending an intensely hot jet of superheated gas over a large area.

One asteroid, 2010 RX30, estimated by NASA to be between 10 and 20 meters across, passed within 248,000 kilometers of Earth at 10.51 am BST today. The second, 2010 RF12, estimated to be only 6 to 14 meters across, will pass within 79,000 kilometers at 10:12 pm tonight. Both were only discovered on Sunday, just three days before their time of closest approach. That is due to their small size; smaller objects are harder for telescopes to pick up.

:::Fireball::: The center of mass of an exploding projectile is transported downward in the form of a high-temperature jet of expanding gas.

The burst first descends at subsonic velocity, coupling its kinetic energy and internal energy to the atmosphere.

Blast waves and thermal radiation pulses from the hot jet of vaporized projectile impact the Earth’s surface where it expands supersonically at temperatures well above the melting point of glass.

Devastation at Tunguska in Russia in 1908 is now thought to have been caused by an asteroid just 100 – 150 feet across! Current equipment is designed to give us early warning of asteroids 500 feet across. There’s some healthy discussion about what’s adequate.

clouds ahead

The consensus among climate modelers is that global warming would lead to more evaporation, which would create more water vapor in the air and more clouds. Yet more water in the atmosphere may not lead to more clouds, because higher temperatures would require more water vapor to become saturated. This means that more water vapor would be needed to form clouds leading to a grand conundrum about upcoming clouds.

The study of clouds is ongoing.

oopsortunists

As if Tony Blair is a random number on a lottery ticket, his time in power seems more luck and circumstance than merit. We fail to test leaders against broad needs.

Voting isn’t enough if merely choosing winners during a carnival.

We know too little of politics, peer into its strange place, and must bring makers of our lives to better evaluation.

Gill Corkindale at Harvard Business Review:

In the UK, Blair appears not to be valued for his political legacy — his service to the UK his and international statesmanship — but rather as one of a new breed of self-serving politicians, who literally spun a web of power, duped the public on the grounds for going to war, blindly supported of George W. Bush, left a party in turmoil, and then attained fabulous wealth and faux-celebrity lifestyle after leaving office.

there’s only one

Surely this is a fun brain tease, to invent new this, to discover one and only.

Petina Gappah

At a Harare café the other day, I was intrigued to hear an extremely well-toned and well-groomed blonde woman say, with all the confidence of the only one in Africa who does this, ‘I am the only person in Africa who does this.’ She and her companion moved away before I could find out what this was, leaving me in great suspense. I must confess that I have been obsessing over this this a little. Africa is so big, so vast, so incredibly ginormous. And yet this lady is the only one in the whole continent who does this.

What is this? Is she the only person in Africa who gives French pedicures to African poodles? The only person in Africa who eats her peas with honey, who has done it all her life, it makes the peas taste funny but it keeps them on the knife? The only person in Africa who does sudoku in a bath of vanilla milk and rose petals? The only person in Africa who eats her meals backwards, starting with dinner in the morning and ending with a nice continental breakfast in the evening? The only person in Africa who makes small scarves for bats?

trapped, paralyzed, ashamed, helpless, furious

I can only be generous, only do things for those I love, only be of use to the world, if I am safe, sheltered, self-sufficient. I cannot afford to be needy, to be fully open, to let my heart be broken.

I am no use to the world broken.

Dave Pollard:

I am as self-sufficient, emotionally, as anyone I know.

But this stability has come at a price. I have built a protective shell around myself that cannot be penetrated until and unless I choose to open myself, and I do that rarely, only when I’m sure I can handle it. This has made me insensitive to much of the world’s pain and suffering, misanthropic, uncourageous, shut off from the grief that lurks beneath the knowledge of that awful suffering, and awareness of the state of this terrible world. I do this to survive, because I know what I can handle, and what I cannot.

I suspect I am far from alone in this.

I sometimes see the whole world as a hospital and a prison, with a trillion trillion creatures struggling to cope, to protect themselves and those they love, to heal themselves, to find support and solace and a trace of security, to steal a few moments of illusory freedom, and simply to survive. We are all civilization’s unwitting and well-intentioned victims, I think, hiding, or screaming out our pain, our innocence. Lurching from moment to moment, living for another day.

There is no cure, no pardon, no end, and no escape from our sentence here. We do what we must. We carry as much of the weight of the world as we can bear, and we turn away from the rest.

Or maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe it’s just me. No matter.

oil snows down

Surveys show that the underwater plume of Deepwater’s oil is being degraded and diluted, now at low concentrations, but a ‘marine snow’ of oily sediment coats the seafloor.

Wellhead region and near shore sediments made up of grayish muddy clay and a thin layer of orange-brown oil of varying thickness. Dead worms, shrimp and other bottom-dwelling organisms in the samples.  (nm – nautical miles)

pew numbers

Tech news here on Google’s auto-suggest feature. Algorithms analyze and rank popular views of various religions.

haves & have not internet

The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier.

For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.

Was?!

The Economist summarizes what’s ahead as firms carve up customers in order to price content and shape broadband.

Big companies are building their own digital territories.

Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanizing, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.

It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into ‘internets’, but there is a danger that it may splinter….


Here’s a project of Communications Workers of America:

The sooner we pass legislation, the sooner we can be sure everyone can reap the benefits of a fast and open internet. Take a moment to email your member of Congress with this easy-to-use tool, and do your part to bring broadband home.

http://action.cwa-union.org/action/speed-matters-broadband-home


cramming sucks

Psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. NYTimes did not place this story on top of the front page??!!

Tips: Instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. Spacing works: An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now improves recall.

“We walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

free market shackles

Competition removed any real benefit of deregulation for bank shareholders.

Re-regulation—opposed by most bankers—might be surprisingly good for banks over the long run.

Of course competition was good for borrowers, at least for a while. Lower spreads meant cheaper finance, but not dramatically cheaper. Spreads of 150bps on mortgages levered 15 times is about as profitable as spreads of 40bps levered 60 times… at the risk to the whole banking system.

Re-regulation will a) reduce taxpayer risk, b) increase spreads, and c) reduce excess leverage.

And while we’re at it, what’s to be done with sloppy media? In 2005, TIME was beside itself promoting home ownership. Exposing terrific error in 2010 is no mea culpa.


medication prevalence trend

This stumps me. Half of us buying prescriptions hides many factors no chart can reveal.

September report from Centers for Disease Control:

  • The percentage of Americans who used at least one prescription drug in the past month increased from 44% in 1999-2000 to 48% in 2007-2008.
  • The percentage of persons who used two or more prescription drugs increased from 25% in 1999-2000 to 31% in 2007-2008.
  • The percentage of persons who used five or more prescription drugs increased from 6% in 1999-2000 to 11% in 2007-2008.

Methinks I’ll blame this on Bush too. Why not? Those years, his watch. Spending for prescription drugs was $234.1 billion in 2008, which was more than double what was spent in 1999.