Category: interesting

Why is social and economic and political and religious growth so rough and tumble?

Buckminster Fuller once opined that it was because not enough people were involved. He invited more population on the earth where once educated there would be enough minds and bodies to more effectively carry out our work together.

I’m snipping all of this from the Agnet newsletter, produced by the Food Safety Network at Kansas State University and the University of Guelph, Ontario.

On India’s despairing farms, a plague of suicide
19.sep.06
New York Times
Somini Sengupta
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.html?ref=world
BHADUMARI, India — Here in the center of India, on a gray Wednesday morning, a cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house.

The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income.

Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer.

The story says that across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.

Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power.

Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.

Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.

At the same time, frustration is building in India with American multinational companies peddling costly, genetically modified seeds. They have made deep inroads in rural India — a vast and alluring market — bringing new opportunities but also new risks as Indian farmers pile up debt.

M. S. Swaminathan, the geneticist who was the scientific leader of India’s Green Revolution 40 years ago and is now chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, was quoted as saying, “The suicides are an extreme manifestation of some deep-seated problems which are now plaguing our agriculture. They are climatic. They are economic. They are social.”

The story notes that Monsanto has more than doubled its sales of Bt cotton here in the last year, but the expansion has been contentious. This year, a legal challenge from the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh forced Monsanto to slash the royalty it collected from the sale of its patented seeds in India. The company has appealed to the Indian Supreme Court.

The modified seeds can cost nearly twice as much as ordinary ones, and they have nudged many farmers toward taking on ever larger loans, often from moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates.

Peter’s Reviews reports,

“It seems that the acorn really doesn’t fall far from the Irwin tree. Following Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin’s accidental death, his daughter, Bindi, is set to have her own show.

“The show had been planned before Steve’s death and Bindi intends on honoring her father by following in his footsteps, including eventually swimming with the stingrays.

From Life Style Extra: Steve, 44, died tragically when a stingray’s poisoned barb pierced his heart while he was filming a documentary at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

It was thought Bindi’s show, expected in January 2007, would be axed following his death but she wants to carry on her father’s conservation and TV work.

Update:
Bindi Irwin has a wiki page.
Rebecca Murray at about.com posted a short promo/interview with Steve and Terri Irwin, noticing “For all the passion and wildness in Steve’s speaking demeanor, Terri is the perfect balance to reign it in and keep it all in perspective.”

Friend John Stainton has a wiki link.

Peat is a plant material created when decomposition fails usually because conditions are too cold, waterlogged, sterile or acidic. It can be thought of as coal at an early stage of development.

There may be 250,000 square miles of peat bogs.

Some poorer nations such as Ukraine would benefit if they could effectively use their domestic peat rather than import coal, gas or oil.

Famous for using peat to warm a stone cottage, Scotland and Ireland now use it to generate electric power. The Scotsman newspaper reports, “Crofters are shunning the traditional but time-consuming toil of cutting peat each summer, cutting peat slices measuring about 16 inches square and four inches thick, instead relying on Irish peat briquettes, coal, oil or electric heating. Even rises in energy prices have not been enough to get Highlanders back out on the moorlands to gather virtually free fuel – leading some to fear that the ancient art might be lost.

Peat cutting is not unique to Scotland and Ireland. It is also cut for fuel in Finland, Romania, Russia, Belarus, the Baltic states and in China. In Russia it is used for 30 per cent of their power stations. [link] One of the biggest deposits of peat is in Indonesia, and a peat-fired power station is generating electricity in Sumatra. The use of peat for power generation has also been studied in Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States.

The challenge for peat is drying and sizing the particles to feed into boilers. These costs often stop peat development. Today’s burners are often called reactors because of their sophisticated control of combustion. Without advanced engineering, fuels like peat can burn dirty, like coal, unless prepared prior to conveying, burned under controlled pressure and mixed atmospheres with variable responsive feed rates. However advanced and complete the combustion, current techniques still require condensing and scrubbing of exhausts.

Today’s new plants are usually not causing the pollution problems we’ve seen from “dirty coal”, peat, wood, or even our fireplaces. Most air pollution headlines about dirty solid fuel are based on emissions from many many hundreds of older plants where owners – nations – are reluctant to upgrade or scrap. In the USA, these older plants are paid for, stable, cheap to run, and make big profits for many complacent owners.

Here’s a link to using hollow fibre technology technology to making coal and solid fuels burn cleaner.

It’s surprising that firewood remains the number one method of cooking in the world.

Electricity is cleaner.

PM Pierre Trudeau cited a project called YIN City by sending encouragement in a friendly telegram. We were proud to receive it.

YIN City was organized in the latter 1960s by a gaggle of enthusiastic and bright Canucks. A few of us were holding meetings and sketching plans for a new and independent city to be erected in the Arctic for the purpose of developing a ‘prototype for humanity’ where under controlled hardship humanity would again learn how to share.

The project was called: Youth Innovation North.

I was 19.

My aunt Isabel Holt of Minneapolis enjoyed much adventure post-WWII. For instance, she had an act in the “Ice Follies” with her ice skating dog, a boxer named Duke.

Duke had four paw-skates, as precise and expensive as professional figure skates, with the sharp toe picks on chrome-plated blades and the speed-eyelets to lace his white tapered skate boots !! He could do circles and figure eights and race along the sideboards. But dogs can’t turn their ankles, so he would stop by sliding on his butt. To grand applause, the last part of his act was to sit on the cold ice as he slid through the curtain. I loved Duke.

I remember her story about driving her tiny English Austin car west of Denver over Rocky Mountain roads chugging at perhaps 15 miles per hour when a huge boulder slammed into her roof, filling the entire interior, splitting the doors open, and spilling her onto the road unhurt!

Her husband Marvin Holt passed away in 2007 at the age of 93.

Random numbers have better luck.

Community is more important than leadership.

I debated this point with Senator Barbara Boxer during the 1982 election season.

“It takes three generations to meet the Mayor.”, I tease folks by worrying that our blocs of government are too large and thus unresponsive.

Plato warned that no government should be larger than for citizens you can see.

At CampDemocracy.org I read this snippet,

“In the early 1910’s, our representatives passed Public Law 62-5, limiting the number of representatives to 435. This is less than the Parliament of England during the reign of Henry VIII during the plague years! This problem is, in my opinion, the genesis of all our problems.”

and followed their link to thirty-thousand.org

The House of Representatives was intended — by this nation’s founding fathers — to be a peoples’ house. How many of us would call it that today?

As is shown in this web pamphlet, the House of Representatives has devolved into a virtual oligarchy. Incumbents’ re-election rates currently exceed 95% and their average tenure in office is more than 10 years. Most alarming is the corrupting co-dependence between the elected officials and special interests, especially those that provide campaign financing. Perhaps even more insidious is the growing lack of faith in our government by the general public.

This web pamphlet attempts to demonstrate that the primary underlying cause for these adverse trends is increasingly oversized House districts. In 1804, a member of the House of Representatives represented, on average, 40 thousand citizens. Today, each Representative “represents” over 660 thousand people….

In the early ’80s as a director on Marin County’s Steering Committee for the Future, we built a four day community college conference to encourage citizens to realize that all futures begin where we stand.

We do not wait for edict but build agreement.

Stronger than law, agreement is our good and precious secret.

Whether 1, 10, 1,000, 10,000, our representatives merely manage what we create.

Our democracy are us.

Think Global. Act Local.

Be Personal.

Our Intermodal Yodel:

Network from matrix
And matrix from node,
To coin a modern ode.

Web .0

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. (Putt’s Law)

from Deb Shinder, Editor, WXPNews

Paris Hilton books at $650,000 per appearance. wikiNews

I’m stunned.

One colony of Argentine ants is believed to extend almost the complete length of California, stretching from San Diego to Ukiah, 100 miles north of San Francisco.

Their sheer numbers, cooperative behavior and lack of natural predators in the United States make these small, slender ants – only about 1/8 of an inch long – difficult to eradicate…

But now chemists and biologists at the University of California, Irvine, (UCI) think they may have found a natural way to finally check the spread of environmentally destructive Argentine ants in California and elsewhere in the United States: Spark a family feud.

Slight alterations in the “recognition” chemicals on the exoskeletons of these closely related pests, these scientists say, could transform “kissing cousins” into mortal enemies, triggering deadly in-fighting within their normally peaceful super colonies, which have numerous queens and can stretch hundreds of miles.

We spend $10,000 per student per year in public schools, twice 1980, which at $500Billion is more than the cost of Defense, yet student performance remains flat.

Private sector schools are back on the agenda, but it seems not because corporate schools are better, but that they introduce the vigor of competition.

When staff and teachers feel threatened when enrollment drops in favor of a nearby commercial school, student performance in the public school shows improvement.

Complacency seems endemic. It’s difficult to know what to try next.

To set up a municipal wireless broadband system, The Wireless Report says about 20 Sensoria routers would be needed at $2,000 each to cover one square mile.

Calcium supplements useless for strengthening bones

Scientists take new look at coffee’s bad rap

Why are leafy greens grown in California’s Salinas Valley linked with E. coli?

A fifth of American kids projected to become obese

Residential buildings produce over 20% of the nation’s greenhouse gas. Read More

The human psyche is skewed to the negative, according to happiness experts.

“People prefer tragedy,” says Dr Stefan Klein, author of The Science of Happiness. Show people happy and sad pictures and their brains will respond more strongly to the latter. “In every newspaper bad news yields larger headlines than good news. Losses inflict hurt more than equivalent gains bring joy.”

Happiness is not simply the absence of unhappiness, research shows. Brain scans have recently revealed happiness has its own separate circuitry, concentrated in the left-hand side of the prefrontal cortex, while unhappiness is predominantly associated with activity in the right part of the brain.

Article here

Happiness is enjoying a boom.

And not just among hedonists, and people forced to confront their mortality. Economists, scientists, psychologists and publishers can’t get enough of the stuff. It is being prodded, measured, weighed, defined and deconstructed; the world is groaning under a mountain of academic papers and books on the subject.

Some believe the new findings on what makes people happy call for a revolution in how governments can help citizens flourish. Faster economic growth, they argue, should no longer be the most important objective for society.

Money can make people happy, but not as much as you think.

Where average income per person is low – less than about $20,000 a year – extra money does make people happier. Above that, happiness seems to be independent of income. The average American, for example, is much richer than the average Icelander or Dane, but also less happy.

Go there.
Contempt for the customer is not a brand-building strategy

“Homework may be the single most reliable extinguisher of the flame of curiosity.”

Alfie Kohn asks two questions: First, Does the research show that homework is beneficial? And second, Why not?

Kohn has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”

OOZ examines the narrow spaces where humans and animals intersect and interact.

WorldChanging discusses how animals endure in the spaces humans covet and convert themselves toward ourselves.

It’s not enough for us that there are experts.
Where each exclude more than they offer.
We’ve no regard for leadership.
Each so greedy in their coffer.
We seem better poor and lost.
Poverty a lesser cost.
Our lot.
Not.

The role of the plant’s pores in defense against invading bacteria has been redefined by a new look at the behavior of one the plant’s first lines of defense against disease.

Pores called stomata are like tiny mouths that open and close during photosynthesis, exchanging gases. In sunshine, the stomata open. In darkness, they close to conserve water.

It has been assumed that these tiny ports were busy with their photosynthesis business and were merely unwitting doorways to invading bacteria but recent discoveries show that stomata are an intricate part of the plant’s immune system that can sense danger and respond by shutting down.

It appears those plant-based bacteria produce a phytotoxin, a chemical called coronatine, to force the pores back open. For bacteria, entry is crucial to causing disease and probably survival. They could die if left lingering on the surface. Animal-based bacteria do not produce coronatine.

“Now that we know a key step in bacteria’s attack, we have something we can learn to interfere with,” Melotto said. “From this we can learn about disease resistance.”

Conventional wisdom holds that harmful bacteria on fruits and vegetables are the remnants of contamination skulking on the exterior of the plants — easily washed away by conventional surface sterilization techniques. But University of Florida microbiology experts believe the recent rash of spinach-related E. coli infections may be instead linked to swarms of the pathogen lurking inside the leafy greens.

“We know that plants can take bacteria up from the soil through their roots,” Triplett said. “What we need to do now is investigate whether this is a problem with our crops, and then what we can do about it if it is.”

For food safety experts, this could mean a paradigm shift in thought about food sterilization.

“When I was a graduate student, we were taught that the insides of plants were sterile,” said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. “Further elucidation is needed before we can say this is a major health concern…but assuming E. coli is getting into the plant — yes, this will be a big problem to address.”

The problem, UF researchers say, would be twofold. The first is the question of how to keep dangerous bacteria out of water and soil in the first place. The second is how to eliminate a pathogen if it does infiltrate crops. [story]

I have worked as hard as any and more than most.

I know what effort is and I know what truth is and I am in all things good.

Best to you,
and please be brave,
and please turn less by wanting and more by giving:

You are always.

“one of the best online resources for education in the humanities”

Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter says:

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets, or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We’re all a little jumpy…

“The government in Ghana, like governments in many developing countries, is not allowed to help its farmers with subsidies or protect its own chicken market with higher tariffs on imports. When they did try, …”

“Paul Wolfowitz, who as the US Deputy Defence Secretary was a key architect of the Iraq war and who has focused his attention during his first 15 months…” “in areas such as tackling corruption and good governance…” is imposing conditions such as “economic policy choices like privatisation and trade liberalisation.”

Britain is protesting.