big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Government says AIDS Tests for all of us.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that doctors offer AIDS screening to all of their patients, noting that close to 250 million Americans don’t know their HIV status.
Currently, doctors offer AIDS testing to high-risk patients and pregnant women. Under the new CDC recommendations, the tests would be offered to everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 as part of their regular physical exam.
…can’t confirm link
These tips are more nuanced than the usual conscensus science or dominance crap. Negotiation is a part of life we all have to deal with. Being able to do so successfully can make a big difference to our outcomes. Here are eight tips that have helped Paul. Found at his Australian site — “tips in order to help others enjoy their lives”.
There is a bunch of tough, brave, good-hearted confrontation here. Perhaps written to speak to the end of life, this is rare language with honest insight.
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind’s reply:
“I did not choose the way,
the way chose me.”
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love.”
If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.
How medical science got female sexuality wrong. An Australian urologist, Dr Helen O’Connell, is forcing a re-write of anatomy books and a rethink among medical professionals.
“They left it out,” she said. “It boils down to rivalry between the sexes: the idea that one sex is sexual and the other reproductive. “The truth is that both are sexual and both are reproductive.”
“The original anatomists weren’t interested in the clitoris. The penis was much more interesting. “It was bigger and you didn’t have to wear your spectacles to see it.”
We are not here merely to earn a living and to create value for our shareholders. We are here to enrich the world and make it a finer place to live. We will impoverish ourselves if we fail to do so.
—Woodrow Wilson
from SlowLeadership
This year’s Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics was presented by David Graeber, until recently an Associate Professor at Yale, entitled Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. PDF link, via metaFilter, with neat follow-up and comments such as,
Every time intellectuals have the chance to speak yet do not speak, they join the forces that train men not to be able to think and imagine and feel in morally and politically adequate ways. When they do not demand that the secrecy that makes elite decisions absolute and unchallengeable be removed, they too are part of the passive conspiracy to kill off public scrutiny. When they do not speak, when they do not demand, when they do not think and feel and act as intellectuals … they contribute to the moral paralysis, the intellectual rigidity, that now grip both leaders and led around the world.
—C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (1958)
In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that war between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England, on French or English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered an antiquated barbarism. The ‘short twentieth century’ was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political effectiveness became the ability to maintain huge mechanized killing machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by definition, can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties —who have been only too good at it—seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left.
Carl Sandburg once opined: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Unless we have a big dream, a multicolored mental image (in 3D), we will be unlikely to do the necessary foundation work to realize that dream. You know what I mean. The goal setting and action plan steps that are so vital to our vision.
But the dream is the key. Until we get emotionally involved and fired up about the positive direction our life is taking, it will be too easy to get sidetracked by the inevitable distractions along the way.
On the subject of emotion, Carl Jung said: “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” In order to really put the gusto in our goals we have to get our senses involved.
A quote from jack/zen’s teacher’s teacher, Sunryu Suzuki:
In the beginner’s mind, the possibilities are many.
In the expert’s mind the possibilities are few.
“…indoor chlorinated pools promote childhood asthma.
These findings further support the hypothesis implicating pool chlorine in the rise of childhood asthma in industrialized countries.”
Chlorinated pool attendance, atopy and the risk of asthma during childhood (PDF; 610 KB)
“It’s already way late to acknowledge that the ideas that are shaping technology aren’t coming from Redmond, they aren’t even coming from companies.” Chris Pirillo via preoccupations
Is “maleness a genetic disorder”? The human male is, on most measures, more vulnerable than the female. Part of the explanation is the biological fragility of the male fetus, which is little understood and not widely known. A typical attitude to boys is that they are, or must be made, more resilient than girls. This adds “social insult to biological injury.” Culture and class make a difference to the health and survival of boys.
The data presented here have implications for the clinical management of male patients as well as for the upbringing of boys.
National City Network
http://www.nationalcitynetwork.org/
A “comprehensive resource that connects city leaders and engaged citizens with the knowledge needed to build stronger communities.” Browsable topics include Arts, Recreation & Culture, Civic Engagement, Planning & Land Use, Human Services, etc. The search engine retrieves full-text reports and other documents, as well as citations (and sometimes full text) for newspaper articles.
It’s no surprise that financiers are drawn in. Mobile data usage is the fastest-growing and most lucrative sector for wireless operators looking to expand beyond voice calls. Wireless location-based services have finally started to hit the U.S. market over the past few months, with recent launches by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless. Researchers at ABI predict the global market will grow from $981 million in 2005 to $8 billion by 2010.
Plus there are the legions of kids who have signed onto social networking sites like MySpace (76 million users), Bebo (24 million), Facebook (9 million), and Tagged (2.5 million).
Innovations emerge easiest in communities where there are leaders – not managers and administrators – who invite and inspire people to thrive on the dynamic perifery of the core.
Innovations fail to emerge in community where managers and administrators keep the community tighly held in a defensive, stasist core.
This simple yet profound lesson speaks to the importance of the community’s willingness to value the development of leaders. Interestingly enough, it’s the emergent leaders at the perifieries that can do the most good in moving this agenda forward.
Jack & his Zen-ning
People flocking to megacities where droves of rural citizens are arriving all the time, this last point is particularly significant, are surviving on small-scale subsistence farming.
Many people face not only extreme poverty, but a new degree of food insecurity in a place where they don’t rely on themselves to grow their own sustenance.
Using the farming skills they brought with them from the countryside to grow food in the city can generate income and provide the most nutritionally rich food available.
A lengthy scientific paper from Swiss environmental researchers evaluates urban agriculture in the developing world as a key factor not only for food security, and poverty alleviation, but also public health and sustainable resource management. via WorldChanging
NextBillion continues: In the next two decades mass human migrations from rural to urban areas are expected to radically transform the world’s demographic landscape.
Also check out City Farmer’s news page, which contains a wealth of information about this social experiment being conducted around the world.
Marketing requires imagination and relentless exposure.
Repression and intimidation won’t fly.
Newsnight interviewed Dan Glickman (MPAA – Motion Picture Association of America) and John Perry Barlow (EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation), to hear what they had to say about each other. It’s pretty amusing.
Barlow was the songwriter of “The Grateful Dead”, advising its fans to share. He’s also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Here’s what Barlow has to say about the MPAA:
“These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices.”
Barlow continues:
If I were to encounter Dan Glickman on the street and we were to have a civilised conversation about this subject, which would be a long shot, I’d tell him to relax.
I’d tell him to spend less of the resources of his industry on fighting the inevitable and more on learning about the conditions that they find themselves in and recognising the opportunities, which I think are vast and very encouraging. But they can’t get to those opportunities until they quit trying to stop progress.
He goes on:
“But you know the problem is – the bad news is that you’re up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you’re dead. You’re 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they’re just smarter than you. So you’re gonna lose that one.
But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you’ve been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries….. “
Read more, and Dan Glickmans comments over here.
via TorrentFreak
In a landmark decision, the European Patent Office upheld a decision to revoke in its entirety a patent on a fungicidal product derived from seeds of the Neem, a tree indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.
The fungicidal properties of the Neem tree had been public knowledge in India for many centuries and that this patent exemplified how international law was being misused to transfer biological wealth from the South into the hands of a few corporations, scientists, and countries of the North.
The Board of Appeals dismissed an Appeal by the would-be proprietors —the United States of America and the company Thermo Trilogy— and maintained the decision of its Opposition Division five years ago to revoke the Neem patent in its entirety, thus bringing to a close this ten-year battle in the world’s first legal challenge to a biopiracy.
Source:
Ben Bagdikian in this book
“The New Media Monopoly”
via bopnews who continues by stating “The US is a propaganda state”.
There is no other explanation for the fact that pluralities or majorities of Americans believe things that are clearly untrue, and known to be untrue to the public in every other democratic state in the world.
Rare case study illustrates the cash factors when operating small farms from 3 to 12 acres.
We are what we eat:
Estimated distance a tomato travels from farm to market: 1,569 miles.
Estimated distance a head of lettuce travels from harvest to market: 1,823 miles.
The typical American prepared meal contains, on average, ingredients from at least five countries outside the US. Average time spent preparing meal in US, 1954: 2.5 hours. Average time spent preparing evening meal in US, 2004: 6.5 minutes.
During the past 50 years, an average of 219 farms per day have closed or been amalgamated into a larger enterprises.
People who see their relationships as either all good or all bad tend to have low self-esteem, according to a series of seven studies by Yale researchers published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In two of the studies participants were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether each of 10 adjectives applied to their relationship partner, adjectives such as caring and warm or greedy and dishonest. Partners in this study included college roommates and mothers.
read more
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is living with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
The numbers are startling: When you adjust for inflation, the minimum wage in this country has actually decreased 38 percent since 1968, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the booming economy of the 90s did not assist many of those in the lowest income categories, especially in areas where housing prices rose while incomes remained stagnant. In 2002 alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1.7 million more Americans dipped below the poverty line, bringing the national total to 34.6 million. Nearly one-third of those– 12.1 million– are children.
It is an American face.
People everywhere are afraid that very little separates them from disaster, that their jobs are not secure, and that if they lose their jobs there will not be another one waiting. They know something is wrong in our country, and they don’t know what they can do to make it right. Most are good people who work hard. I have seen their joys, their frustrations, and their attempts to change their reality. The problem is not one of the motivated versus the lazy.
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, our work may not be finished in the next few months or the next few years or perhaps in our lifetimes. But for the sake of our United States and all who dream of living out its promise, let us begin– one face and one community at a time. link
By the year 2016, no one under the age of forty will remember a world without personal computers.
The average twenty year old will find it hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t any email to check or Web sites to visit. When we reach this point, even the novelty of the term “Internet” will have long since faded to join such golden buzz-words of yesteryear as “space age” and “atomic”. …more at PBS.org
Model of an ant colony
Department of Biological Science at Florida State University pours orthodontal plaster down ant holes, and creates perfect molds of the topology of the inside of an ant-colony.
This is a plaster cast of a large Pogonomyrmex Badius nest.
The nest is 135 chambers and 12 meters of vertical shafts.
The top-heavy distribution of chamber area and spacing is typical for the species, as are the helical shafts and the decrease of chamber size with depth
Link to picture series via betuman
An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable things. A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant. Collective intelligence: Ants and brain’s neurons
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that will require any agency receiving money from FEMA to have an evacuation plan to accommodate household pets and service animals in a disaster.
Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS Act), S. 2548 and H.R. 3858
Fun
exposition
of
seamless
art,
a la
M. C. Escher.