One Stop Thought Shop

Cows burp up to 20% of our greenhouse gas in the form of methane. It’s gas from one of the ruminant gut as bacteria break down grain or other feed.

This new breakthrough can absorb methane.
Maybe we can sequester burps from cows.

Record High Methane Storage Material Found

Can you visualize a surface area of over 2000 square yards?
I suppose that’s under half a football field.

Can you visualize a surface area of over 2000 square yards crammed into a small grape?

CrankyPhotographer says,

For anyone carrying a camera and using it in a public place, I highly recommend downloading Bert P. Krages’ wallet-sized PDF about The Photographer’s Right. When the fuzz or the feds or the TSA threaten you for taking a picture in a public place of a public building (or people in public), you can read them your rights before they try and take away yours.

Petty tyranny, history proves, sparks and grows easily into dangerous times.

We must know by now that the War on Terror has stimulated excess rule making and is carried out by poorly trained employees following shortsighted policies that are commonly ineffectual while damaging innocent lives.

This story at Sign of the Times is a horrid example of ‘brown suit’ behavior: A young blonde Icelandic woman’s recent experience visiting the US, The Story of Eva Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected.

During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned.

Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

…
I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn’t understand the officials’ conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains.

…
I could hardly believe that this was happening. Was I really about to be jailed? I was led inside in the chains and there yet another interrogation session ensued. I was fingerprinted once again and photographed. I was made to undergo a medical examination, I was searched and then I was placed in a jail cell. I was asked absurd questions such as: When did you have your last period? What do you believe in? Have you ever tried to commit suicide?

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread.

…
Now the Foreign Ministry [of Iceland] is looking into the matter and I hope to receive some explanation why I was treated this way.

Sadly, I wasn’t alarmed by this comment following the post: “How far down into the bowels of insanity the U.S. has fallen!”

Update:
A mother from Britain, Yvonne Bray, took her daughters, 15 and 13, to New York shortly after Christmas for a shopping trip but was hospitalized with pneumonia during their visit and told the daughters couldn’t stay.

Social workers took the daughters to a municipal orphanage in downtown Manhattan, where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours.

The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: “Have you ever been the victim of rape?” and “Do you have homicidal tendencies?”

One question asked “are you in a street gang?” to which a daughter replied: “I’m a member of Appledore library.”

Still dressed in hospital pajamas, the mother tracked down the girls.

What’s being said before Davos?

Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said before traveling to Davos:

“The year 2008 is a crucial year that could end up setting the tone for some time to come. What we need is an ideological mutation without falling into the trap of protectionism.”

One such mutation in mainstream economic policy took place after the Depression of 1929…

“We are seeing the seeds of a new paradigm,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who will be at Davos this year. “Whoever wins the U.S. election will have to pay more attention to equity. And whatever comes out of the next climate change agreement will be international economic cooperation on a scale never seen before.”

“Economic theory tells us that globalization is a win-win, but it isn’t, at least not in the West,” said Stephen Roach, chief economist for Asia at Morgan Stanley.

“The theory was written for another era. We have to ask some hard questions about unfettered capitalism. We need a new script.”

Weekly earnings for full-time American workers in the second quarter last year were unchanged from their 2000 levels – even though productivity grew by 18 percent in the same period.

Fifty-four percent of Western Europeans and 43 percent of Americans now believe their children will be worse off than they are in economic terms, according to a Gallup International poll in the last quarter of 2007 across 60 countries.

Davos dedicated page here

Is economic history about to change course?

Among the chieftains of politics and industry gathering in Davos for the World Economic Forum, a consensus appears to be building that the capitalist system is in for one of those rare and tempestuous mutations that give rise to a new set of economic policies.

Important comforting guidance during this era, from Oscar Wilde,

We are all of us in the gutter
But some of us are looking at the stars.

A 2006 study by Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin found that Americans are more socially isolated than only 20 years ago.

Nearly a quarter of us have “zero close friends” with which to share or talk over issues. More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members.

Unclaimed People
A new Oregon Ombudsman program for the elderly found that sixty percent living in elder care never get a visitor. This American Life at NPR Radio has a podcast about what happens when people are left alone: “There’s a body to be buried, a house full of stuff to get rid of. It so happens there’s a county bureaucracy for just this type of problem.

What is happening?
What are humans for?

Numbers and factors can make us brave, far less vulnerable, because we can support our intentions.

Ed Ring at Ecoworld calculates while he makes a point. Will a green earth help us reduce carbon in the atmosphere? Will sustained forests truly help? But what if there’s a billion additional cars?

New Generation Of Homeless Vets Emerges

For as long as the United States has sent its young men – and later its young women – off to war, it has watched as a segment of them come home and lose the battle with their own memories, their own scars, and wind up without homes. [Huffington Post]

In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King provides us character.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

…
Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

…
With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force — has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.

…
Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. … Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

…
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.

In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action.

…
We will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first.

The Science pages of the NYTimes carried a story about underground fires burning years and years, even smoldering for centuries. Did you know?

Fires are burning in thousands of underground coal seams from Pennsylvania to Mongolia, releasing toxic gases, adding millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks.

The coal fires are similar to those that smoldered for months beneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center, in that they involve buried fuels and are sustained and intensified by slight drafts of air and heat locked into surrounding rubble or rock.

In 2002, Maureen Sullivan at Slate asked about a Colorado fire that’s been burning since 1910, “How can a fire burn underground for 92 years, and why hasn’t anyone put it out before now?” Coal fires can reach temperatures of 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, so water dumped on them evaporates instead of putting them out.

Burning 250 years?
The Smithsonian reports that across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. More than forty-five years ago in Centralia, Pennsylvania, “a vast honeycomb of coal mines at the edge of the town caught fire. An underground inferno has been spreading ever since, burning at depths of up to 300 feet, baking surface layers, venting poisonous gases and opening holes large enough to swallow people or cars. The conflagration may burn for another 250 years, along an eight-mile stretch encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of the coal that fuels it.”

Underground coal fires are burning in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Colorado, Kentucky and Wyoming.

Scientists believe that anywhere from 20 million to 200 million tons burn from underground coal fires in China alone – producing 1% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide each year. (Coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just over one billion tons.) India’s coal fires are more numerous. A coal seam inside Australia’s Burning Mountain has been smoking for over 5500 years.

There are so many perpetual coal fires it might be possible to extract the heat to generate electricity after capping and directing the heat source with vertical thermal extraction.

Chemicals and fuel can be extracted from the internal gases as well. A proposal for China will ignite an underground coal mine for an above ground coal-gasification power and chemical plant, keeping the sulfur, tar, particulates and mercury underground. In some parts of the world, if it’s too costly to bring coal to the surface, British Petroleum and others believe they can burn the coal while it’s still underground.

Here’s an excellent synopsis of underground coal fires, Fire in the Hole – Coal’s Underground Secret.

After digging to a depth of 50 feet last year, Mexican scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Mexicans, in the weeks that followed Texan scientists dug to a depth of 75 feet. Headlines in the Houston newspapers read: “Texas archaeologists have found traces of 200 year old copper wire and have concluded they had an advanced communications network a hundred years earlier than Mexico.”

One week later, the Navajo Nation Council published in the Window Rock Navajo Times, “After digging to a depth of 90 feet in wash beds near Kayenta, Elmer Chee reported that he found absolutely nothing. The tribe has therefore concluded that 300 years ago the Navajo were already wireless.” [link]

The National Film Board of Canada has posted insightful footage of the effort to call attention to broken treaty. This is a documentary that reveals courage and frustration in a nonviolent demonstration where men, women and children become a people standing. You Are on Indian Land, 1969

Don’t be alone. There are few advocacy rules.

“Ronni Bennet has a new Time Goes By post which should terrify anyone who is getting on in age and is without close friends and relatives. She tells the story of a 73 year old woman who went into the hospital with a broken ankle expecting to go home after a short stint in a re-hab hospital but never got out. Instead, she is a prisoner in a nursing home with a radio anklet that alerts the nurses if she sets foot out of the building. She was committed as mentally incompetent even though she had a long history of managing her own affairs on the terse and illegible diagnosis of a doctor that was not even her primary care physician. This frightens me far more that anything Al Qaeda could do. This is terrorism aided and abetted by law and social prejudice.”

This type of poor institutional outcome has little oversight. [Link to post]

I have this incredible dream that one day, one minute, the whole world, at the same time, will decide it’s time for peace and love. So I just do my part. And I think that’s all you can do. I’m not telling anyone else what to do. I do this, and that’s the end of my story. – Ringo Starr

I’ve often wondered why people insist on trusting their brain. So many defend utter nonsense or are led toward important decisions on the smallest impulse. Why?

To help us along, PsyBlog has gathered a much needed beginning to a ‘Brain User’s Manual’:

What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds

A new national seal to reflect the current age:

The condom allows for inflation,
halts production,
destroys the next generation,
protects a bunch of pricks,
and provides security while being screwed.

[knil]

And greed it is. This graph reveals the truth about so-called smaller government and what Republican nonsense efforts to achieve power have cost us.

Ronald Reagan, first to increase debt by more than $100 Billion in one year.
Ronald Reagan, first to increase debt by more than $200 Billion in one year.

George H.W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $300 Billion in one year.
George H.W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $400 Billion in one year.

George W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $500 Billion in one year.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion AGAIN.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion a THIRD time.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion a FOURTH time!

Larger version here.

Burning accused witches during the witch hunts may thus be compared to destroying confiscated whisky during Prohibition. – Thomas Szasz

Amsterdam’s ‘Centre for Drug Research’ ceased to exist as an independent drug research institution in 2004, but Peter Cohen left a few challenges to our thinking. Offering something completely different about our understanding of addiction, Cohen says

“I will offer an alternative description. I will try to create a definition that will make it possible to accept the behaviour we now call addiction and see it as a normal, although infrequent type of adaptation. Once we normalise the behaviour we no longer have to fear it, and organize massive and religious discriminations against this behaviour and its alleged cause, the drug.”

The person has been reduced to the enslaved bearer of a deranged brain.

In my world of learned control, the user is a rational being trying to reach rational goals by means of techniques that are hard to grasp for people who use other types of control to reach the same rational goals; that is to feel they master their environment, get a sense of belonging and to cope. In my view, people we call ‘addicted’ do the same things that people do that we call ‘not addicted’. The difference is their methods. It is like looking at homosexuals. They do the same things as heterosexuals, only their methods differ. To decide that they are ill, deviant, or self destructive is not science.

So, my pointing out that the word ‘addicted’ fits in a list of words like possessed, bedevilled or bewitched, is an attempt to change our way of explaining heavy drug use as the agent of magic, and to show that even ‘scientific’ approaches to this behaviour may mask devils and ghosts, and create Cardinals, Inquisitors, and Heretics.

I can’t help but think that it’s because many of the artist’s pictures are vaguely pornographic. Did you know Klimt painted the naked bodies of his women before painting on the clothes?

http://www.sharpsand.net/2008/01/10/search-phrases/

We know little about the rich. This most important scholarship barely exists. But it’s fun to moan.

Found at wood s lot, Glen Ford ramps his rant into fine rhythm:

When politicians offer nothing, and the people demand nothing, then the powers-that-be are free to continue doing whatever they choose.

The death knell of participatory politics can often be a very noisy, celebratory affair – such as we have witnessed in the call-and-response ritual of “Change!” “Hope!” and other exuberant but insubstantial campaign exercises.

Finally, the most accomplished slickster in presidential history, Bill Clinton, was compelled to expose Barack Obama’s “fairy tale” anti-war history – some truth for a “change.” Black Agenda Report knows the story very well, after more than four years of observing Obama’s descent from vaguely progressive rhetoric to shameless pandering (to whites) and vapid “Change!” mantra nonsense.

Only the rich can win this game.

Bitching about Obama? Ford seems to be warning us, “Although ‘change’ may come, it will be at the direction of the rich.”

With no mention of China, the piece below may be several years old, yet it seems there’s only a piddling 4,000 listings on Google. Without success I searched for the original author until deciding if it screened through a Lee Iococca book or didn’t halt Buzz Aldrin, the author will likely press his claim with their publishers first.

Question:

What is the truest definition of Globalization?

Answer:

Princess Diana’s death.

Question:

How come?

Answer:

An English princess
with an Egyptian boyfriend
crashes in a French tunnel,
driving a German car
with a Dutch engine,
driven by a Belgian
drunk on Scottish whisky,
followed by Italian Paparazzi
on Japanese motorcycles;
treated by an American doctor
using Brazilian medicines.

This is written by a Canadian,
using American patents
with Taiwanese chips,
a Korean monitor,
assembled by Bangladeshi workers
in a Singapore plant,
transported by Indian truckers,
hijacked by Indonesians,
unloaded by Sicilian longshoremen,
and delivered downtown by Mexican illegals.

That, my friends, is Globalization!

---

Maybe the following from a previous post will add insight too:

When the rich steal from the rich, it’s Good Business;
When the rich steal from the rich for the poor, it’s Noblesse Oblige;
When the middle steal from the middle, it’s Corruption;
When the rich and the middle steal from the poor, it’s Fiscal Responsibility;
When the poor steal from the rich and the middle, it’s Crime;
When the poor steal from the poor, it’s Tough Luck.
BH

Our differences are politics. Our agreements are principles. – William McKinley

Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at the California Institute of Technology led a study using magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brains of 20 people as they were given the same Cabernet Sauvignon but with different prices. [story]

People given two identical red wines to drink said they got much more pleasure from the one they were told had cost more. The brain scans confirmed that their pleasure centers were activated far more by the higher-priced wine.

A wine retailer added, “Price is just one of the elements, but if you served the same wine in better glasses or a grander environment, that would also make people think the very same wine was better.”

Critics of the study say it might have been different if the particpants had been picking up the bill. Scott Rick, a researcher in neuroeconomics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said:

“There are people who derive pleasure from spending, and those for whom it is painful.

“In a study of 13,000 people it emerged that 15% were spendthrifts to whom spending gave pleasure and 25% were tight-wads to whom it gave pain, and the remaining 60% fell in between the two.”

While we pour blood and $1.5 trillion into Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA is no longer the world’s top agricultural exporter. Twenty years ago it would have seemed absurd….

10.jan.08 [via Agnet]
Fortune Magazine
Susanna B Hecht, Charles C Mann

After a half-century of dominance, the U.S. is losing its edge in agriculture to a booming, hi-tech Latin America powerhouse.

Today Soylandia, with nearly 60% of the world market, dominates the global soy trade. And Brazil the heart of Soylandia is an agricultural powerhouse. Not only is it the world’s biggest soy exporter, a title it seized from the U.S. in 2006, but it has the world’s biggest farm trade surplus, $27.5 billion last year. The U.S. farm surplus was $4.6 billion.

The leading producer of beef, poultry, pork, ethanol, coffee, orange juice concentrate, sugar, and tobacco, Brazil has seen farm exports grow an average of 20% a year since 2000, according to the USDA.

Warning us that there are bumps ahead, John Bogle, founder of the $1.3 trillion Vanguard mutual funds, says,

“At home, we have a tremendous future financial problem with the federal deficit. We’ll have to take action on Social Security someday. Government spending has gotten to the point where we will have to either cut spending or raise taxes. Another problem is this deadlocked Congress. And I see the quality and caliber of our presidential nominees, and I am not impressed. It raises the question of whether this country is even able to run itself anymore.”

But let’s not be certain about gloom! John Bogle asserts there’s much on the horizon too:

What’s the best investing advice you’ve ever received?

It was the best advice and the earliest advice. I was working at a brokerage house one summer while in college, and one of the guys who was another runner at the firm delivering securities said, “Let me tell you all you need to know about the investment business.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Nobody knows nuthin’.” That sounds cynical, but we don’t know what the markets hold, certainly not in the short run. We have no idea.

There are many changes ahead, as always. Impatience in America can reshape our world. Impatience from poor workers in China can skew our sense of reality in a heartbeat. James Fallows at the Atlantic tries to explain “The $1.4 Trillion Question“:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes.

In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

The Pacific Northwest, especially near Alaska and along the Queen Charlotte Islands is wet, more wet, and then it rains.

From early May until September in the early 1960s, I counted both trees and killer whales among the coastal islands and inlets. Of 150 summer days only 11 were dry.

I was paid to survey forests, to audit old growth trees and count new seedlings, but I was more than eager to cruise the channels to visit and count the Orca.

To live in these wilderness forty years ago, there were no eco-tours, kayak trips or government funded biology jobs. And I was too young.

I was 16 but I’d told the loggers in Sandspit I was 18 and raised with a chainsaw wearing nail bottom boots, joking that if hired I was ready to start in the dark. After a few months of logging, labor and learning, I took over the timber survey, a job that required boating among the islands.

During each day navigating not far from from shore but often many miles from camp, pods of orca whale would pass through the ocean straights and often very near my small inboard boat. I’d stop to drift quietly as they slowly passed. My breath would stop; a sensation of awe fused in the terrific experience of being among creatures so fitted in this great earth.

Intensive field research of the orca whale began in the late 1970s, finding three distinct type of orca that circulate the coastal waters. The ‘resident’ whales, with a shorter fin, can generally be seen during the summer from Alaska down in to Puget Sound. The more aloof ‘transient’ whales hug close to the entire western coast of North America. There’s a smaller number of ‘open ocean’ killer whales, often nicked and scarred because it’s believed part of their diet is shark.

The northern coast of the Pacific is rugged. I was amazed as the mountains met the sea as if an entire continent had been squeezed. Our beaches, grasslands and forests to the line of rock and snow were in one view, from ocean to mountain top, as if compressed into a shorter box.

I found it easy to climb these peaks yet I nearly fell into a crevasse while crossing a flow of ice. Trembling but holding strong to an edge, I was shunning the nightmare I would be found years later as my bones melted through the bottom.

The endless precipitation has lifted robust and endless forests, now among the most critical and endangered rainforests on earth.

These dense forests are western red cedar and spruce on pre-glacial land almost 14,000 years old that stretch from Oregon to Alaska. Among 100s of islands south of Alaska, many so close together I could squeeze my boat between them only at high tide, the Haida have survived at least 9,000 years.

In this bountiful damp, from southeast Alaska to the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, the Haida developed a unique and strong culture in equal clans of the Raven and the Eagle, legendary for their art such as ‘Raven Releasing the Sun’ or “Raven Stealing the Moon“,

Haida believe Humans are a direct result of the supernatural and natural. A first contact explorer noted that the “Haida were so intertwined with the super-natural world before contact that we used to have to sing and dance hard to prove we were human.”

Today it’s the totem pole and the bighouse of the potlatch that top the unique character of these varied tribes, and they too are great creatures also fitted to the earth.