Scratches to Sketches
That's a bold speculation...
G is for Goldilocks
http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/g_is_for_goldilocks/
(via Instapaper)
Some people are responsible for more misery and pain than any of us can ever imagine. More so than many current terrorists...
Trapping the Lord of War: The Rise and Fall of Viktor Bout
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-721532,00.html
(via Instapaper)
I found this using the News Pro iPhone application from Thomson Reuters.
To put News Pro on your iPhone or Blackberry, visit:
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
I found this using the News Pro iPhone application from Thomson Reuters.
To put News Pro on your iPhone or Blackberry, visit:
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
I'm, like many people, very curious to see the world go in the right directions. I know beauty and pretty things and balance and I like to think positively about how the creatures on our planet will fare. Global warming is in my opinion a bit of blurred pseudoscience written bold well before it's due. As Michael shows in his book, the jurying still very much out. Perhaps, the emphasis is wrongly placed if we think of global warming as a single effect of man's passage on the earth. Sure the globe will get warmer than it otherwise would because we burn stuff in a net sense. We burn and heat things up and the great old earth cools things down again to bring all into balance. That's GAIA, a subtle process of self or cybernetic correcting that the earth as a balancing organism engages in.
Michael conceives of demons and good guys in battle to understand how misfitting it can be to go overboard in any one direction, either abusing the earth or trying to help it too much. We need to recognise that we are part of the problem and part of the solution and the mix is not necessarily balanced.
Hopefully, people can reach into their philosophical beings to devise the energies need to understand better how our world can be made a better place. It's no good believing in myths, such as economic equilibrium or environmental balance. There are many directions that major environmental changes can push people. We need a form of collective wisdom that provides a cushion against the extremes.
As an idealist, I would like to see lushness in the environment and appreciate what Crichton is saying when he points out that our predecessors engineered our present environment much more than we can realise without consideration of the possibilities. He is referring not to the last several hundred years but to millenia. Yes, we are recipients of many cumulative streams of effort going back a very long time.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
Whether you believe in global warming or not, something is amiss and it may surprise you!
On Thin Ice
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/208775?RS_show_page=0
(via Instapaper)
http://www.howlifeworks.com/business/wi-fi_hotspot
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/science/07bees.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
The world is full of uncertainties and rarely do political leaders anticipate major events and changes in time to avoid them. We are thus continually in the position of seeing the late resolution of crises and disasters.
I found this using the News Pro iPad application from Thomson Reuters.
To put News Pro on your iPhone, iPad or Blackberry, visit:
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
It's not easy, trying to understand the change going on around one at the present time. It's eerily dangerous and yet the destructive forces are not unleashed building up within many minds. People are seething, angry and frustrated. Time will tell how this anger will express itself, but the danger is that it will affect the youth, who do not know history and who will take matters into their own hands. The consequences will be the "smushing" of our fragile streams of independent thought and the foreshortening of our temporary period of democracy.
Finanical crisis! What is that? What just happened to the world economy? Who understands the political economy and sociology of what just happened, the irreversible bit, the bit that changes country topographies and the fortunes of large groups of people permanently? Why did it happen? Can it happen again? Can we trust our political leaders to correct the momentum of the financial changes that are now hitting everyone?
It's a double edged sword. The economy, I mean. On the one hand it promises so much and on the other there are conditions to it's working evenly. It never works fairly, but it should work evenly. I can voice the opinion that the workings of an economy is generally unfair. It is because every so often it follows a mind of it's own and takes away the vast amount of more evenly distributed wealth through hard work and technical progress and gives that wealth to a few who own key assets that produce very little wealth, but represent long term values.
The economy gives wealth to asset owners, a special group of asset owners normally, but occasionally a group that produces nothing other than the legalities of ownership. We have seen the social destruction in history before. did not understand it, and our predecessors came unstuck in revolution and violence. Yes, the cycle of history moving away from democracy to authoritarianism and power in the hands of a few. Yes! There is a cycle in the fortunes of man as Shakespeare wrote and we are but players on that great stage of social transformation.
Our world economy is being transformed by the consequences of American social change, the great striding forth of individualism that produced a strong cycle of political change, a great wind blowing democracy and then will blow centralism and control, as the fear and social pressures mount. What is happening is not a US-China process, but the effects of the great 2000 wind of US social change world wide. It is like a hurricane on hot seas that is sweeping the globe.
There is no real balance in a society or an economy, but rather numerous streams of processes of change, sometimes rapid and visible, and sometimes rapid and invisible. What we are presently experiencing is a mix of many very strong and very rapid powerful streams of change. We are seeing an attack on democracy unlike ever before.
Well, it would be more balanced to say that we never had so much democracy before. We never had so much technology racing away putting pressure on manufacturing processes. We never had so much pollution. So what can we make of it all? Do we see the emergence of anti-democratic forces and streams of negative social thought? What do you see around you? You are in the midst of an extraordinarily dangerous period of history, but you are sleepwalking through your chance to protect yourself!
We have large economies, many being poles apart in terms of their resources and social fabrics expreriencing rapid social and economic transformation. We have America, that great engine of technology creation chugging away happily and it's domestic finances in utter chaos. The world currency, the US dollar is still happily moving business along, but it is not business as usual. Why? Well, it is a world with too much unresolved debt and it is the outstanding debt that is mucking things up. By solving the debt crisis, we are engineering a reversal of democracy in that we are redistributing ownership of wealth way from the vast majority to the very few. This is a long term asset exchange driven economic transformation unlike the normal short term asset driven exchange economy that we are used to. That is why it's social consequences will be server and the pressures for bloodshed it will produce will be also so severe.
America is playing economics at the long end of it's asset portfolio and rather than build democracy when technology is pushing forward for democracy, it is building centralism and control of people. Anti-democratic forces constructed and given power through the rapid redistribution of legal wealth during the American melt down's refinancing operations threaten global security more than we see on the surface.
Our fragile democracies are based on a social contract of fairness. What we are seeing big time is an erosion of that social contract's validity.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
We learned from the Apple iPhone 4 discussion that the performance measures we see on devices of our communication instruments can be not a mechanical result but a software one.
What we need is transparency, honesty, and return for our money in the form of standards that cannot be fiddled. Thus, if we do not receive service we don't have to pay for what we did not receive and the information on poor performance should be available for comparison purposes...no algorithms for service providers to fiddle.
Will ye no think kindly on those who would be your friends! May the sun shine with your thoughts, today, and happiness grow in your heart! May you allow yourself some peace of mind.
