July 20, 2008 – We are addicted to dirty fossil fuels, and this addiction is driving a whole set of toxic trends that are harming our nation and world in many different ways. More>>
Yes We Can By BOB HERBERT Published: July 19, 2008 The thing about visionaries like Al Gore is that they don’t imagine what’s easy. They imagine the benefits to be reaped once all the obstacles are overcome. More>>
Al Gore: A Generational Challenge to Repower America “Our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.
“But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.
“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans - in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”
Link to Newsweek article if you want to read rather than listen.
I haven’t read the book yet but it is definitely on my list. It was reviewed in the New York Times:
The New New World By Josef Joffe May 11, 2008 In this examination of power, Fareed Zakaria focuses not so much on the decline of America, but on the rise of China and India.
Excerpt: “We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. The second shift (19th century) was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. The third great power shift of the modern age— This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.
A series of positive trends over the last 20 years have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse.
Looking at the evidence, [scholars claim] that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."
Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding... Today any bomb that goes off, any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is documented by someone, somewhere and ricochets instantly across the world. "That could have been me," you think. Actually, your chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller than drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel like that.”
A market economy cannot supply goods and services efficiently unless they are private goods (excludable and rival in consumption).
There are four types of goods. The type of a good depends on (1) whether or not it is excludable—whether a producer can prevent someone from consuming it; and (2) whether or not it is rival in consumption—whether it is impossible for the same unit of a good to be consumed by more than one person at the same time.
Rival in consumption
Nonrival in consumption
Excludable
Private Goods
Artificially Scarce Goods
Pay per view movies
Software
Non-excludable
Common Resources
Clean water
Biodiversity
Public Goods
Public sanitation
National defense
Source: Krugman-Wells macroeconomics text
Thomas Friedman: "The only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed." The market economy is highly effective.
Thomas Friedman:“We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”
“Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet.”
Everyone has a theory as to why we are in Iraq. Certainly Bush’s recent comments in his Mideast visit lends credence to “oil” as one of the top 3 reasons. But another reason, I am convinced, is for target practice. We have a high tech military that uses highly sophisticated equipment. Anyone who has designed and delivered anything high tech knows that you can’t count on it until it has been field tested. Hardware or software will have “bugs” (defects) until it is used in real life. Moreover, anyone who has performed anything (musical or sports) knows that you don’t get better by reading books, but only by doing it, practicing it over and over.
Combine these two points and it’s rather obvious that our very expensive, high tech military is only worth the time and money if it can be battle tested. That’s the only way the equipment can be perfected and the skills to use it can be developed and sharpened. Without an occasional war, our military capability would hardly be sustainable, much less improve. A military is only as effective as the experiences of the highly trained and equipped men and women. They have to serve active duty to learn and be at the top of their game, especially due to the sophisticated systems involved.
And in an Internet world, where there is no barrier to knowledge, our only competitive advantage is EXPERIENCE not knowledge. Another competitive advantage comes from our military being composed of SYSTEMS not individual warriors. By system I mean what is being referred to in the article below about the use of close coordination between air and ground, between men and machines. Drones, laser-guided missiles, night vision, communications gear, etc. It is a deadly and unstoppable war machine—if you have the skills to operate it. And the only place you can acquire these skills is on a BATTLEFIELD.
And that is why I think we are in Iraq—to build military muscle. Field test the gear and battle test the men and women of the military.
From The Atlantic magazine, the most revealing geopolitical account of the Middle East I’ve read. After Iraq: A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible futureby Jeffrey Goldberg
It was Winston Churchill who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes—but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.
The Iraq War has begun to produce "wholesale change"—but "it won't be the one envisioned by the administration." An independent Kurdistan would be just the start… "It's not a question about how America wants the map to look; it's a question of how the map is going to look, whether we like it or not."
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
A senior Israeli security official, whispered, "He wants Jordan to be more democratic… Would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan."
"The PC way of looking at the 21st century is that non-state actors—al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, general chaos—have replaced states as the key players in the Middle East. But states are more resilient than that." He added that a newfound fear of instability might even buttress existing states.
While it would seem eminently vulnerable to the chaos, Jordan is, in fact, almost tranquil… in part because most of its people want quiet, even if that means forgoing all the features of Western democracy.
In the years since his Iraq project fell into disrepair, President Bush has acted like a realist while speaking like a utopian neoconservative. He has touted the virtues of democracy to the very people subjugated by pro-American dictators. The problem is that Iraq has already proven—and Iran continues to prove—that Americans cannot make Middle Easterners do what is in America's best interest.
"I fear that the surge has just provided a break for Sunnis and Shias to better position themselves for further conflict when American forces are drawn down. There's no indication yet that the Shias are prepared to share power or that the Sunnis are prepared to live as a minority under Shia majoritarian rule."
The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, shows that the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose.
That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt-and only one Republican has failed in that quest.
In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role.
Newsweek: The Roots of Fear The evolutionary primacy of the brain's fear circuitry makes it more powerful than reasoning circuits.
Through surveys of voters, lab experiments that simulate voting and, now, brain-imaging studies that pinpoint which regions switch on when people weigh political decisions, a new generation of political psychologists and campaign strategists is refining the understanding of the power of fear. The result is new insights into how voters respond to having their anxieties stoked; how playing to fears and anxieties can affect voters' views on issues seemingly unrelated to those that incite fear; how fear is wielded most effectively as a scalpel rather than a cudgel, and how the power of fear can be squared with the political truism that the candidate who best projects hope tends to win.
Army Doctor Sudip Bose is now living in Chicago, back in the ER at Christ Medical Center. However he finds that the lessons learned on the front lines of Iraq are always there to guide him. I had an opportunity to talk with him.
New America Foundation The purpose of New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy solutions that transcend the conventional political spectrum. Through its fellowships and issue-specific programs, the Foundation sponsors a wide range of research, writing, conferences and public outreach on the most important global and domestic issues of our time.
We live in a world that is inter-dependent but insufficient.
It is profoundly unequal.
It is unstable because of the threats of war, disease, etc.
It is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction.
I hope for integrated communities:
Broadly shared opportunities
Shared sense of responsibility
A sense of belonging
The central psychological plague of this century is that people think they have more differences than in common.
We have to build systems. In the absence of systems that function, we would not be able to achieve anything. Think about it. However many obstacles you have faced, at critical junctures, you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. In a world with no systems, in chaos, everything becomes a struggle and this predictability is not there.
The satisfaction we derive from being connected to others in the workplace grows out of a fundamental human desire for recognition. As I argued in The End of History and the Last Man, every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized (i.e., evaluated at its proper worth) by other human beings. Indeed, this drive is so deep and fundamental that it is one of the chief motors of the entire human historical process. In earlier periods, this desire for recognition played itself out in the military arena as kings and princes fought bloody battles with one another for primacy. In modern times, this struggle for recognition has shifted from the military to the economic realm, where it has the socially beneficial effect of creating rather than destroying wealth. Beyond subsistence levels, economic activity is frequently undertaken for the sake of recognition rather than merely as a means of satisfying natural material needs. The latter are, as Adam Smith pointed out, few in number and relatively easily satisfied. Work and money are much more important as sources of identity, status, and dignity, whether one has created a multinational media empire or been promoted to foreman. This kind of recognition cannot be achieved by individuals; it can come about only in a social context.
Professor Gilbert of Harvard says that there are two ways to be happy– 1) by getting what you want, and 2) by choosing to be happy with what you’ve got. They are both about equally likely to work for you; the second may actually be more enduring.
Adam Smith: The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
According to Ian C. MacMillan, director of the Snider Center, and James D. Thompson, associate director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, the Botswana project illustrates a new concept they have developed in a study called "Societal Wealth Creation via Experimental Entrepreneurship." The idea is to promote philanthropy which supports business entrepreneurship under a for-profit model that attacks social problems and creates new societal wealth.
My neighbor, upon hearing of my recent interest in Indian cooking, said that jeera (cumin seed) is very good for you— it prevents Alzheimer’s. Intrigued, I did some research on the web. The first article I found says a healthful compound “curcumin” is contained in turmeric, haldya or holud.
India has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease in the world. A diet rich in curcumin, a spice used in yellow curry, may offer a potential explanation and a new therapy for the brain disorder, according to a new study (2001).
A relative of ginger, turmeric is a powder ground from the root of a large-leafed Asian plant. Researchers believe the curcumin it contains fights disease partly by shutting down a powerful protein that promotes an abnormal inflammatory response in the body.
“Our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.
This is a must-hear podcast.
After Iraq: A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future by Jeffrey Goldberg 
THE POLITICAL BRAIN
EXCERPTS from 
Book by 
The satisfaction we derive from being connected to others in the workplace grows out of a fundamental human desire for recognition. As I argued in The End of History and the Last Man, every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized (i.e., evaluated at its proper worth) by other human beings. Indeed, this drive is so deep and fundamental that it is one of the chief motors of the entire human historical process. In earlier periods, this desire for recognition played itself out in the military arena as kings and princes fought bloody battles with one another for primacy. In modern times, this struggle for recognition has shifted from the military to the economic realm, where it has the socially beneficial effect of creating rather than destroying wealth. Beyond subsistence levels, economic activity is frequently undertaken for the sake of recognition rather than merely as a means of satisfying natural material needs. The latter are, as Adam Smith pointed out, few in number and relatively easily satisfied. Work and money are much more important as sources of identity, status, and dignity, whether one has created a multinational media empire or been promoted to foreman. This kind of recognition cannot be achieved by individuals; it can come about only in a social context.
My neighbor, upon hearing of my recent interest in Indian cooking, said that jeera (cumin seed) is very good for you— it prevents Alzheimer’s. Intrigued, I did some research on the web. The first article I found says a healthful compound “curcumin” is contained in turmeric, haldya or holud.