All John's children

Chocolate Powered Racing Car Unveiled

2009-05-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

LONDON — Scientists unveiled on Tuesday what they hope will be one of the world's fastest biofuel vehicles, powered by waste from chocolate factories and made partly from plant fibers.

Its makers hope the racer will go 145 mph and give manufacturers ideas about how to build more ecologically friendly vehicles.

The car runs on vegetable oils and chocolate waste that has been turned into biofuel. The steering wheel is made out of plant-based fibers derived from carrots and other root vegetables, and the seat is built of flax fibre and soybean oil foam. The body is also made of plant fibers.

Scientists at the University of Warwick say their car is the fastest to run on biofuels and also be made from biodegradable materials. It has been built to Formula 3 specifications about the car's size, weight, and performance.

Their claims cannot be independently verified.

They hope it can reach speeds of over 145 mph when it is tested on a racetrack in a few weeks time. They have driven it at around 60 mph and are now making final adjustments to the engine before driving it at top speed.

Warwick's project manager James Meredith said their model shows that it is possible to build a fast, efficient, environmentally friendly car.

The car, named the "WorldFirst Formula 3 racing car," will go on display at several races including the European Grand Prix and Britain's Goodwood Festival of Speed.

From:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/chocolatefueled-race-car-_n_196861.html

Don't go in the water, in IB

2009-04-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

John Hope

2009-01-14T21:18:00.000-08:00

What's IN and what's OUT

2008-11-13T16:50:00.000-08:00

.....OUT - Waterboarding.......................................... IN - Boogieboarding

Multiverse theory

2008-11-12T23:16:00.001-08:00

by Tim Folger
(Excerpts)

Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

Physical laws clamor for life: the universe knew we were coming.

“For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” Linde says. “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’ Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”

Source: Discover magazine, November 10, 2008

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator

Barackisms

2008-11-10T17:58:00.000-08:00

OBAMAPHORIA: The postelection rapture that swept over Obama's supporters worldwide.

OBAMANATION: A twist on "abomination," expressed by evangelicals and other conservatives who oppose Obama's stance on abortion, gay marriage and other social issues.

OBAMARAMA: The celebrations around the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration.

OBAMANOS: A play on "Vamonos," or "Let's go," among Obama fans in Mexico.

OBAMATOPIA: The political paradise that Obama's staunchest supporters hope he'll usher in.

OBAMALUJAH: Exultation shouted by his fans.

OBAMATRONS: The policy wonks who will occupy the West Wing of his White House.

OBAMASCOPE: Media scrutiny of the new leader. (Example: "One hundred days after Barack Obama took office, newspaper editors put the president's economic plan under the Obamascope.")

OBAMANATOR: Hollywood-inspired nickname for the new president – even if he's got what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger contends are "skinny legs" and "scrawny little arms."

OBAMALICIOUS: Complimentary term used by those who like Obama's looks.

OBAMALOHA: Goodbye, Obama-style, with a nod to Hawaii, his birthplace.

OH-BAMA: Joyful exclamation, via headlines in the Kennebec, Maine, Journal, The Regisister Guard in Eugene, Ore., and The Namibian, from the southern African country of Namibia.

BAMELOT: Description of his presidency, from a New York Post headline that played on the youth and freshness of John F. Kennedy's administration that came to be known as "Camelot."

OBAMERIKA: Headline from the Croatian newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija.

BARACKSTAR: Description from those who believe Obama is "the Mick Jagger of politics" (from Slate.com).

From Telegraph.co.uk, Nov.7, 2008

Muslim clerics endorse anti-terror fatwa

2008-11-08T22:39:00.000-08:00

HYDERABAD, India, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.

Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.

"We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to," he said. "Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.India has the world's second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting was also expected to address issues like national integration.

"Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form. Cooperation should be done for the cause of good but not for committing sin or oppression," the fatwa written at the Darul Uloom Deoband, India's foremost Islamic seminary.

Children for the White House

2008-11-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

Military Investigates Amnesia Beams

2008-11-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Military Investigates Amnesia Beams
By David Hambling EmailOctober 30, 2008 | 1:37:00 PMCategories: Bizarro, Lasers and Ray Guns, Less-lethal

Neuralizer_2A team of scientists from the United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It's a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation as a means of treating post-traumatic stress disorder. But some military research has moved in another direction entirely.

In the 1980s, researchers found that even low-level exposure to a beam of electrons caused rats to forget what had just happened to them (an effect known as retrograde amnesia — the other version, anteretrograde amnesia, is when you can't form new memories). The same effect was also achieved with X-rays. The time factor was not large — it only caused memory loss about the previous four seconds — but the effect was intriguing.

One theory was that the amnesia was a result of the brilliant flash experienced when the electron beam struck the retina. And, indeed, it turned out that it is possible to produce amnesia in rodents using a flash of light:

Retrograde amnesia was demonstrated for the 80-, 85-, and 100-V foot-shock test trials. At 40 V the voltage may not have been great enough to be felt by the subject. For groups examined at shock levels above 100 V, the foot shock was so potent that a photoflash was ineffective in producing RA. Our conclusion was that the photoflash was an effective amnesiac until the intensity of the foot shock became more potent than the photoflash; this is consistent with the recency theory generated in serial learning and memory tasks.

This might help explain some of the disorienting effects of strobe lights used as nonlethal weapons, but there seems to have been little further research on this.

However, there have been plenty of studies on the physical effects of radio and microwave exposure on the brain. Many of those investigations have been conducted by the military.

The Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate has carried out its own experiments in this area, which did not confirm the results of earlier studies suggesting that microwaves could cause memory loss. (The report is now removed from the AFRL website, alas.) Most scientists chalk up such effects to heating. But the Directed Energy Bioeffects division continues to research the human effects of various forms of radiation. What's more, a 2003 paper on microwave effects on the nervous system, from a team that includes Navy and Air Force scientists, states that "research with isolated brain tissue has provided new results that do not seem to rely on thermal mechanisms." It is hard to assess the real effect on working memory and other brain functions, they add.

"The many exposure parameters such as frequency, orientation, modulation, power density, and duration of exposure make direct comparison of many experiments difficult…. It is concluded that the diverse methods and experimental designs as well as lack of replication of many seemingly important studies prevents formation of definite conclusions concerning hazardous nervous system health effects from RF [radio frequency] exposure."

Still, it’s interesting to see that the notes for a classified course run by the Directed Energy Professionals Society (the people who build laser and microwave weapons) include "memory loss" as a potential effect of such devices.

I doubt whether they have a functioning Men In Black-style "Neuralizer." But as memory research continues to advance, it certainly starts to look like more of a possibility.

Barack Obama and the Fear of Socialism

2008-10-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

by glamatron

My open letter to everyone who is bustling around the internet telling everyone who will listen that Obama is a socialist! A socialist! And then standing back, waiting with gaping mouth, for people to rush out and change their votes.

If you enjoy having weekends off, thank a socialist.
If you appreciate the eight-hour work day, thank a socialist.
If you approve of minimum wage, thank a socialist.

If you like living in a country where it's illegal to sell your child to a sweatshop for a dollar a week, you can be thankful that socialists, yes those are anti-capitalist, anti-free-market socialists, worked hard in the face of big business and government opposition to make that happen.

There's more...

glamatron's diary :: ::

Do you like the fact that you don't have to step over sick homeless people on the way to your car? Do you feel thankful that hoards of starving orphans aren't begging you to carry your bag at the airport? Do you approve of the fact that elderly people don't have to die in the street if they run out of money?

Do you want to take a little trip to 19th century New York City and see what life was like before welfare, before labor laws, before publicly funded garbage disposal and street cleaning, before the government could tell you how to treat your children, before the government could tell you how to operate your factory safely, before the government could tell you how to wire and plumb your apartment building, before socialism?

I keep hearing, "I enjoy living in a capitalist country and I want to keep it that way! Don't you take my capitalism away from me!" Sister, you don't live in a capitalist country. Sorry. That has already been taken away from you. Along with children working in mines, tenements made out of cardboard, and unregulated air pollution. Do you miss all that? Is it just killing you that the terrible socialists with their wealth redistribution gave Medicaid to babies in poverty? After all, they didn't earn it. Their mothers couldn't afford it. In your sparkling, elegant capitalist society, they wouldn't have it. You want to be in charge of spending your own money, not giving it to the government to redistribute to the poor! Do you wish we could go back to a time when generous churches and noble private citizens were responsible for picking up the tab for those babies? Because you know what? They didn't. Read about it. It was ugly.

Do you drive on public roads? Are you glad that every child in the country has an opportunity to go to school? Do you like the fact that meat packers have to uphold certain standards in their factories to sell you a steak? You like paid vacation days? These are socialist principles, people. The USDA. The EPA. Where you see government regulating business for the benefit of the people, that's socialism. Where you see safety nets for poor people, old people, children, and sick people, that's socialism. You really want to get rid of all that?

The big businesses of this country did not suddenly one day wake up and say, "Hey, let's give those workers two days off a week. They've earned it!" They did not just announce, "You know, it's Tuesday, let's set a minimum wage!" They didn't establish a 9 to 5 work day just because 9 and 5 are good numbers for them. It goes against profit and the free market to be kind, safe, and fair, and yet those are the principles that I'm teaching my children to live by. Aren't you? Are you not teaching them to put profit first and step on whoever they have to step on to get there? Then guess what: you're not teaching them to be little capitalists. Sorry! But you're not.

I don't like to talk about religion on this blog, because for me religion is very private. But I will ask you this: What did Jesus say to Nicodemus? Did he say, "Gather up all your awesome money and all your possessions, put them in your SUV and follow me?" No, he told Nicodemus to give all his money away, then follow. Did Jesus say that heaven would be populated by fabulous capitalists who had grabbed their piece of the pie and hung on for dear life? No, he said it would be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We're deifying Joe the Plumber, who wants to hang on to his wealth, who wants to get ahead, who wants to grab his piece of the dream. Am I reading the same Bible you are? The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. What does that mean for Joe?

The latest news to go shrieking around the internet is that Barack Obama was a member of the New Party in Chicago. Before you get all lathered up about it, read about the party on Wikipedia and on their own web site. Did the New Party espouse a whole lot of socialist principles, like affordable housing and a living wage? Yes. But you know what? So do I. I don't consider myself a socialist, but I sure wouldn't want to consider myself a capitalist either.

If you want to make your mind up about Barack Obama, read his policies, study his plan, and make your decision based on what he has said he values and what he has said he will do. Getting scared about the word "socialist" is irrational. Before you run screaming into the night, look around you. Socialism has done a lot of good in your world. Are you afraid that Obama the socialist is going to make your working day shorter? Are you afraid he's going to make your food safer, give you more city parks, make your air cleaner, make your workplace safer, give more people voting rights, establish more vacation days, or something awful like that? Are you afraid he's going to keep us out of foreign wars, stop writing huge checks to big businesses, and improve our schools?Wow, yeah, that's terrifying.

I can't get excited about this socialism scare. For me, those are all good things.

Be kind. Be fair. Help people. Protect the weak.

Which of these excellent principles is capitalist again?

Source: DailyKos, Sun Oct 26, 2008

Holding a baby

2008-10-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

Hey, hold me careful, I'm the future. You won't mess with it, man, promise!

Supply side economics statistical data comparison

2008-10-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

By Michael Ettlinger, John S. Irons | September 12, 2008

The first supply-side era in modern economic history began in earnest in 1981 with huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Although there were modest steps back from these tax cuts in the ensuing years in response to fiscal deficits and tax-sheltering, this first supply-side era didn’t end until the tax hikes of 1993. This respite from supply-side policies ended in 2001, however, when a new set of supply-side tax measures were enacted. Today, as budget shortfalls mount and the economy weakens, the supply-side approach to economic policy is once again up for debate. This paper reviews the theory underlying supply-side tax cuts and examines their results.

The term “supply-side” comes from the idea that economic policy, and tax policy in particular, can influence private-sector production decisions by changing the incentives to work or to invest. Like many ideologies pushed to an extreme, supply-side theory does contain a kernel of truth: In certain circumstances lower tax rates can lead to additional economic activity and can lead to additional government revenue. This is a standard incite in public economic theory. But, it is equally true that in other circumstances lower tax rates do not lead to additional economic activity or government revenue.

The chain of logic for supply-side policies to work requires the following. Lower tax rates on savings (or on those who save more) leads to higher saving rates. Higher saving leads to more economic investments and greater capital accumulation. Finally, more capital leads to greater economic growth. At each of these steps, however, there is reason to doubt the theory—there are other possible outcomes and conflicting theories.

The efficacy of supply-side policies thus becomes an empirical question: Do they work? As importantly, do they work better than alternative approaches of greater public investment to stimulate our economy? The two supply-side eras that sandwich the period from 1993 to 2001 offer us an opportunity to assess the impact of supply-side policies. The claims for these policies have been great, yet the results have been meager. Specifically:

Real investment growth after the tax increases of 1993 was much higher than after the tax cuts of 1981 and 2001. The yearly growth rate after 1993 was 10.2 percent versus 2.8 percent for the first supply-side era beginning in 1981, and 2.7 percent in the period of the second supply-side era beginning in 2001. Without better investment growth being associated with supply-side policies, a critical link in the theory of supply-side economics is broken—and it is difficult to draw any plausible connection between supply-side tax cuts and any observed positive economic performance.
Economic growth as measured by real U.S. gross domestic product was stronger following the tax increases of 1993 than in the two supply-side eras. Over the seven-year periods after each legislative action, average annual growth was 3.9 percent following 1993, 3.5 percent following 1981, and 2.5 percent following 2001.
Average annual real median household income growth was greatest after the 1993 tax increases, at 2.0 percent annually compared to 1.4 percent after 1981 and 0.3 percent after 2001.
Wage levels also did better after 1993. Average real hourly earnings following 1981 fell at an annual rate of 0.1 percent and following 2001 rose at a rate of only 0.3 percent. Following the 1993 tax increases average hourly earnings grew by 0.9 percent per year.
Employment growth was weaker during the supply-side eras than during the post-1993 era. Average annual employment growth was 2.1 percent after 1981, 2.5 percent after 1993, and 0.6 percent after 2001.
Federal budget deficits and national debt increased during supply-side periods and decreased following the 1993 tax increases. In the seven years from 1993 to 1999, the country went from a federal deficit of 3.9 percent of GDP to a surplus of 1.4 percent. After 1981 the deficit ballooned to 6 percent of GDP by 1983. In the year the 2001 tax legislation was adopted, there was a surplus of 1.3 percent of GDP. This turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent by 2004, which fell back to 1.2 percent in 2007 but will undoubtedly be higher in 2008. The national debt has followed a similar pattern, rising by an astounding 14.8 percentage points relative to GDP over the 7 years following adoption of the 1981 supply-side tax cuts, shrinking by almost 10 percentage points relative to GDP following 1993, and moving back up by 3.8 percentage points relative to GDP after the 2001 tax cuts.

Of course, the reason for the failures of the supply-side periods to deliver as strong an economic performance as the 1993 to 2001 era may not have anything to do with tax policy. Other short-term factors and long-term trends influence the economy as well. The evidence that supply-side tax cuts help economic growth is, however, weak at best and much contradicted in the economic literature. As the data we present in the pages that follow shows, economic policies with tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as their centerpiece have simply failed to produce strong economic growth by a variety of measures.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/supply_side.html

Fewer foreign children adopted

2008-10-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

A decline in foreign adoptions since restrictions imposed by Russia and China is prompting greater interest in U.S.-born kids, including those in foster care.

A USA TODAY survey of a dozen large adoption agencies found an increase from 2006 to 2007 in inquiries, home studies or placements of U.S.-born children.

"The pendulum has shifted," says Joan Jaeger of The Cradle, an Illinois agency. Its home studies for domestic adoptions rose from 90 to 109 while those for international adoptions fell from 95 to 70.

DOMESTIC ADOPTIONS: Those hoping to adopt are looking at the U.S. more closely

"It's really sad. Some Americans have spent a lot of money" trying to adopt abroad, says Barbara Holtan of AdoptUsKids, a federal effort to promote adoptions from foster care. She says more people are calling her office. "Maybe the silver lining here is that children in foster care will get more consideration."

Inquiries about adopting from foster care rose 47% in the past year, says Rita Soronen of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, which advocates adoption of kids in foster care.

Bethany Christian Services in Michigan says inquiries about foster care increased from 4,244 to 5,083, and adoptions rose from 342 to 402. The World Association for Children and Parents, a Seattle agency, says such adoptions doubled from 20 in 2005 to 40 last year.

The U.S. government does not track all domestic adoptions, only those from foster care. Its most recent figure, 52,000, is for 2005. That year, 115,000 of the 514,000 children in foster care were eligible for adoption.

The State Department tracks foreign adoptions through visas issued to orphans. The number of foreign children adopted by Americans fell in 2007, for the third consecutive year, to 19,411 after tripling from 1990 to 2004. Adoptions from Guatemala, Vietnam and Ethiopia increased, but those from China fell 16% and from Russia 37%.

"It's a shame," says Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children's Services. He says many of the world's 143 million orphans are not finding homes.

On the other hand, Michele Bond, deputy assistant secretary of State, says domestic adoptions are increasing in China, Russia and South Korea.

by Wendy Coch, USA Today

updated 02.11.2008

The Role of the Unconscious in the Perception of Risks

2008-10-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Andrew F. Fritzsche*

Introduction
Our Western culture has created a one-sided world founded strictly upon rationality. This has been accompanied by a suppression of many spiritual needs into our unconscious, out of which they can surface in the form of emotions, influencing our attitudes and our behavior in many ways and in many areas. The perception of risks is just one such area.

Systematic studies on the perception of risks can be said to have begun, in 1969, with the formulation of the classical question, "How safe is safe enough?" by Chauncy Starr.1 It soon became clear that the mathematical definition of risk used by insurance companies, namely the expectation value of the possible loss or damage, is a measure of only one aspect of a hazard. In contrast, people in general experience such a situation, like life itself, as a many-faceted and multi-colored reality.

This subjectivity of the perception of risks became a major and fertile area of study by cognitive psychologists, who identified and threw much light on many characteristics of a hazard that influence the way in which it is judged. Respect for the insights thus gained highlighted the difficulties encountered when taking decisions on matters of risk, and formal risk management aids such as risk-benefit analysis, utility analysis and decision analysis found intensive development.

In due course, the need to involve the public in this decision making in some way was recognized, and much attention was given to the political processes involved. Most recently the successful communication of relevant risk information to the public has gained increasing attention as an essential but neglected prerequisite for any such public involvement.

One problem in particular has dogged risk management over the full 25 years outlined above. This is connected in one way or another with the enormous range of subjective reactions to the many hazards facing us and which have made it so difficult to reach equitable solutions.

As indicated, risk perception has occupied risk analysts, cognitive psychologists, economists, social and political scientists, and even philosophers, in addition to applied specialists from various fields of activity that are the source of hazards of all kinds. Viewing this list, it is remarkable that the very branch of knowledge which occupies itself specifically with the human psyche, with our inner world, our emotions, our instincts and our hopes has not, as yet, been consulted. Reference is to the field of depth psychology or the psychology of our unconscious.
This statement is not absolutely true. Occasionally, cognitive psychologists in this field have recognized that "technological risks can evoke the deepest feelings".2 However, they have not questioned the deeper sources of such feelings.

The physicist Wünschmann, together with the psychiatrist Tyn, have published a study on the psychological background of the nuclear energy controversy in a book: Unconsciously in Opposition.3 The present author is indebted to this book for drawing his attention to the relevance of depth psychology not only to an understanding of the nuclear, but also to many other societal controversies, as well as to the deep insight which this approach offers into the sources of the subjectivity of risk perception in general. A part of what follows leans quite heavily on this pioneer study. Some work by Tubiana, a French physician and radiologist,4 should also be referred to in this connection.

The One-Sidedness of Modern Society

Ever since the Age of Enlightenment and then at a rapidly accelerating pace since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Western societies have been increasingly dominated by the developments in science and technology. This development has raised our standard of living and in many ways also our quality of life to a level many other parts of the world can still not even dream of. There is hardly a material wish that cannot be fulfilled, often instantly, or at least in principle. Actually, this development was initiated far earlier, when analytical thought evolved in Greece a few centuries before Christ. In the Renaissance, it expressed itself in well-known conflicts between science and religion, knowledge and faith.

In the course of this development, rationality and purely material gains have been increasingly stressed to the detriment of our spiritual values and our emotions. This trend was recognized and deplored by many men of learning, beginning with the Greek philosophers themselves. More recently, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,5 the Swiss moralist and original author of the call "back to nature," declared in his famous essay, "to the extent that our sciences and arts progress towards perfection, our soul has been corrupted."
In our days, Carl Gustav Jung, whose work will occupy us here, expressed himself on this dilemma as follows:6

Everything imaginable has been done for the outside world: the sciences have been refined to an unbelievable extent, technical achievements have reached an almost uncanny degree of perfection. But what of man in all this .... No one has stopped to consider that he is neither morally nor physically adapted to such changes.

As a result of this one-sided and in the true sense unnatural development, large sections of society have become estranged from their natural roots and disoriented in a world that they can only partially understand. Deep inside us this uncanny world of technology can create a vague unfocused fear that may even cause spiritual ailments or neuroses. In the grips of such a subconscious world, why wonder that certain hazards are abhorred and zero risk is demanded? Society has, in truth, become dehumanized.

Around the turn of the century, growing awareness of such spiritual distress led to the serious study of our inner world and to the birth of the German schools of depth psychology and psychoanalysis, primarily coupled with the names of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Alfred Adler (1870-1937) and Jung (1875-1961).

Focusing now more specifically on the relevance of our inner world for the perception of risks, a number of questions would seem to call for clarification: How is it that subjective reactions to hazards can vary so enormously from individual to individual as this has been repeatedly established? How then is it also possible to find definite general trends in risk perception, or systematic differences in the valuation of certain categories of risks? What can be said in a general way about the sources of beliefs from a non-intellectual point of view? And how about controversies over hazards which quite often assume a quasi-religious intensity?

Below, this author will attempt to outline what the work of the Swiss physician and psychoanalyst Jung and his school of depth psychology can say to answer questions such as these. This presupposes the introduction of some very specific concepts and other fundamental elements of Jung's teachings in the first part of the paper. Risk managers, constantly confronted by the socio-political complexities arising from what could be termed the "idiosyncrasies of risk perception" will, in general, have limited familiarity with these teachings, so that they call for careful definition and explanation. Extensive use will be made of quotations from the writings of Jung and his followers to assure authenticity in the presentation of his ideas. It must be understood that Jung's psychology includes a far wider range of ideas than those relevant to the present subject.

On the other hand, aside from familiarity with the phenomenon of the subjectivity of the perception of risks just indicated, the author has assumed general acquaintance with the work done in the past aimed at understanding this phenomenon. For this reason he has restricted himself in the second part of the paper to appropriate allusions to previous work and to only a few topical references to the vast risk-perception literature.

It must be appreciated that a paper like this, introducing a fundamentally new approach to an understanding of risk perception, will tend to bring up many new questions, and much more work is called for before the real value of the depth-psychological approach and the nature and extent of its consequences can be properly judged. We must not forget that the extensive insights gained by cognitive psychologists in this field have been the result of investigations by many professionals in many countries, and over a period approaching two decades.

The Unconscious in the Psychology of Jung7

Jung, originally a collaborator of Freud, though perhaps less known in the U.S., developed Freud's understanding of our inner life in many decisive directions. Thus Jung's Unconscious is a far broader concept than that of Freud, representing "a world that is just as much a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious, 'cogitating' world of the Ego, and infinitely wider and richer."8

The complement, our consciousness, is the home of our awareness, knowledge, intellect and rationality.9

Logical analysis is the prerogative of consciousness; we select with reason and knowledge. The Unconscious, however, seems to be guided chiefly by instinctive trends, represented by corresponding thought forms -- that is, by archetypes.[See below.]

Our consciousness distinguishes us from all other animals. Yet, this is a very recent acquisition within the framework of evolution.10

Primitive man was much more governed by his instincts than are his "rational" modern descendants, who have learned to "control" themselves.

Today the conscious part of our psyche has lost contact with some of the primitive psychic energies.11

Skepticism and scientific conviction exist in him side-by-side with old-fashioned prejudices, outdated habits of thought and feeling, obstinate misinterpretations, and blind ignorance.

According to Jung, it seems that:12

the Unconscious has preserved primitive characteristics that formed part of the original mind. It is to these characteristics that the symbols of dreams constantly refer, as if the Unconscious sought to bring back all the old things from which the mind freed itself as it evolved -- illusions, fantasies, archaic thought forms, fundamental instincts, and so on.

In the usage of Jung, the Unconscious can comprise:13

all urges, impulses and intentions; all perceptions and intuitions; all rational or irrational thoughts, conclusions, inductions, deductions, and premises; and all varieties of feeling.... Such material has mostly become unconscious because -- in a manner of speaking -- there is no room for it in the conscious mind.... It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to "forget" in this fashion, in order to make room in our conscious minds for new impressions and ideas.... But just as conscious contents can vanish into the Unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.

Jung once used the graphic image of a spotlight. What appears in the beam of light is conscious; what lies beyond in the dark is unconscious, but it is nevertheless alive and active. Just as the beam of light can move on, some of the earlier conscious contents can revert into the unconscious while other contents step into the light of consciousness. However, the former are still there and may come back into the light at any time. Jung made an important distinction between the personal and the collective Unconscious.14

The personal Unconscious contains lost memories, painful ideas that are repressed (i.e. forgotten on purpose), subliminal perceptions, by which are meant sense-perceptions that were not strong enough to reach consciousness, and finally, contents that are not yet ripe for consciousness.

It follows from this that the contents of the personal Unconscious are of a personal nature and thus, in their totality, they are unique to each individual.15

While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious, but which have disappeared from consciousness either by having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective Unconscious have never been in consciousness and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.

The collective Unconscious is the sum of all the hereditary factors of humanity's spiritual evolution, reborn in the structure of every individual brain. The contents of the collective Unconscious are thus the universal possession of humankind, active in all of us in like fashion.

Contents of the Collective Unconscious

These pre-existing forms are of two kinds: the instincts and the so-called archetypes.

Instincts are common to both animals and humans. They are a kind of reflexive reaction of a compelling nature, psychological impulses which in any given context are unambiguous and precise. We are all acquainted with our involuntary reaction on unexpectedly coming into contact with a hot object. The impulsive fear we experience in an unexpectedly dangerous driving situation is also of an instinctive nature. Instincts are, in the final analysis, ways of acting.

Archetypes, in contrast, are ways of perceiving. This term is Jung's name for the prototypes of human mental images which often have a mythological source and reveal themselves in the form of symbols. Yet,16

they are, at the same time, both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then there is simply a word-picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some kind must flow from it.

These consequences can express themselves spontaneously in the form of dreams, visions or thoughts. In this way archetypes forcibly mold our attitudes and in general also our behavior.

In Jung's own words:17

The archetypes have their own initiative and their own specific energy.... They come and go very much as they please, and often they obstruct or modify our conscious intentions in an embarrassing way. One can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience the peculiar fascination that accompanies them. They seem to hold a special spell.

We must thus come to understand that:18

we are moved by forces from within as well as by stimuli from without. These inner motives spring from a deep source that is not made by consciousness and is not under its control. In the mythology of earlier times these forces were called mana, or spirits, demons, and gods. They are as active today as they ever were. If they conform to our wishes, we call them happy hunches or impulses.... If they go against us, then we say that it is just bad luck.... The one thing we refuse to admit is that we are dependent upon "powers" that are beyond our control.... [But mankind's] gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep us on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications... and, above all, a large array of neuroses.

The Typology of Jung

We shall come back to archetypes shortly. Before doing so, we must cast a glance at the almost unlimited diversity of the individual psyche. Though our collective Unconscious is a universal inheritance from the evolution of mankind, this does not mean that every individual will, during his or her life, respond in the same way to this inheritance. We are all only too well aware of the sometimes striking differences in temperament and in the reactions of different persons to a given situation, not least in the valuation of a hazard. A human being is born with an unbelievable mixture of genes, and among these there may be factors which are very difficult to reconcile.

A distinction between contrasting human types can, in principle, be traced back over three millennia to the Chinese I Ching [Book of Changes], that introduced the complementary forces of Yin and Yang. Closer to our own topic one could mention the Hippocratic Four Humors, expressing sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic or choleric temperaments. Since then, many more specific personal characterizations have been proposed: platonic/ aristotelian, idealist/materialist, romantic/classical, or empiricist/ rationalist. In this tradition Jung coined the terms introvert/extrovert to denote two different attitudes, and these have since become a part of our everyday vocabulary.

With these terms Jung distinguishes two opposing attitudes toward the factual world. Extroverts are oriented outwards, experiencing their essential stimulation from the outer world of people and things. Subjective influences seem a mere disturbance of their objective world view. Their thinking is materialistic and they form their opinion on the basis of facts. They are active, have an open character, are optimistic, sociable and communicative and they face their environment unreservedly.

Introverts, on the other hand, are oriented inwards. They are motivated by their own subjective view of the world rather than by objective reality. Facts are of secondary importance compared to the suggestions of their inner counsellor. This makes introverts very susceptible to influence from archetypes:19

Introverted thinking shows a dangerous tendency to force the facts into the shape of one's [subjective] image or even to ignore them [altogether] in order that one may unfurl one's fanciful image...."

Introverts have a reflective and reserved character, are pessimistic, passive and hesitative, and due to their anxious disposition they are defensive when face-to-face with their environment. This can express itself in politeness and meticulous correctness, thrift and conscientiousness, but is at the same time coupled with a vigilant mistrust.

Clearly these descriptions are those of two extremes. As we no doubt are well aware, all of us have both extroverted and introverted attributes in our personal make-up. We belong to one or the other type by virtue of the predominating characteristics. Extroverted characteristics play a subordinate role in the make-up of the introvert and vice versa. However, external circumstances or a momentary inner disposition can influence the balance and bring the subordinate attitude to the fore. The position of any individual on the extrovert/introvert scale, nevertheless, seems to be more or less fixed at birth.

The balance of attributes determines the way an individual reacts in any situation and influences his or her attitude towards the object in question. Finally, if applicable, it will determine also both intentions and behavior towards the object.

In the course of his further work, Jung was struck by the large differences which he still found between individuals who could be clearly assigned to the one or other of the above-mentioned attitude types. This led him to distinguish additionally between four basic psychological functions of the mind and thus between four corresponding functional types. These functions are: thinking and feeling on the one hand, sensation and intuition on the other.

Thinking implies the intellectual use of the mind, aimed at rational understanding. Thinking types view things as an observer. In order to comprehend the world and to decide their actions, they lay great emphasis on their logical analysis of a situation. Everything that turns up is subject to their reflection or meditation in order to determine the "truth." Thinkers decide with their heads.

Their counterparts, called the feeling type by Jung, often neglect thinking to a remarkable degree in favor of their emotions. They view things more as a participant. They judge a situation on the basis of their scale of values and lay great weight on achieving harmony. Feelers decide with their hearts. Feeling must here be understood in the sense: "I have the feeling that this is good, that is, right."

For another sense that the word "feel" can assume: "I feel cold," Jung uses the word "sensation." Sensation types restrict themselves to perception of a situation by means of their five senses, neither reflecting on its meaning nor considering its spiritual value. This type likes things to be specific, concrete and routinely practicable. They are down to earth and tend to see individual trees rather than the whole wood.

If, on the other hand, the perception is not the outcome of one's conscious senses but appears out of the Unconscious in the form of a presentiment or an instinct, then Jung speaks of an intuitive type. This type dislikes all routine, is imaginative and thus welcomes change and variety. The intuitive sees the whole wood rather than individual trees.

These four basic functions and functional types are diagramed below, showing that they form two distinctive pairs of concepts. Thinking as well as feeling are rational functions. This is quite evident in the case of thinking, but it is also true in the case of feeling when, as here, this concept has been freed of everything intuitive.20

Feeling values and feeling judgments -- that is to say, our feelings -- are not only reasonable, but are also as discriminating, logical, and consistent as thinking.

In contrast, sensation and intuition are irrational functions, non-rational, non-logical and non-evaluating.21

Lack of rationality is a vice where thinking and feeling are called for -- rationality is a vice where sensation and intuition should be trusted.

Jung's View of the Psychological Functions of the Mind

Each of the functions in one of these pairs are again mutual opposites.22

The one-sided emphasis on thinking is always accompanied by an inferiority in feeling, and differentiated sensation and intuition are mutually injurious.

Here again, of course, no individual will ever exhibit any one of these basic functional characteristics in pure form to the total absence of all others. We all of us manifest a complex combination of all four to varying degrees. The predominating characteristic, however, is a strong indicator of our mental make-up.

In contrast to the distinction extrovert/introvert, the combination of the four basic functions can change during a lifetime. Because the two attitude types extrovert and introvert can be combined with any one of the four functional types, the psychological typology proposed by Jung to characterize individuals leads to a total of eight basic types.

Our individual psychological make-up determines to a large extent the nature and the course of our whole life. On the basis of these, our very personal spiritual qualities, we take up a career, develop a particular philosophy of life and an individual world view, are attracted mainly by certain persons and groups in society, and can embrace a specific ideology with more or less fervor.

It is worth mentioning that the female sex is generally more receptive than the male to moods, feelings, presentiments and everything irrational. Its relation to the Unconscious is considerably closer and richer. In the course of history women have often recognized the value of new spiritual factors earlier than the emotionally more conservative men.

Our personal psychological resources will also to a large extent determine how we react in the face of a hazard, how we perceive it, how we value it and how we finally come to terms with it. The evaluation of a hazard by an extroverted individual of the thinking type will, for example, be based primarily on a rational analysis of the risk, while the result of any such analysis will hardly be of consequence for an introvert with strong intuitive tendencies. The latter instinctively "knows" how dangerous the situation is. His judgment of the risk will often seem to be quite unrealistic to the extroverted thinker.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the colorful variations in the behavior of the various psychological types. Such a discussion can, for example, be found in Goldsmith and Wharton23. However, what has been said makes it at least plausible that the eight types proposed by Jung can come close to describing major classes of behavior which are found not only in the perception of risks, but also in countless other life situations.

A systematic study of correlation between psychological type and risk perception behavior remains to be undertaken. There exist a number of empirical questionnaires aimed at the determination of personality type according to Jung24 on which such a study could be based.

Discussion of Human Behavior Patterns

There have been many attempts to trace back typical behavior patterns to specific human characteristics from a cultural, political, sociological, economic or anthropological point of view.25 These have afforded many insights into the variety of the human temperament and their social implications. Perhaps the most well known of the cultural theories is the grid-group typology due to Mary Douglas.26 This identifies five basic ways of life: hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism and autonomy, typified respectively by the submitting caste member, the fundamentalist sectist, the ineffectual fatalist, the freedom-loving entrepreneur and the uninvolved hermit.

The main thrust of this and other cultural theories is that human behavior and way of life are determined by social context.27 Another interpretation, however, now seems to call for attention. Surely the successful entrepreneur became what he is primarily because he was blessed with an initiative, imaginative, active and self-reliant personality (and perhaps with other helpful traits). In Jung's terms, he is an extrovert with well developed intuition. The withdrawal of the hermit into his or her undisturbed niche will likely be the expression of an intensive introvert personality. Rather than becoming what cultural theory terms a sectist through association with other egalitarian and moralistic-minded individuals, it would seem that the attraction of this social group is nothing else than an expression of the sectist's inborn make-up, paraphrased in Jungian terms as an introvert with highly developed feeling and intuition.

Thus, in this author's view, the typology of Jung, based on the psychology of the Unconscious, is a more fundamental analysis of human behavior than those referred to above, reaching back, as it does, to the basically in-born functions of the mind. Jung's typology approaches the question of behavior as it were from the "inside," whereas other theories, whether based on cultural, sociological, political or economic backgrounds, are all in this sense approaches from the "outside."

This, of course, is not to negate certain influences on the individual from the outer world. The primary determinant would, however, seem to be his original psychic make-up. Much of what is taken as social influence may well be a reinforcement of certain original personality characteristics which are representative of the role the individual plays in society following his natural inclinations. A systematic correlation of Jung's typology with the categorization due to cultural and other theories is another worthwhile study which should be undertaken.

Some Pertinent Archetypes

The perception of a hazard is a very personal matter, a fact only too familiar to all workers in the field of risks. The variation displayed is of the same order as the variation of individual characters and temperaments. Much light has been thrown on the deeper sources of this variation by the typology of Jung.

At the same time it is well known to practitioners in the field that certain categories of hazard are perceived in a rather similar way by large groups of the population. Some hazards are widely held to be particularly repugnant, others as wholly innocuous, often quite independently of any objective measure of the risk. Though this seems to be in conflict with the extreme individuality of risk perception just discussed, there is no doubt that there is frequently also some system in the subjective perception of risks. Consideration of this phenomenon brings us back to the collective Unconscious and to Jung's archetypes.

As already seen, an archetype is an innate tendency or an instinctive inclination towards the occurrence of a particular mental reaction. An archetype slumbers in our collective Unconscious and may be activated at any time, not consciously, but quite automatically at the call of a "trigger" from the outside. Such a trigger may be a thought, a statement or an event. The archetype then suddenly enters into our consciousness, sometimes with an unbelievable violence that can totally captivate us.

Archetypes often reveal themselves in the form of mythological symbols with which events and situations in the real world can unconsciously be associated. In what follows, we mention just a few archetypes with relevance to the perception of risks.

The Hero's Downfall

Every culture has its myths about the downfall of a hero. The hero, first smiled upon by the gods, becomes arrogant and revolts against them, finally finding merciless humiliation and punishment at their hands. Among such myths one could mention the punishment of the angel Lucifer according to the Book of Genesis, the Greek myth of Prometheus, or the story of Icarus.

This archetype would seem to manifest itself in our days, for example, in the reproachful question whether our society is really still in full control of science and technology. To these our western nations owe their well being and all too often they are claimed to hold the solution to all the remaining problems of mankind. But possible negative consequences have become a growing topic of discussion -- a presentiment of dire punishment awaiting us? This archetype is directly related to the distrust sometimes shown toward scientific elites, toward powerful industrial organizations and certain technologies like nuclear energy, or even to science and technology quite generally. Indirectly it may make itself felt in the attraction of "soft technology," "small is beautiful" and the "back to nature" movement (the latter reaching back to 1750 as we have seen).

That such expressions of the hero archetype can reflect on the perception of certain risks seems most likely. Perhaps the most obvious example is the widespread and often extreme overestimation of those risks in any way connected with "artificial" or man-made radiation and, as a consequence, the fear of nuclear energy. Here mankind, like Prometheus, has usurped the powers of the gods and our downfall is bound to come.

The widespread anxiety caused by modern developments in gene technology may also be an expression of the hero archetype. Here too, man can be seen as arrogantly assuming the role of Creator, a role which behoves him not, and which can end only in mankind's extinction.

In both these cases, psychometric studies have invariably shown most extreme disparities between the risk perceived by many lay persons and that determined by the specialists.

The Paradise Archetype

People of all world cultures have dreamed of a paradise on earth, and this archetypal dream has always been a strong force in religion, philosophy, literature and art. The idea of a paradise plays a role not only in society as a whole, but also in our personal lives.

However, this vision has at all times been exploited both for bad as well as for good. Today it is at the root of our belief in a welfare state, in world peace and in the rights of humankind, but the identical vision was, and in some parts of the world still is, invoked by the leaders of totalitarian regimes to legitimize their ruthless rule.

This archetype makes us responsive to many "good" goals, be they religious, political or charitable, as well as to aspire to these goals with enthusiasm and frequently with fervor -- even with fanaticism. The pursuit of such goals tends to encourage the formation of like-minded groups of all kinds: not only whole religions, but also religious and quasi-religious sects, environmental and other public interest groups, as well as anti-groups in a multitude of fields. A major motivation in all of these is the archetypal vision of a better world, at least as seen by the respective proponents. In this sense, the archetype of a paradise is perhaps less a goal as such, than a strong incentive to become active and to fight for what has been recognized as "good,"or against what has been recognized as "bad."

That this reflects back upon the perception of risks that are the consequence of "good" or "bad" activities is hardly to be doubted. Such an unconscious projection of the archetypal paradise image is often accompanied by a restriction of our consciousness, leading to a considerable misjudgment of reality. This can be and is, on occasion, misused to manipulate individuals and whole groups for the "good" cause.

The Sun as Archetype

We shall return to the special characteristics of such groups shortly, but first another very compelling archetype must be mentioned. The life-giving divine power of the sun has been the source of religious and quasi-religious myths in all cultures, and in the course of time these have engraved themselves deeply into the collective Unconscious of the human psyche. In these myths the sun represents the source of all light and warmth, and thus the source of life itself, so that the sun has become the well nigh irresistible symbol of all that is good.

The force of this archetype can be suspected in many contexts. A dark brown complexion can be the greatest pride of some vacationers returning to their city desks, much envied proof of their good health. But in fact, excessive exposure of the skin to the ultraviolet rays of the sun is the most frequent self-caused source of cancer after smoking. The sun, it is felt, surely can only be good!

A more indirect expression of the archetype sun is the overwhelming role that solar energy plays in many lay discussions about energy. The radiant energy of the sun is the natural, clean and inexhaustible energy source, available to all mankind regardless of social standing, race or creed, and free of charge (?!) from our very own heavenly body. Heaven, by the way, is also an archetype.

What a contrast this is to the "unnatural," uncanny, dangerous and satanic (another archetype) potency of nuclear energy. Who would, under these circumstances, expect that the risks resulting from the production of solar and nuclear energy are perceived in any way approaching reality by the uninformed non-specialist?

It has already been mentioned that archetypes frequently express themselves in the form of symbols. This can be demonstrated here quite literally. Some ten years or so ago, the anti-nuclear community in the German-speaking (and presumably also in other) countries propagated the button shown below. What made it so popular was the image around which the message was arranged, namely the friendly smiling face of the sun on a bright yellow background. It is hard to imagine a more direct appeal to the archetype of the sun and to all the positive associations which this implies.

Atomic energy? No thank you.

The enormous appeal of the archetype of the sun in its various forms of expression has been demonstrated in the risk field by psychometric studies. As an example, reference may be made to studies of attitudes towards energy systems undertaken at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg (Austria). One of the results of this work is reproduced below28 as a graph that shows the frequency distribution of attitudes toward five energy systems.

The attitude of the total sample toward solar energy (as well as hydro) was most frequently highly favorable, with practically no negative attitudes. In contrast, attitudes toward nuclear were very mixed, most frequently neutral, with strong polarized groups holding either negative or positive beliefs. Of course, archetypes do not influence all persons to the same extent. In this light, the unconditionally positive valuation of solar energy is certainly striking.

We may note in passing that the objective health risks of solar energy generation are by no means lower than those incurred by nuclear energy when, as it must be, the whole production cycle is taken into account. This is due to the very low specific energy flux provided by the sun, thus calling for very extensive installations, whose construction require large quantities of materials and much labor. Both materials procurement and construction work are the source of considerable risk.29 The subjective perception of the risks associated with these energy systems thus does seem to be strongly influenced by the archetypes just considered.

Frequency Distribution of Attitudes Toward Energy Sources30

Discussion

There are as many archetypes as there are typical traditional situations in the life of mankind. Endless repetition has imprinted the experience of such situations in our psychic constitution, ready to be activated from without. Most of these archetypes, however, are hardly of relevance to our present topic. The general point to be made here is that the collective Unconscious, our common inheritance from archaic times, contains much that can influence our behavior today, and this usually without our even being aware of it. These innate tendencies, then, are common to us all, and so it will come as no surprise that many people can, as a result, have quite similar reactions to the world around them. Similar perceptions of specific risks are only one example among many.

Individuality comes in by way of the large psychological differences from person to person discussed earlier. Thus the strength of the influence of an archetype, and of archetypes in general, can vary from individual to individual. It will be far less in the case of an extrovert than in that of an introvert, and less for the thinking than for the feeling type.

The Psychology of Groups

The work of Jung has also led to important insights into the behavior of like-minded groups of individuals such as they originate in countless situations in the private and public sphere. In accordance with the well-known saying, "birds of a feather flock together," such groups tend to form as a result of a common temperament, mutual interests or the pursuit of a common goal.

In view of what has been said about the wide variation of temperaments and in particular about the influence that archetypes can have on our behavior, such group formation is easy to understand. Thus the aims of religious, welfare, ecological or political groups will preferentially attract certain psychological types. But Jung has shown that there is more to it than that.

A fellowship of like-minded persons can give the individual courage, bearing and dignity, which he may have difficulty in maintaining if he is on his own. It promotes a feeling of human solidarity and of belonging. It is so easy to identify with a group, to feel oneself carried by the "ecstasy of the group." The force of an archetype can then be used to motivate people to collective action. This is exploited for good, and not infrequently, for bad.31

A large gathering of individuals has great suggestive power. In a crowd the individual easily becomes a victim of suggestion. Something needs only to happen, for example a proposal is made with which the whole group is in accord, then one also conforms, even if it is immoral. In a crowd one feels no personal responsibility and no fear.

This is the phenomenon commonly called mass psychology.

Jung studied this phenomenon particularly in the days of the Third Reich in Germany. He concluded that when many individuals unite in a common frame of mind, the ensuing group experience brings forth a collective soul which lies on a lower level than that of the participating individuals. In a very large mass of people even a kind of common beast soul can emerge.32

A large crowd made up of admirable human beings resembles in terms of morality and intelligence a large, foolish and violent beast.

As a final climax, a radicalization cannot be excluded in any mass movement: "Destroy that which threatens our own destruction."

While this phenomenon certainly was demonstrated in the extreme by National Socialism as well as by some other radical political movements or parties since then, it doubtless also plays a major role in the many terrorist organizations active in our days, as well as in the tragedy now in progress in former Yugoslavia.

A trend in this direction can, nevertheless, be made out to a greater or lesser extent in the behavior of many of the usually moderate societal groups and activist movements so common today. In such groups ideologies are created, which may then be defended against "unbelieving" outsiders with vehemence and often with a quasi-religious fervor. Convinced that the group is in possession of the one and only truth, it becomes a matter of faith, and in matters of faith no compromise is possible. Topical examples of such behavior will come to every reader's mind.

Such behavior makes the members of groups intolerant and to a large extent inaccessible to any conflicting information, even to indubitable facts. Intelligence can accomplish little when archetypes have you in their grip. This must be kept in mind when attempting to communicate risk or any other information to a wider public.

Further, the inflexible behavior of many groups can make rational discussion difficult and sometimes quite useless, being little more than the performance of a ritual, a discourse among the deaf, as the French so aptly say. Such debates can even be counter-productive in that they can increase rather than reduce a confrontation.

Psychological Projection

Jung recognized the influence of another strong archetypal force in such behavior, that of the so-called Shadow.33

By "Shadow" [Jung] means the "negative" side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal Unconscious.

A human being's Shadow consists not only of small weaknesses and minor failings; it can on occasion develop a sheer demonic force.

His Shadow is usually unheeded by the individual, but it is very often projected onto others, for example onto his "opponents" in a debate, onto the government or onto society as a whole. An everyday example can be found in the malicious gossip one all too frequently can hear.

There is nothing new in this insight. The projection of one's Shadow was referred to in the famous Bible quotation, "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own."34 We tend to believe that we ourselves make no mistakes (or we have an excuse ready if ever we do!). It is always the others who are in the wrong -- or the authorities.

Jung found that:35

one is "open" to other influences in one's unconscious Shadow side [so that] uncanny and alien elements can break in.... The Shadow is exposed to collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality. When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right... . . [But when in a group] he [can] give way to impulses that do not really belong to him at all.

Such influences can be seen in many activist groups, as well as in debates that arise over controversial issues. The workings of archetypal forces may also help us to understand the behavior of the notorious "scientist-activist" or the so-called "critical scientist" who, in the name of an ideology, frequently usurps the role of specialist in a field far from his own.

Specific contents of the Unconscious can be projected not only onto another person or an organization, but also onto a material object. As was the case for primitive man, who thus projected his fears onto a tree or a cave, gaining relief by avoiding these in the future, so does modern man frequently unburden himself of his metaphysical fears by focusing them upon a concrete object. Many people who have lost their bearings in our modern super-rationalized society and which were referred to in the introduction, frequently project the oppressive but diffuse feeling of fear under which they suffer in this way, for example onto nuclear power or onto the loudly proclaimed "poisons in our food." The many archetypal influences mentioned earlier make nuclear power a particularly effective object for such projection, while anything which might jeopardize our food would undermine our very existence. It can hardly come as a surprise if the risks originating from objects which carry our projected fears in this way are widely overestimated in our society.

It is not out of place here to note that the mass media, emphasizing as they do everything sensational, personal misfortune, accidents and disasters occurring worldwide, together with their incessant appeal to our emotions, influence the perception of risks in general and the concentration of vague fears on certain preferential objects of projection in particular. The fact should not be overlooked that the journalists responsible for this reporting are in general just as susceptible to, and just as unaware of, influences coming from their Unconscious as is the average citizen. In addition, however, they seem to be unaware of, or in some cases are unwilling to admit, the fateful positive-feedback role that they can play among their readers on the process of risk perception as a result of their subjective selection and presentation of hazards. It would constitute a big step forward if this closed feedback loop could be broken open.

Summary and Discussion

Anton Stangl has said:36

Though we are today materially better off than ever before, so many of us feel a growing uneasiness at this prosperity, which we pay for by leaving our subconscious emotional needs deeply ungratified... . In this way, inner discontent and a multitude of fears become our constant companions.

The psychotherapist Jung devoted his life-work to the study of these subconscious needs and was able to help countless individuals gain a more natural balance between their rational outer and their emotional inner selves. Jung has made us aware of the richness of our Unconscious, a major part of which -- the collective Unconscious -- is the mutual inheritance of our race from the evolution of mankind. We are far too little aware of the fact that this inheritance continues to influence us, for better or for worse, by way of our instincts and through the activity of archetypes. Archtypes are natural dispositions, but they must be awakened. They can be triggered in any particular situation and can then influence our beliefs, our decisions and our behavior in all walks of life -- not least in the way we come to terms with risks.

Jung also studied the marked differences in the general character and temperament of individual persons and described the major functions which characterize them. If one individual apprehends, sees and feels more of the objective outer world than another, then again this must forcibly influence his behavior. In addition, Jung's work throws much light on the behavior of groups of like-minded individuals and on the background of societal controversies.

From a holistic viewpoint, we must face the fact that human beings are basically far more irrational than rational, and we must understand how strongly irrational forces can influence our lives. These frequently emotional influences can enrich our life immeasurably. "In Jung's view the Unconscious is the great guide, friend and adviser of the conscious."37 But we must also be aware of situations in which our Unconscious can mislead us. The judgment of risks can be a case in point.

Why is it so difficult for risk analysts and risk managers to acknowledge these irrational influences? Attempts to understand the perception and appraisal of risks in our society by the public at large have been plagued by the obvious inadequacy of all logical, i.e., rational, explanations. True, as a result of extensive work by behavioral scientists and cognitive psychologists, many judgmental biases have been uncovered, and the heuristics that seem to lie at their root have been explained or at least made plausible.38 Almost universally, however, authors in the field have in their conclusions hastened to stress that such behavior is, "of course" not irrational. As a matter of fact, one gains the impression that "irrational" is some sort of an indecent word, and its use seems to be taboo.

It must be appreciated that this is very typical of our modern society, oriented as it is almost exclusively toward rationality. What is rational we consider to be good and undoubtedly right, so that anything irrational clearly seems to be not only bad, but in many cases also absurd. In its true sense, however, the word "irrational" means nothing more than "not rational," without any qualification being implied. The present derogatory interpretation is a reflection of our modern Western culture.

The crucial problem of risk perception has not been solved by the cognitive psychologists. The heuristics that they have identified can explain some deviation between perceived risk and objective risk, in whatever manner the latter may be defined. But they are certainly not anywhere nearly adequate to understand deviations of many orders of magnitude, such as they frequently occur in the judgement by the public of certain risks. Radiation, nuclear energy, gene technology and "poisons in our food" have already been referred to as examples. Here emotions come in, and there is no getting around it, emotions are irrational.

More recently it is occasionally admitted that the criteria of the lay public and its intuitive perception of risks are at least partly irrational and that they should not for this reason be considered irrelevant.39 As far as the author is aware, however, nobody seems yet to have been motivated to look more closely at these irrational factors and to see whether we might not perhaps learn something thereby.

The present article has been a short introduction to Jung's psychology of the unconscious insofar as it is applicable to our problem. This approach seems to offer deep insight into the mental functioning of us human beings and thus into our reactions in the face of risks.

The Unconscious is that part of our self which has been so regularly avoided in all attempts made until now to understand risk perception. As a matter of fact, the author feels that insight into the workings of our Unconscious proves to be the key to a deeper understanding of our frequently inconsistent response to hazards and of the conflicts that so often arise therefrom in the political management of risks.

Of course the work of Jung and his school of depth psychology has a far wider application than to the problems taken up here. In fact it is deeply relevant to almost every aspect of our lives. When Jung died in 1961, the whole field of risk perception and risk behavior was not yet recognized as the societal problem that it has since become. The author has little doubt that Jung, were he still alive, would have been fascinated by the application of his ideas in this field. As it is, deeper studies by professional Jungian psychologists in collaboration with representatives of the risk perception community would doubtless be very fruitful.

Conclusions

In the first place it must be realized and accepted that our Unconscious is a very real part of our being, without which a life of fulfillment is not possible. Opening ourselves to the great wealth slumbering in our Unconscious is the only chance we have to escape the one-sidedness of our modern rational society which has been deplored by far-seeing individuals since generations.

Moreover we must become more immediately aware of the fact that the diversity of human individuality which we experience in everyday life is chiefly the expression of fundamental differences in people's psychic make-up. Creative social contacts are only possible if we accept that our partner may experience things differently from ourselves, without him or her for this reason being a fool or an enemy.

However, we must also be on our guard. Jung was as well aware of the dangerous dual nature of the Unconscious and its contents as he was of the decisive role of our superior consciousness.40 While our Unconscious can enrich our lives immensely in a multitude of ways, it can also lead us astray. Fascinating archetypal forces can gain power over us without our realizing this, influencing us in uncontrollable ways, not always to our advantage.

Thus we must learn to recognize when our Unconscious intrudes upon our rational thought processes.41

Our reflections, if they are to be reflections at all, must be rational, that is they must be based on reason.

...

There is a world of difference between a conscious decision to split off and temporarily suppress a part of one's psyche, and a condition in which this happens spontaneously, without one's knowledge or consent and even against one's intention.

The former is a civilized achievement, the latter Jung termed an archaic regression. He meant by this a relapse into a spiritual state appropriate to an early stage of our evolution, before our consciousness developed. We human beings of today must become aware of such psychic relapses. Our consciousness must then step in and bring about the necessary corrections.

Any projection of specific contents of the Unconscious upon persons or objects in the outer world, and in particular the projection of our Shadow, are also examples of an archaic regression which we Homo sapiens must learn to overcome.

Jung's essential message is the need for an enhanced awareness, embracing an appreciation of the importance and the true role of our Unconscious, as the vital prerequisite for a genuine quality of life and for the achievement of humane relations with our fellow citizens.

His was an apparently so simple and yet so exacting call for increased individual consciousness. But he was modest and probably realistic as to how this could be achieved.42

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us.

There is no doubt that Jung thereby confronts us with a tremendous challenge. Now, what does this enhanced awareness of the role of the Unconscious mean for the risk manager?

While accepting the fact that the subjective perception of risks will vary with the differences in character and temperament between individuals, there are cases where these differences are so extreme that rational explanations are obviously inadequate. According to Jung such extreme responses to a risk are an expression of our Unconscious of which we are in general quite unaware, and as such they are irrational in the true sense of the word. They will frequently be found to be quite inappropriate if not counterproductive in the given context.

In deference to such intuitive or emotional valuations, many safety measures have in the past been taken to reduce already minimal risks still further, while at the same time paying little attention to other situations in which, with the same or even less effort, more serious ones could be reduced far more efficiently.43 It should really be an obligation for risk managers to try to keep the perception of risks broadly in line with their magnitude; otherwise all our priorities will be distorted.44 Clearly this is not only dictated by societal fairness but, in the final analysis, it is nothing less than an ethical imperative. That such decisions confront the risk manager with a moral dilemma is a point which, it seems, has not always been clearly appreciated.45 But the author believes that Jung has offered us the deeper understanding needed to accomplish this.

Whereas extreme positions which find individual expression can be said to originate in the personal Unconscious, Jung also recognized similar influences coming from the collective Unconscious and which he attributed to the power of archetypes. Such archetypes, being the universal possession of us all, would be expected to influence many individuals in a like manner. Even if such views, then, may be quite widely held, the risk manager must be very much on his guard. He must also recognize when vague fears or hopes may unknowingly be projected upon certain objects or activities, thus unreasonably magnifying their risks or benefits. In Jung's terms, he will in both cases be in danger of yielding to an archaic regression.

In the formation and behavior of like-minded groups, quite common in the fields of ecology and risks, Jung, while acknowledging many positive aspects, drew attention to the danger of suggestive influence on, or even manipulation of, the individual group member with the creation of a fundamentalistic and seemingly unassailable ideology. Coupled with a tendency to project one's Shadow on one's adversary, many discussions with such groups become quite sterile. Stubbornness and intolerance rule out any chance of compromise. Risk managers would do well to keep this in mind when communicating with such groups. In addition, they should not forget that the mass media, with their love for the spectacular, may initiate or at least seem to confirm many extreme perceptions of risk.

Of course it is not enough for individual risk managers to take these lessons to heart. A socially acceptable management of risks is in general not the result of decisions by a few responsible individuals but is more of a socio-political process. In order that the insights gained through Jung's work really influence risk management, all persons involved in this process -- and certainly the relevant opinion makers and the politicians -- should also be sensitized to the relevance and importance of the depth-psychological findings discussed here as well as to the consequences that they imply.

The author sees no quick and easy way to achieve this. It is more a matter of cultural development than one of simple education, and such a process will take its time. However, as has repeatedly been implied, it is becoming more and more widely accepted that our rationalized western society is in deep need of a compensation of its one-sided materialistic world-view through a convincing cultivation of its spiritual needs if it is to surmount the problems confronting it. The problem discussed in this paper is only one of many that would profit from such a development.

In conclusion, a reader may question the validity of Jung's teachings. Like any philosophy or other construct in the realm of the intellect, Jung's psychology of the unconscious is not -- and cannot be -- a scientific theory susceptible to proof or falsification. Its validity stands or falls with the extent to which life situations find a plausible and coherent interpretation. An impressive confirmation of Jung's ideas is the widely acknowledged success which they have had in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

* Dr. Fritzsche received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Until 1988, when he retired, he was a member of the Swiss Nuclear Safety Commission and safety advisor to the Swiss Department of Energy.

1 Chauncy Starr, Social Benefits vs. Technological Risk: What is our Society Willing to Pay for Safety? 165 Science 1232 (1969).

2 Baruch Fischhoff, Managing Risk Perceptions, 2 Issues Sci. & Tech. 83 (1985).

3 Andreas Wünschmann, Unbewusst dagegen; zur Psychologie der Kernenergiekontroverse [Unconsciously in opposition; On the psychology of the nuclear energy controversy] (1982).

4 Maurice Tubiana, One Approach to the Study of Public Acceptance, in Directions in Energy Policy, 343 (Behram Kursunoglu & Arnold Perlmutter, eds. 1979).

5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts [Discourse on the sciences and the arts] (1750).

6 Carl G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events, 72 (London: Keegan Paul 1947).

7 Jung uses "unconscious" in a very specific way, and the word is capitalized when used in Jung's sense.

8 John Freeman, Introduction to Carl G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols, 12 (London: Aldus Books 1964).

9 Carl G. Jung, Approaching the Unconscious, in Carl G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols 78.

10 Id. at 52.

11 Id. at 96.

12 Id. at 98.

13 Id. at 37.

14 Carl G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology , 65 (London: Pantheon Books 1928).

15 Carl G. Jung, The Concept of the Collective Unconscious. Lecture in New York City, Oct. 2, 1936, manuscript.

16 Jung, supra note 9, at 96.

17 Id. at 79.

18 Id. at 82.

19 Carl G. Jung, Psychologische Typen [Psychological types] (1921) (translation by author).

20 Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 105 (New York: Harcourt, Bruce & Co. and London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. 1933).

21 Id. at 106.

22 Id. at 106 ff.

23 Malcolm Goldsmith & Martin Wharton, Knowing Me -- Knowing You: Exploring Personality Type and Temperament (1993).

24 See Horace Gray & Joseph B. Wheelwright, The Jungian Type Survey (1964); Myers Briggs, The Myers Briggs Type Indicator.

25 For an overview, see e.g., Aaron Wildavsky & Karl Dake, Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why? 119 Daedalus 41 (1990).

26 Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias, in her book, In the Active Voice, 190-2, 201-3 (1982); see also Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture (1982).

27 Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis & Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (1990).

28 Kerry Thomas, Comparative Risk Perception: How the Public Perceives the Risks and Benefits of Energy Systems, A376 Proc. Roy. Soc'y 35 (1981); Kerry Thomas & Harry J. Otway, Public Perceptions of Energy System Risks: Some Policy Implications, in 2 Progress in Resource Management and Environmental Planning 109 (Timothy O'Riordan & K. Turner, eds.1980); and Kerry Thomas et al., A Comparative Study of Public Beliefs about Five Energy Systems (IIASA RR-80-15) (1980).

29 Andrew F. Fritzsche, The Health Risks of Energy Production, 9 Risk Anal. 565 (1989).

30 Thomas and Thomas et al., supra.

31 Carl G. Jung, Ueber Archetypen und das kollektive Unbewusste [Concerning archetypes and the collective unconscious] (1934) (translation by author).

32 Jung, supra note 6, at 74.

33 Jung, supra note 14, at 65 ff. (The specific concept which Jung terms "Shadow" is here capitalized.)

34 Matthew 7: 3.

35 Marie-Louise von Franz, The Process of Individuation, in Carl G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols, 170, 169.

36 Die vergessene Welt der Gefühle [The forgotten world of feelings], 35 (1986) (translation by author).

37 Freeman, supra note 8, at 12.

38 See, e.g., Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic & Amos Tversky, eds. 1982).

39 See, e.g., Billie Jo Hance, Caron Chess & Peter M. Sandman, Setting a Context for Explaining Risk, 9 Risk Anal. 113 (1989); Ortwin Renn, Die Grenzen Ueberschreiten: Die Psychologie des Risikos, 8 Mensch und Umwelt 53 (1993); and Pieter J. Stallen, Who's Afraid of Technological Risk? An Attempt to Model Reasonable Emotions in Environmental Impact Assessment,Technology Assessment and Risk Analysis 313 (1985).

40 Cf. Aniela Jaffé, Symbolism in the Visual Arts, in Carl G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols, 267 (translation by author).

41 Jung, supra note 14, at 48 (translation by author) and Jung, supra note 9, at 25, respectively.

42 Jung, supra note 9, at 101.

43 See, e.g., Bernard L. Cohen, Society's Valuation of Life Saving in Radiation Protection and Other Contexts, 38 Health Phys., 33 (1980).

44 Herbert J. Dunster, Regulation of Risk, A376 Proc. Roy. Soc'y 199 (1981).

45 Andrew F. Fritzsche, The Moral Dilemma in the Social Management of Risks, forthcoming Risk..

2008-10-02T10:08:00.000-07:00

"Given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; at least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

Barack Obama

Rolling Stone about Mrs. Palin

2008-09-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Mad Dog Palin

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 27, 2008.

The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is -- it's what her candidacy says about America

.....
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

......

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would "have a friend and advocate in the White House." This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.

....

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He's been on TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that's a lifetime of hands-on experience. It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama.

As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, futureembracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin's Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in middle America, you have to accept that middle America probably feels the same way when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-"I love you, Obama!" ritual at the Democratic nominee's town-hall appearances.

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.

Bailout sweet deal for the haves, paid by havenots.

2008-09-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

by Kos
Curbs would be placed on the compensation of executives at companies that sell mortgage assets to Treasury. Among them, companies that participate will not be able to deduct the salary they pay to executives above $500,000.

Ooh, they can't write off the salary above half a million! What a limit! And what about golden parachutes?

They also will not be allowed to write new contracts that allow for "golden parachutes" for their top 5 executives if they are fired or the company goes belly up. But the executives' current contracts, which may include golden parachutes, would still stand.

There you go. Our taxpayers will help fund multi-million dollar golden parachutes. Delightful!

And what about oversight?

The Financial Stability Oversight Board would be charged with ensuring the policies implemented protect taxpayers and are in the economic interests of the United States. It will include the Federal Reserve chairman, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, the Federal Home Finance Agency director, the Housing and Urban Development secretary and the Treasury secretary.

Yup, the oversight panel will be staffed by the same jokers who brought us this mess -- Bernanke, Paulson, and Cox. Feel better? And since half the money will be disbursed before the Obama Administration takes over, that's $350 billion that will be distributed to Bush's friends before the year is over, further stressing our nation's finances and hamstringing the Obama Administration.

DailyKos, Sept. 29, 2008

Why the debates won't matter (vote tampering, it's a felony)

2008-09-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

by Marty Kaplan

.....In El Paso County, Colorado, the county clerk -- a delegate to the Republican National Convention -- told out-of-state undergraduates at Colorado College, falsely, that they couldn't vote in Colorado if their parents claim them as dependents on their taxes.

In Montgomery County, Virginia, the county registrar issued a press release warning out-of-state college students, falsely, that if they register to vote in Virginia, they won't be eligible for coverage under their parents' health and car insurance, and that "if you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding."

In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Democratic voters received a mailing containing tear-out requests for absentee ballots addressed to the clerk in Caledonia -- the wrong location. In Middleton, Wisconsin, Democratic voters received absentee ballot requests addressed to the clerk in Madison -- the wrong address. Both mailers were sent by the McCain campaign.

Florida, Michigan and Ohio have some of the country's highest foreclosure rates. "Because many homeowners in foreclosure are black or poor," says the New York Times, "and are considered probable Democratic voters in many areas, the issue has begun to have political ramifications." If you're one of the million Americans who lost a home through foreclosure, and if you didn't file a change of address with your election board, you're a sitting duck for an Election Day challenge by a partisan poll watcher holding a public list of foreclosed homes. In states like New Mexico and Iowa, the number of foreclosures is greater than the number of votes by which George W. Bush carried the state in 2004.

In the 2006 election, according to the nonpartisan Fair Elections Legal Network, black voters in Virginia got computer-generated phone calls from a bogus "Virginia Election Commission" telling them that they could be arrested if they went to the wrong polling place; in Maryland, out-of-state leafleters gave phony Democratic sample ballots to black voters with the names of Republican candidates checked in red; in New Mexico, Democratic voters got personal phone calls from out of state that directed them to the wrong polling place. Does anyone think this won't be tried again in 2008?

The reason behind Alberto Gonzales' attempted purge of US Attorneys was that some of them wouldn't knuckle under to Karl Rove's plan to concoct an "election fraud" hoax that would put Republicans in control of the nation's voting lists. "We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," Rove falsely told the Republican National Lawyers Association, an evidence-less problem crying out for a draconian solution. Does anyone think that Rove's move from the White House to Fox has dampened Republican ardor for this ruse?

And if all of that doesn't alarm you, consider the new report on electronic voting systems [pdf] from the Computer Security Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which concluded that "all voting systems recently analyzed by independent security testers have been found to contain fatal security flaws that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the voting process.... Unless electronic voting systems are held up to standards that are commensurate with the criticality of the tasks they have to perform, the very core of our democracy is in danger."

And did I mention that on Election Day, some polling places in minority precincts in battleground states will be shocked, simply shocked, to discover that so many people want to vote that it will take hours of standing in line to vote. That is, of course, unless they run of out ballots.

So while the presidential and vice presidential debates may make for swell political theater, the likelihood is that victory will be determined not by how the debates move a small percentage of undecided Americans off the fence, but by the voting experiences of a few thousand voters in a few swing states on November 4. Josef Stalin is reputed to have said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." I think he had it half right. Those who decide who cast the votes also decide everything.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/why-the-debates-wont-matt_b_130104.html

Thoughts for the Eve of Rosh Hashana

2008-09-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

A New Year reminder of mutual responsibility
Sep. 28, 2008
THE JERUSALEM POST

On this Rosh Hashana Eve, which also marks the end of the Sabbatical - shmita - year, the Torah teaches an important lesson about greed and trust, a lesson which resonates particularly loudly today as America, and much of the rest of the world, grapple with a major financial crisis.

The coincidence is impossible to ignore: On Monday, the last day of the present seven-year shmita cycle, Jewish law dictates that all outstanding debts be cancelled. At the same time, US Congressional leaders and the Bush administration prepare to perform perhaps the largest cancellation of debts - shmitat ksafim - in US history, a financial bailout that will cost America $700 billion.

True, financial disasters often happen in September. The inevitable financial crash often gets postponed until after the slow summer vacation months. Still, the concurrence of the end of the shmita cycle with the financial crisis is striking.

According to Jewish law, a creditor who has not collected a loan before the Rosh Hashana following the seven-year shmita cycle must relinquish it. The rabbis looked favorably upon debtors who insisted on paying back their debts anyway. But there is no obligation.

Later, after being conquered by the Romans, the subjugated Jewish people, living in the land of Israel in a constant state of political and economic instability, began to refrain from extending loans out of fear they would lose their debts. Hillel the Elder, who died in 10 CE, responded by instituting a legal loophole called a prozbul that circumvented the shmita.

But the ultimate ideal, according to the original biblical commandment and the teachings of the rabbis, is to foster a society built on mutual trust in which debtors are not obligated to creditors at the end of the shmita year.

Obviously, the US bailout plan is not identical to the biblical commandment to relinquish debt. American legislators and regulators who rescued Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG from financial collapse are motivated by a self-serving desire to head off a domino effect that could topple the US economy. In contrast, shmitat ksafim is to be performed regardless of any personal benefit. The impetus should be a desire to build a more just society in which individuals are responsible for one another and no one is subjected to the ignominy of living in eternal debt.

An important lesson can be learned from shmitat ksafim, as relevant as ever in this age of unencumbered free-market economies fueled by greed and self-interest. Human beings, says Judaism, should not be a bunch of essentially selfish individuals who do nothing but seek to maximize their material well-being. Greed might drive economies, but, unchecked, it can spiral out of control and wreak havoc - as it is currently doing in the US banking and mortgage industries.

Shmitat ksafim teaches that, sometimes, a feeling of solidarity and support for the community should override narrow individual interests.

THIS MESSAGE is pertinent for the Jewish state as it prepares to celebrate Rosh Hashana.

Disturbing trends plague our society - including a high level of socioeconomic polarization between rich and poor, and a large percentage of children living under the poverty line.

Underlining the distress, according to data released recently by Yedid, the Association for Community Empowerment, this year approximately 3,000 Israeli homeowners were evicted from their homes for failing to meet mortgage payments, up from about 2,500 last year.

Banks and other large creditors should not be expected to make a wholesale cancellation of debts. And debtors should not be allowed to get off scot-free. But exceptions can be made when the debtor is sincerely willing to work hard and make painful changes in spending and saving habits, and the creditor can safely agree on a compromise without risking financial instability.

This would foster a greater feeling of trust and mutual responsibility, in keeping with the true spirit of shmitat ksafim.

Our society is far from the ideal, but it is our obligation to strive for the sense of mutual responsibility sought by the framers of Jewish law - an obligation underlined by the remarkable coincidence of the ancient enlightened shmita provisions and the current bitter financial crisis.

Copyright 1995- 2008 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

Muslim Children Gassed at Dayton Mosque After "Obsession" DVD Hits Ohio

2008-09-28T20:22:00.000-07:00

by Chrisd Rodda

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West -- the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail -- were distributed by mail in Ohio, a "chemical irritant" was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain's supporters has led to -- Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.

I read the story as reported by the Dayton Daily News, but this was after I had received an email written by a friend of some of the victims of these American terrorists. The matter of fact news report in the Dayton paper didn't come close to conveying the horrific impact of this unthinkable act like the email I had just read, so I asked the email's author for permission to share what they had written. The author was with one of the families from the mosque -- a mother and two of the small children who were in the room that was gassed -- the day after the attack occurred.

"She told me that the gas was sprayed into the room where the babies and children were being kept while their mothers prayed together their Ramadan prayers. Panicked mothers ran for their babies, crying for their children so they could flee from the gas that was burning their eyes and throats and lungs. She grabbed her youngest in her arms and grabbed the hand of her other daughter, moving with the others to exit the building and the irritating substance there.

"The paramedic said the young one was in shock, and gave her oxygen to help her breathe. The child couldn't stop sobbing.

"This didn't happen in some far away place -- but right here in Dayton, and to my friends. Many of the Iraqi refugees were praying together at the Mosque Friday evening. People that I know and love.

"I am hurt and angry. I tell her this is NOT America. She tells me this is not Heaven or Hell -- there are good and bad people everywhere.

"She tells me that her daughters slept with her last night, the little one in her arms and sobbing throughout the night. She tells me she is afraid, and will never return to the mosque, and I wonder what kind of country is this where people have to fear attending their place of worship?

"The children come into the room, and tell me they want to leave America and return to Syria, where they had fled to from Iraq. They say they like me, ... , and other American friends -- but they are too afraid and want to leave. Should a 6 and 7 year old even have to contemplate the safety of their living situation?

"Did the anti-Muslim video circulating in the area have something to do with this incident, or is that just a bizarre coincidence? Who attacks women and children?

"What am I supposed to say to them? My words can't keep them safe from what is nothing less than terrorism, American style. Isn't losing loved ones, their homes, jobs, possessions and homeland enough? Is there no place where they can be safe?

"She didn't want me to leave her tonight, but it was after midnight, and I needed to get home and write this to my friends. Tell me -- tell me -- what am I supposed to say to them?"

When acting as a representative of Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the 501(c)3 non-profit organization that I work for, I cannot engage in political activities. The distribution of Obsession, however, although a political campaign scheme, clearly crosses over into the mission of MRFF. So, I'm going to make two statements here -- one in my capacity as MRFF's Research Director, and another as an individual whose disgust at the vile campaign tactics of John McCain's supporters completely boiled over when I opened up the email about children being gassed.

My statement as MRFF's Research Director:

The presidential campaign edition of the Obsession DVD, currently being distributed by the Clarion Fund, carries the endorsement of the chair of the counter-terrorism department of the U.S. Naval War College, using the name and authority of an official U.S. military institution not only to validate an attack the religion of Islam, but to influence a political campaign. For these reasons, this endorsement has been included in MRFF's second lawsuit against the Department of Defense, which was filed on September 25 in the Federal District Court in Kansas.

My opinion as an individual and thoroughly appalled human being:

John McCain has a moral obligation to publicly censure the Clarion Fund, the organization that produced Obsession and is distributing the DVDs; to denounce the inflammatory, anti-Muslim message of Obsession; and to do everything in his power to stop any further campaign activities by his supporters that have the potential to incite violence.

Source: DailyKos, Sept. 28 2008

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/28/203016/697/536/613742

61 Nobel Laureates in Science Endorse Obama

2008-09-27T09:51:00.001-07:00

A group of 61 Nobel Laureates have gotten together to endorse Barack Obama for President. Their letter and the signatories are below. This is the largest number of Nobel Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, more than endorsed either Gore or Kerry. (Kerry had 48 total.) That is a remarkable statement. Here is the link to the original letter of endorsement.

An Open Letter to the American People

This year’s presidential election is among the most significant in our nation’s history. The country urgently needs a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.

We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.

During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country’s scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government’s scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.

We have watched Senator Obama’s approach to these issues with admiration. We especially applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance our nation’s competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take – through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research – to meet the nation’s and the world’s most urgent needs.

Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world’s leading country. We hope you will join us as we work together to ensure his election in November.

Signed,

Alexei Abrikosov Physics 2003
Roger Guillemin Medicine 1977
Peter Agre Chemistry 2003
John L. Hall Physics 2005
Sidney Altman Chemistry 1989
Leland H. Hartwell Medicine 2001
Philip W. Anderson Physics 1977
Dudley Herschbach Chemistry 1986
Richard Axel Medicine 2004
Roald Hoffmann Chemistry 1981
David Baltimore Medicine 1975
H. Robert Horvitz Medicine 2002
Baruj Benacerraf Medicine 1980
Louis Ignarro Medicine 1998
Paul Berg Chemistry 1980
Eric R. Kandel Medicine 2000
J. Michael Bishop Medicine 1989
Walter Kohn Chemistry 1998
N. Bloembergen Physics 1981
Roger Kornberg Chemistry 2006
Michael S. Brown Medicine 1985
Leon M. Lederman Physics 1988
Linda B. Buck Medicine 2004
Craig C. Mello Medicine 2006
Mario R. Capecchi Medicine 2007
Marshall Nirenberg Medicine 1968
Stanley Cohen Medicine 1986
Douglas D. Osheroff Physics 1996
Leon Cooper Physics 1972
Stanley B. Prusiner Medicine 1997
James W. Cronin Physics 1980
Norman F. Ramsey Physics 1989
Robert F. Curl Chemistry 1996
Robert Richardson Physics 1996
Johann Diesenhofer Chemistry 1988
Burton Richter Physics 1976
John B. Fenn Chemistry 2002
Sherwood Rowland Chemistry 1995
Edmond H. Fischer Medicine 1992
Oliver Smithies Medicine 2007
Val Fitch Physics 1980
Richard R Schrock Chemistry 2005
Jerome I. Friedman Physics 1990
Joseph H. Taylor Jr. Physics 1993
Riccardo Giacconi Physics 2002
E. Donnall Thomas Medicine 1990
Walter Gilbert Chemistry 1980
Charles H. Townes Physics 1964
Alfred G. Gilman Medicine 1994
Daniel C.Tsui Physics 1998
Donald A. Glaser Physics 1960
Harold Varmus Medicine 1989
Sheldon L. Glashow Physics 1979
James D. Watson Medicine 1962
Joseph Goldstein Medicine 1985
Eric Wieschaus Medicine 1995
Paul Greengard Medicine 2000
Frank Wilczek Physics 2004
David Gross Physics 2004
Robert W. Wilson Physics 1978
Robert H. Grubbs Chemistry 2005

Beam It Down, Scotty

2008-09-17T16:42:00.001-07:00

Want solar without all the hassle of clouds and night? Beam it down from space. John Mankins of Space Power Association ran the first technical test on this old idea and announced the new results last week, reports Nature.

For less than $1 million and only 4 months of prep, Mankins transmitted microwaves from Maui to the neighboring island of Hawaii—proving that energy can be transmitted all the way through the atmosphere.

Here's the deal: Even on a sunny day, the atmosphere absorbs and scatters half the Sun's rays. Panels in orbit could collect it all, daytime, nighttime, and every time in between. Beam the energy via microwaves to the surface. The microwaves will pass unhindered through our 60-mile-thick atmosphere. Presto. 100-proof solar fuel.

So many solutions. But so many Galvestonians standing dumbfast as the storm approaches. Can we get moving? Please?

Feral children, unimaginable stories

2008-08-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

In our society, praising itself as civilized, chock full of high-tech gadgets and extreme wealth, where some people buy carbon yachts for tens million dollars, there are hungry, neglected and, hard to imagine - "feral children"(think Mowglee, Tarzan). These children reduced to animal existence, and sometimes worse than that, grow without a human touch and care, can't speak or walk as we do...

A girl in the window. Story of Dani.
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece
A transcript of PBS show on Nova about Genie, another "wild child".
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html

How's that possible, you may ask. How a mother can do such things to her own flesh and blood? How social services, this supposedly widespread safety net leaves these children out? What is wrong in our world? Can't we do anything, and if we can, then - what?

Ready to track down God Particle (or to end the world?)

2008-08-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years. (27 photos total)

Liberalization of reproductive laws

2008-06-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

GLOBAL TREND TOWARD LIBERALIZATION
Since 1995, many more countries have liberalized their abortion laws…	…than have tightened them.
Albania (1996)	El Salvador (1998)
Benin (2003)	Nicaragua (2006)
Bhutan (2004)	Poland (1997)
Burkina Faso (1996)
Cambodia (1997)
Chad (2002)
Colombia (2006)
Ethiopia (2004)
Guinea (2000)
Mali (2002)
Nepal (2002)
Portugal (2007)
Saint Lucia (2004)
South Africa (1996)
Swaziland (2005)
Switzerland (2002)
Togo (2007)
Source: Center for Reproductive Rights, 2007.

Statistics : Abortion is down where contraceptives are up

2008-06-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

ALL ABOUT EUROPE
Europe experienced a far more dramatic decline in abortion rates than did other regions of the world, and that decline was concentrated in former Soviet bloc countries.

Rise up. Reach down.

2008-06-08T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago, I took a trip I wouldn't have predicted. This is a story about a near-execution, a graduation and a decision by former Gov. Jim Edgar that has delivered unexpected consequences.

It's a story about rising up and reaching down.

Months earlier, Garcia, a 36-year-old convicted double murderer, had dropped her court appeals, said she was done "begging for her life" and put the wheels in motion for her death by lethal injection. It would mark the first execution of a woman in the U.S. in two decades. It became an international story.

Garcia's biography wasn't pretty.

At age 2, she saw her mother jump out a window and die.

Her father split. She was reared by grandparents and an uncle. The uncle began raping her when she was 7, giving her alcohol to calm her and shut her up.

Family members confirm the grandmother knew but did nothing.

By 16, she was an alcoholic and a prostitute. By 17, she was married and pregnant.

Her baby, Sara, was not yet 1 when she suffocated her with a plastic dry cleaning bag rather than face the prospect of DCFS taking Sara away to live with the grandmother and the pedophile uncle.

She confessed, went to prison for 10 years, married one of her tricks, an older man named George Garcia, who once, according to Supreme Court records, genitally mutilated her with a broken bottle.

Drunk one night, she shot and killed George.

Her sorrow over Sara is something Guin Garcia lives with every day. She is not sorry about George.

Fourteen hours before her scheduled execution in 1996, Gov. Edgar, who had signed off on the executions of four men, suddenly stopped the wheels from turning on this one. For a Republican who supported the death penalty, it was not an easy decision. Edgar commuted her sentence to natural life.

Last week, I went back to the prison at Dwight. With a 3.95 "A" average, Garcia was graduating magna cum laude from Lake Land College.

Dressed in caps and gowns, marching to "Pomp and Circumstance," 57 other women received GEDs and certificates in computer technology, commercial cooking, dog training and business management.

Friends and family filled the prison gym. Small children were in their Sunday best, waving to their mothers. There aren't many happy days in prison, said Warden Mary Sigler. This was one.

As one of the inmates rose to claim her diploma, a young man in a back row proudly cried out, "That's my Mom!"

Garcia was last to be called up, the only one that day to accept a college degree, an associate in liberal studies.

You might be asking, what's the point? Why waste tax dollars on a lifer? There's an answer.

It's what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen calls "Rising up, reaching down."

Graduates I talked to that day, including one who is 28 and has been locked up since she was 15, told me the reason she earned her GED last year and got a certificate in professional dog grooming this year was that Garcia, whom younger inmates call "Granny," demanded that she straighten up and fly right.

Garcia's quest for education helped motivate hers.

That young woman -- a slight, pretty African American -- will get out in two years better prepared to go forward because Guin Garcia, in life's depths, somehow found it in herself to rise up and reach down.

Today, Garcia is 49, with no illusions about getting out. And yet, thanks to a decision by a pro-death penalty governor to spare one life, new life has been given.

Rise up. Reach down.

It can happen anywhere.

United States Homeless Statistic

2008-06-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

http://lahsc.org/wordpress/educate/statistics/united-states-homeless-statistics/

3.5 million people (1.35 million of which are children) will experience homelessness in a given year.
Children under the age of 18 account for 39% of the homeless population. 42% of these are under the age of 5.
43% of the homeless population are women; 40% of these women are unaccompanied. 22% of homeless women claim domestic abuse as reason for homelessness. 25% of these claim to have been abused within the past year.
Families with children comprise 33% of the homeless population.
Vets constitute 40% of the homeless population.
1 in every 5 homeless persons has a severe or persistent mental illness.
25% of the homeless nationwide are employed.

Is the God particle the right term?

2008-04-10T10:43:00.000-07:00

by Tom Heneghan

One of the most brilliant simplifications I’ve ever come across is the term “the God Particle.” Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book with that name 15 years ago that was so interesting that even a physics klutz like myself (I almost failed it in high school…) read and enjoyed it.

It turns out, though, that the physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs said in Geneva this week at a news conference our correspondent Robert Evans attended. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”

Higgs, now 78, first proposed a theory of the particle officially knows as the Higgs boson 40 years ago. CERN, the giant nuclear research centre at the French-Swiss border near Geneva, is building a vast underground particle collider to try to find it. “The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly … I’m more than 90 percent certain that it will,” Higgs said after visiting the collider due to start working early next year.

So the term “the God particle” may be coming to the religion blogosphere pretty soon. Instead of doing the homework and writing the essay, I’ll let others explain what it is — here are some good examples at National Geographic and Wired and a cartoon here.

Lederman, by the way, also seemed of two minds about calling the Higgs boson the “God particle.”

As he put it in his book:

“This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddam Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one…

Lederman then goes on to quote Genesis 11:1-9 , the Tower of Babel story about mankind dispersing. Finding the God Particle, he says, would be like undoing the confusion that followed.

Even if the physicists have qualms, I think the term “God Particle” is so expressive that I’m glad Higgs didn’t get his way. I know there are those out there who don’t agree, who do and who don’t say. There are also deep implications for science and religion. Still, some things are just so awesome that a reasonable comparison with the divine seems to me like a good way to put something so hard to understand into perspective.

Do you think it’s offensive?

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/09/is-god-particle-the-right-term-for-massive-mystery-in-physics/

The Trumpet Child

2008-04-07T22:49:00.000-07:00

Over the Rhine

The trumpet child will blow his horn
Will blast the sky till it’s reborn
With Gabriel’s power and Satchmo’s grace
He will surprise the human race

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonious notes from up above
He’ll improvise a kingdom come
Accompanied by a different drum

The trumpet child will banquet here
Until the lost are truly found
A thousand days, a thousand years
Nobody knows for sure how long

The rich forget about their gold
The meek and mild are strangely bold
A lion lies beside a lamb
And licks a murderer’s outstretched hand

The trumpet child will lift a glass
His bride now leaning in at last
His final aim to fill with joy
The earth that man all but destroyed

SUDAN: Hundreds of thousands of Darfur children not in school

2008-04-05T00:19:00.001-07:00

About 650,000 or half of all children in Darfur do not receive an education, despite efforts by various organisations to provide schooling in camps and towns across the western Sudanese region, an international NGO said.

"Education is the foundation for economically viable and more peaceful societies. But the international community has been loath to fund schooling in conflict situations," Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children US, said in a statement on 27 February. "This is shortsighted."

In West Darfur State alone, 200,000 children come of school-age every year - of whom 22,440 are being assisted by Save the Children to attend classes in 42 schools in camps and towns.

"We cannot afford to wait to begin education programmes until violence ceases and families can return home," MacCormack said. "What about the children whose time for school is now? Are they to be left by the wayside of history?"

Urging donor nations to provide more assistance for education in conflict zones, the NGO said present levels of support had failed to meet all the needs.

The Darfur conflict, which began in 2003 when communities in the region took up arms to fight alleged marginalisation by the Sudanese government, has displaced more than one million children. The government responded by arming militias, but these have since been accused of abusing civilians.

In recent weeks, attacks by Sudanese government forces have displaced thousands more civilians, including children, and hindered humanitarian access to those affected.

According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), a recent high-level mission to El-Geneina and Sirba in West Darfur found that thousands of civilians had remained trapped in Jebel Moun where fighting continues, without protection, shelter, food or belongings. However, about 24,000 were reported to have returned to Sirba and Abu Saroug.

Photo: IRIN
A camp for the displaced in Darfur
William Spindler, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told a news conference on 26 February in Geneva that some of the affected civilians had either gone to other villages or were attempting the dangerous journey to Chad.

"According to our team, more people have crossed into Chad over the past weekend following renewed attacks on Jebel Moun," he said. "The latest arrivals are mainly women, children and elderly people and they are extremely traumatised."

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says more than 250,000 Sudanese refugees and 180,000 internally displaced persons are in eastern Chad.

The Sudanese government denies targeting civilians, saying the attacks were being carried out to flush out rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), who have been hiding among civilians in the area.

The attacks have, however, made the situation increasingly bleak in recent months, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

From: humanitarian news and analysis
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

In a 27 February letter urging the UN Security Council to condemn recent “horrific” attacks on Darfur civilians and to impose targeted sanctions on those responsible, it said the situation was reminiscent of the worst periods of the conflict in 2004.

According to the letter, Sudanese armed forces backed by Janjawid militia attacked three West Darfur villages on 8 February, in which hundreds of civilians died, and tens of thousands were displaced.

The attacks, said Georgette Gagnon, HRW’s Africa division director, cut off at least 20,000 civilians from humanitarian assistance and breached the ban on offensive military fly-overs imposed by the Security Council. It also underlined the government's failure to disarm the Janjawid militia.

"The attacks marked the beginning of a campaign of aerial bombardments and ground attacks that continues today, which includes the bombing of a recently emptied refugee camp at Aro Sharrow in West Darfur," Gagnon said.

We all are Jerusalem

2008-03-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

A Beautiful Murderer
March 30, 2008
http://realisrael.wordpress.com/

I received this by email. I Googled it and found out that it has been published several times on different blogs, but I feel the topic is important enough to publish again. Hopefully others will do the same. This letter was written by the family of Malki Roth.

[Several months ago,] the New York Times carried a review of a film called “Hot House” that goes inside Israeli prisons and examines the lives of Palestinian prisoners. We’re not recommending the film or the review. But we do want to share our feelings with you about the beaming female face that adorns the article.

The film is produced by HBO. So it’s presumably HBO’s publicity department that was responsible for creating and distributing a glamor-style photograph of a smiling, contented-looking young woman in her twenties to promote the movie.

That female is our child’s murderer.

She was sentenced to sixteen life sentences or 320 years which she is serving in an Israeli jail. Fifteen people were killed and more than a hundred maimed and injured by the actions of this attractive person and her associates. The background is here.

Neither the New York Times nor HBO are likely to give even a moment’s attention to the victims of the barbarians who destroyed the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem and the lives of so many victims. So we would be grateful if you would pass along this link to some pictures of our daughter whose name was Malki. She was unable to reach her twenties — Hamas saw to that.

Though she was only fifteen years old when her life was stolen from her and from us, we think Malki was a beautiful young woman, living a beautiful life. We ask your help so that other people — far fewer than the number who will see the New York Times, of course — can know about her. Please ask your friends to look at the pictures — some of the very few we have — of our murdered daughter. They are here.

And remind them of what the woman in the Israeli prison — the woman smiling so happily in the New York Times — said last year. “I’m not sorry for what I did. We’ll become free from the occupation and then I will be free from prison.”

With so many voices demanding that Israel release its terrorist prisoners, small wonder she’s smiling.

With greetings from Jerusalem,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
On behalf of Keren Malki

Malki and Michal Raziel were best friends who both perished in the terrorist attack at Sbarro. I wanted to make sure a picture of them is posted so you can put a face to the many names.

Quotes

2008-03-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James Baldwin

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
Leo Rosten

Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.
Pamela Glenconner

To the Thawing Wind

2008-03-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

by Robert Frost

COME with rain. O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
bath my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

The Burning of the Leaves

2008-03-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

by Laurence Binyon

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Spark whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

Hunger is set to grow as global food stocks fall

2008-03-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

The Great Wheat Panic of 2007 saw global prices shoot up by over 92 per cent during the year. Rice and corn prices also rose as sharply. Food riots have been reported from Kolkata to Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Austria, Hungary and Mexico.
And the Food and Agricultural Organization declared that 854 million people go hungry around the world. Things are expected to get worse in 2008.
Is mankind peering down an abyss of hunger?

Global consumption of wheat and rice has outstripped production for the past seven years running, except in 2004-05. Production is growing, but population is growing faster.
If production is less than demand, then how do people get enough food? Each year, a certain portion of foodgrains is kept in stock, to be used next year. This is now getting used up for meeting excess demand.
Global wheat stocks were down to 107 million MT (metric tonnes) in 2007, compared with over 197 million MT in 2001; rice stocks were just 71 million MT compared with 136 million MT.
All this means that the future supply of both wheat and rice is becoming more uncertain. That means prices are likely to keep going up.
India stands at a tipping point, especially as foodgrain production is stagnating. Wheat output was 72.8 million MT in 2002.

This year it is estimated at about 74 million MT. Rice output was 93.3 million MT in 2002 and this year it is estimated at about 90 million MT. Meanwhile, population has increased by about 88 million. So, there will be need for imports.
This, in turn, will fuel global prices. Grain economist Mike Woolverton of Kansas State University says that as soon as India bought 795,000 MT of wheat at a record price of $389.45 in August 2007, wheat futures in Europe rose by 70 per cent on expectations of more orders.

Greg Wagner, director of a grain trade consultancy in Chicago says , "With global economies continuing to expand, the demand base has been increasing while the supply has been decreasing. As a consequence, prices must go high enough to cut back on demand otherwise there will not be any wheat left."
In 2007, the world supply of wheat was affected due to drought in Australia, a freeze in US and lower production in Ukraine. The price surge was also fuelled by the new US law saying the use of ethanol for automobiles should be doubled to 15 billion gallons by 2015. Ethanol is made from corn. So, corn prices surged.

According to David Victor, an agricultural economist at Stanford University, "Corn prices are rising, in large part because a growing fraction of US corn production is going into ethanol biofuels, mainly because of ill-conceived energy policies. Since the US is the largest corn exporter, this affects the world market. In turn, this has some effect on wheat because, for example, wheat can be used in feed grain instead of corn."

Indian Stock Market

Stock exchange News, valuation, Stock picks, market analysis

how it was

2008-03-10T13:57:00.000-07:00

How Noisy They Seem
- by Alootook Ipellie

I saw a picture today, in the pages of a book.
It spoke of many memories of when I was still a child:
Snow covered the ground,
And the rocky hills were cold and gray with frost.
The sun was shining from the west,
And the shadows were dark against the whiteness of the
hardened snow.

My body felt a chill
Looking at two Inuit boys playing with their sleigh,
For the fur of their hoods was frosted under their chins,
From their breathing.
In the distance, I could see at least three dog teams going away,
But I didn't know where they were going,
For it was only a photo.
I thought to myself that they were probably going hunting,
To where they would surely find some seals basking on the ice.
Seeing these things made me feel good inside,
And I was happy that I could still see the hidden beauty of
the land,
And know the feeling of silence

Earth and Water, creating life

2008-03-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Missisipi Delta, water of life

2008-03-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

Art of science is beauty

2008-03-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

Desolation Canyon, USA

Unicorns of the Desert

2008-03-02T19:08:00.000-08:00

by Konstantinos Bouras

Be mellow like clouds
Be mellow like tempestuous sea
with tranquil depth
Be mellow like cyprus trees
inflamed by thunder
Be mellow with the sword
in the holy war your psyche
summons you
Be mellow like the thorn
piercing the breast
of a nightingale
compelling it to sing
Be mellow like the dagger
plunged into your flesh
to whiten
the lungs in light
Be mellow amongst ogresses
dwelling in your chamber
be gallant
gaze at them if you may
for above water Medusa
becomes a lump of clay
Be mellow hearken to the song of the sirens
fasten on the one spar
with Ulysses
But alas
if at the moment
of the most exquisite happiness
you plug your ears
your sanity shall be lost
Be mellow even encountering your demon
ejecting swords
sow them in your chest
like a helmet
Be mellow
and let the indian uttering
that once you find your other shelf
you shall perish
swing along with it
in the water of the one cave
bite its tongue
pierce its frame through daily
for if you feel remorse
you shall be lost.
Be mellow
sleepless for eternity
if you must
sowing flowers in the desert
to be uprooted by simoon
Be mellow
like the sword
without a sheath.

When will we learn

2008-02-27T18:43:00.001-08:00

Peter's Dream

2008-02-22T22:11:00.000-08:00

Lennie Gallant

I still get up before the day breaks
And I still walk down to the shore
I watch the sun rise from the eastern ocean
But I don't sail to meet anymore

How could they have let this happen
We saw it coming years ago
The greedy ships kept getting bigger and bigger
And the sonar told them where to go

Last night I dreamed that I was sailing
Out on the Sea of Galilee
We cast our nets upon the waters
And Jesus pulled them in with me

Where am I gonna go now
What about this boat I own
What about this old piano
What about my father's bones

Someone sang an old sea shanty
And Nealy told a mainland joke
Kelly cursed and swore until his voice gave out
And then he asked me for a smoke
And then he took his father's shotgun
Walked to the harbour, through the town
He fired fourteen times, woke everyone up
And we all watched that boat go down

after the miracle

2008-02-21T20:13:00.000-08:00

"What we go through if we see something miraculous happen?
First, we are moved by it.
It gives us joy just to behold it.
Then, we change our lives in some way, as a result of seeing it.
This makes us feel good too, just by acknowledging it.
But then...
The doubts start to creep in, as time goes by.
Did we really see it?
Is it foolish to have changed our life for it?
What have I done?"

That is the death of the miracle. It existed in us and for us, which is not a solipsistic notion, but rather an effect of repetitive events, caused by the same unexplainable source, and extinguished by the same gray hand of reality that, in the end, rules our brain and our actions.
Unless there is a staircase leading somewhere else, the steps of it being wonder, light and illusion.
Only poets, artists and lovers, diseased enough to live in a state of perpetual madness are seeing the ladder. They are the ones cursed with this blessing. Or blessed with the curse.
The rest of us...
How high can a chicken fly?

As high as the story of a flight.

In memory of JFC.

Gone Where?

2008-02-20T21:28:00.000-08:00

by Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says "There, she is gone."
"Gone where?"
"Gone from my sight. That is all."
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at that moment when someone says "There, she is gone" there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout - "Here she comes!"

from the southern shore of Crete..November,1995

2008-02-19T19:18:00.000-08:00

One of my finer photographic moments. My wife thought I was crazy, stopping our rented Opel every couple of miles to capture moments with my Nikon. When we got home and she saw the prints, she understood. Shot on glorious Ektrachrome.

Trembling Sweetly

2008-02-17T04:19:00.000-08:00

-Photis Angoules
Let the silver wake tremble gently on the waters
of sea, the waves fade away like a lullaby,
and unwillingly lull to sleep the fisherman in his boat
who stays sleepless for mooring at dawn.
And from the land across, as you look, you see
the sparse lights playing, flickering,
as if speaking secretly to your soul and you are unable
to understand what they tell you in their visual tongue.
And as the charms of sea and sky intoxicate you
and in the drunkenness of joy you forget your pain
at such a moment, the dark thought may
not cross your mind; the thought that you live to die.

Open Letter to God (Surface Earth: Copyright, 2006)

2008-02-13T22:32:00.000-08:00

How do we sit together in loving Christian kindness and denounce “others”, who, more often than not, are closer to God whether they believe in him or not, simply in acts of kindness and their reliability of spirit?
**
God, I’m back, I don’t know if I am just chatter in your head or if my voice sings with others.
A bluebird landed in my tree.
He sat high above the purple flowers
Which grew and grew
Taller
Although I didn’t even know their name
It did not stop the trees or the flowers from growing

There must be answers somewhere. I’m simply not clever or learned enough to find them, but I know they are here.

All my life, all I have ever wanted to do is write, primarily, to get people to understand humanity, that we are all one. That there is no beginning and no end and what you do to my brother or sister, you do to me. Lines of politics, sex, national origin, religion, are simply just excuses for us not to help one another.

Did you know this is my land Lord? The land stolen is now ours? The one they want to build walls around so starving children can remain starving? Who is wrong Lord? Us or them? Or me for even fashioning a question that includes an us and them?

Can I ever wirte Lord without worrying that what I write is not worthy? Or what I write will not be misconstrued, pulled into something that was never intended? A plaything for my unintended audience? Do I dare to be silent the rest of the years You have given me here? Is that my lesson? To shut up and be quiet and hide in the face of so much atrocity? To suffer it, a self inflicted martyr? Or a willing accomplice?

Many of the ones who seek to do justice in this world dispense judgment, right or wrong, without regard to the injustice they hand out, is that right Lord? Does one balance the other? I know it doesn’t but I watch the news and no one cares, even me, as I stop at the food store stocking up for my family and my family alone.

At any rate Lord, you know me, right down to the center of my soul, far removed from my heart, lower, deeper, higher, more shallow, everywhere and nowhere. Simply almost undetectable here on earth-you know what I’m about. You know I’d love more guidance, a simple how-to book to make the world better, but heck, I’m 39, in earthly standards, I’ve been waiting awhile and it’s not here. Help me Lord. Just give me a list. Tell me how to stop the hurting.

God is here. God is here. God is here.

Allow him to use you.

Without those words, myself and many like me would be lost. How do you meander through a day? How do you forget the grace of each miracle that gives you a day?

God has spoken and he has said that you should love and show forgiving kindness.

This same statement echoes throughout the majority of all religions, why then, are we so lost? What is there to figure out? Forgive and forget. Continue to love. Leave anger at the door. It never means that we go back for more abuse, nor does it mean that we gossip or cause harm to others, no matter what they may have done to us. We move on, in loving kindness.

http://surfaceearth.wordpress.com/open-letter-to-god/

The Four Angels

2008-02-13T22:16:00.000-08:00

Rudyard Kipling

As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree
The Angel of the Earth came down, and offered Earth in fee;
But Adam did not need it,
Nor the plough he would not speed it,
Singing: --"Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire?"
(The Apple Tree's in bud)

As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree
The Angel of the Waters offered all the Seas in fee;
But Adam would not take 'em,
Nor the ships he wouldn't make 'em,
Singing:--"Water, Earth and Air and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire? "
(The Apple Tree's in leaf.)

As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree
The Angel of the Air he offered all the Air in fee;
But Adam did not crave it,
Nor the flight he wouldn't brave it,
Singing: --"Air and Water, Earth and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire?"
(The Apple Tree's in bloom.)

As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree
The Angel of the Fire rose up and not a word said he;
But he wished a flame and made it,
And in Adam's heart he laid it,
Singing: --"Fire, Fire, burning Fire!
Stand up, and reach your heart's desire!"
(The Apple Blossom's set.)

As Adam was a-working outside of Eden-Wall,
He used the Earth, he used the Seas, he used the Air and all;
Till out of black disaster
He arose to be a master
Of Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
But never reached his heart's desire!
(The Apple Tree's cut down!)

IF

2008-02-11T22:42:00.001-08:00

--Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

if you had a vineyard

2008-02-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

Sinead O'Connor

If you had a vineyard
On a fruitful hill
And you fenced it and cleared it
Of all stones until
You planted it
With the choicest of vine
And you even built a tower
And a press to make wine
And you looked that it would bring forth sweet grapes
And it gave only wild grapes
What would you say
Jerusalem and Judah
You be the judges I pray
Between me and my vineyard
This is what God says

What more could I have done in it
That I did not do in it
Why when I ask it for sweetness
It brings only bitterness

For the vineyard of the lord of hosts
Is the house of Israel
And the men of Judah
His pleasant plant

And he looks for justice but beholds oppression
And he hopes for equality but hears a cry
Jerusalem and Judah
This is God's reply

Sadness will come
To those who build house to house
And lay field to field 'til there's room
For none but you to dwell in the land
Oh in the land

And sadness will come
To those who call evil good
And good evil who present
Darkness as light
And light as darkness
Who present as sweetness
Only the things which are bitterness

For the vineyard of the lord of hosts
Is the house of Israel
And the men of Judah his pleasant plant
Oh oh his pleasant plant

Oh that my eyes were a fountain of tears
That I might weep for my poor people

cry for my people

2008-02-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

Phoenix Bird

2008-02-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

Description of the motif of phoenix bird

According to Egyptian sources a sacred bird was occasionally seen at the temple in Heliopolis, the city of the sun god. On some of the oldest and best pictures the bird resembles a heron. The bird symbolized the rising sun, i.e. the day and eternal rebirth. According to an Egyptian myth Osiris transformed into a phoenix bird in Heliopolis. The bird was from time to time depicted sitting in a tree next to Osiris' coffin, thus symbolizing Osiris', the dead man's, resurrection after death. In greek sources, among others Herodot, the phoenix bird's cyclic renewal is a core theme. Later authors have developed the story about the phoenix bird. Ovid and Mela told that the phoenix bird built itself a nest of Incense and died in it. According to Artemidor the bird burned in its nest made by incense and myrrh, after which a new phoenix bird emerged from the ashes. This story about the phoenix bird was spread and has lasted until today. Christian monks in the middle ages employed the phoenix bird as a symbol of Christ because of its voluntary death,rebirth af death and its pure way of coming to life.

Sources (both Danish): Salmonsens Konservationsleksikon, 1920, Gads Religionsleksikon, 1999.

In Andersen's tale "The Garden of Paradise" (1839) the princess in the Garden of Paradise, a fairy, who tempts the tale's prince to sin, like Eve did Adam, is very interested in hearing about the phoenix bird:

When the East Wind gave her the palm-leaf message from the phoenix, her eyes sparkled with pleasure.

In 1850 Andersen published a short prose hymn called "The Phoenix Bird". In "The Phoenix Bird" the phoenix bird is connected with the garden of Paradise and with the fall of man:

Beneath the tree of knowledge in the garden of paradise stood a rosebush. And here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His plumage was beautiful, his song glorious, and his flight was like the flashing of light. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and she and Adam were driven from paradise, a spark fell from the flaming sword of the angel into the nest of the bird and set it afire. The bird perished in the flames, but from the red egg in the nest there flew a new bird, the only one of its kind, the one solitary phoenix bird. The legend tells us how he lives in Arabia and how every century he burns himself to death in his nest, but each time a new phoenix, the only one in the world, flies out from the red egg.

Andersen here locates the phoenix bird in the center of God's original creation. Moreover, he identifies it with poetry itself:

When you were born in the garden of paradise, in its first rose, beneath the tree of knowledge, our Lord kissed you and gave you your true name – poetry!

Poetry – that is writing as a whole, prose is a part of the Danish "poesi" – thus is a divine creation, but its divine spark is not, as it was conceptualized in romantic aesthetics, a part of the light of creation, but of the spark, that "fell from the flaming sword of the angel" (cf. the motif Devil, Satan). The bird's and literature's fate is the same as Adam and Eve's after the banishment from the Garden, with a translation of Johan de Mylius' words in Forvandlingens pris ('The price of transformation'), Høst & Søn, Copenhagen 2004, p. 225: "a poetry in the order of modernity, stray and lonely". The phoenix' bird's way of living, always lonely and unique, always traveling btween death and birth in fire, makes it a figure that Andersen could make use of creating pictures of individuals in transforming destruction, like e.g. the little mermaid and the oak tree in "The Old Oak Tree's Last Dream".

2008-02-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

ME'OLAM RACHOK - From A Distant World

by Rav Kook

And from a distant world, full of illuminations,
The suns there are as broad as the ocean,
And the stars, like the light of our sun,
On the face of the sapphire stone, ...there.

The news reaches me,
Like dew full of overflowing delight,
Guiding me to the hidden Eden,
There...the treasure is stored.

All the faces there are joyful,
Every mouth sings songs of praise,
The highest feelings fill each heart,
And... all legs dance in jubilation.

The past and the future are scrolled into one,
Nothing hidden, everything known,
Every soul full of love for all,
Feelings for the multitudes
And...the light is sown.

All the pasts flow like rivers,
Purity, illumination, strength and light,
Life renewed, freedom and liberation,
Fills ...all our thoughts and activities.

And without teachers, guides, judges or politicians,
Everything is good, everything is clear,
There is no corruption or injustice, everything is with integrity,
And... the night shines like the day.

To a world such as this my soul longs,
In life such as this my spirit soars...

Translations by Itzchak Marmorstein.

I CQ, in search of understanding and love

2008-02-05T22:33:00.000-08:00

Countries with the greatest number of languages
Most countries in the world have more than one spoken language. With 311 languages, the United States is the fifth most linguistically diverse country in the world. Its diversity comes from both indigenous and immigrant sources: the 311 languages spoken in the United States are divided between 162 indigenous and 149 immigrant languages. On the other hand, Papua New Guinea's 820 languages are all indigenous.

http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/worldlanguages.htm

Breakdown of languages by world area, statistics

2008-02-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

Breakdown of languages by world area
It was mentioned earlier that Ethnologue lists 6,912 living languages. The table below reveals a striking difference between the median and the mean sizes of languages in different parts of the world.

http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/worldlanguages.htm

World area	Languages		Speakers
World area	Number	Percent	Number	Percent	Median	Mean
Africa	2,092	30.3%	675,887,158	11.8%	25,391	323,082
Americas	1,002	14.5%	47,559,381	0.8%	2,000	47,464
Asia	2,269	32.8%	3,489,897,147	61.0%	10,171	1,538,077
Europe	239	3.5%	1,504,393,183	26.3%	220,000	6,294,532
Pacific	1,310	19.0%	6,124,341	0.1%	800	4,675
Totals	6,912	100.0%	5,723,861,210	100.0%	7,000	828,105

The Confusion of Tongues

2008-02-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

Concerning The Tower Of Babylon, And The Confusion Of Tongues

1. Now the sons of Noah were three, -- Shem, Japhet, and Ham, born one hundred years before the Deluge. These first of all descended from the mountains into the plains, and fixed their habitation there; and persuaded others who were greatly afraid of the lower grounds on account of the flood, and so were very loath to come down from the higher places, to venture to follow their examples. Now the plain in which they first dwelt was called Shinar. God also commanded them to send colonies abroad, for the thorough peopling of the earth, that they might not raise seditions among themselves, but might cultivate a great part of the earth, and enjoy its fruits after a plentiful manner. But they were so ill instructed that they did not obey God; for which reason they fell into calamities, and were made sensible, by experience, of what sin they had been guilty: for when they flourished with a numerous youth, God admonished them again to send out colonies; but they, imagining the prosperity they enjoyed was not derived from the favor of God, but supposing that their own power was the proper cause of the plentiful condition they were in, did not obey him. Nay, they added to this their disobedience to the Divine will, the suspicion that they were therefore ordered to send out separate colonies, that, being divided asunder, they might the more easily be Oppressed.

2. Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! and that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers !

3. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them divers languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus: "When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon." But as to the plan of Shinar, in the country of Babylonia, Hestiaeus mentions it, when he says thus: "Such of the priests as were saved, took the sacred vessels of Jupiter Enyalius, and came to Shinar of Babylonia."

Vishnu rests with Lakshmi

2008-02-05T10:40:00.001-08:00

Kind and merciful Vishnu, preserver of life, is reborn whenever there is a crisis on Earth.

The Lotus Blossom

2008-02-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

The Lotus Blossom symbolizes the causality of the spiritual life.

Rising up from the mud of the swamp (the physical world, the body)
Growing up through its murky waters (the world of sensory desire & emotions)
Penetrating the air (the mental world of thoughts and ideas) and
Aspiring towards the light of the sun¹ (the spiritual illumination, the Dharma)
It blossoms into a pure white flower (S. Pundarika is the white lotus).
It thus represents the Four Virtues of Nirvana personified by the Four Bodhisattvas
Leading the countless Bodhisattvas that spring up from the earth.

The Lotus Blossom symbolizes the insperability of the cause & effect, the provision & reality, and the source & manifestation of enlightenment.

Kuang-Ting's introduction of the 'Hidden Meaning of the Lotus Sutra' (C. Fa-Hua Hsuan-I, J. Hokke Gengi) says:

Because the Wonderful Dharma (C. Miao-Fa, J. Myoho) is difficult to understand, the illustration of the Lotus Blossom (C. Lien-Hua, J. Renge) is put forward to make it easier to express.

In outlining this from beginning to end, there are six parts.

A. The Lotus Fruit represents the Reality (the seed-bearing fruit of enlightenment) whereas the Blossom represents the Provision (which is the means to enlightenment) – The quotes here are from the Chapter Two of The Lotus Sutra (On the Ways & Means):

1. For the sake of the lotus fruit, there is the blossom; this illustrates that for the sake of the reality one offers a provision. The text of the Sutra says:
“Although understanding the highest serenity of extinction,
With the power of ways and means
I indicated various different paths (to its realization);
But their reality was always the One Vehicle of Enlightenment”

2. The blossom opens up and the lotus fruit is manifested; this illustrates opening up the provision and revealing the reality. The text of The Lotus Sutra says:
“Opening up the doors of ways and means and
Revealing the true aspect of reality”

3. The blossom falls away, and the lotus fruit remains. This illustrates the discarding of the provision, and the establishing of the reality. The text of The Lotus Sutra says:
“Simply discarding the ways and means and
Only teaching the supreme path of enlightenment.”

And the seed-bearing lotus fruit illustrates the source whereas the blossom illustrates the manifestation. The quotes here are from the sixteenth Chapter of The Lotus Sutra (On Measuring the Life):

1. From the source (the lotus fruit) one takes on a manifestation (the blossom). The manifestation depends upon the source. The text of The Lotus Sutra says:
“I have really attained enlightenment and come here for eternity, as I have told you.
However to instruct and influence living beings I have taught
that while young I left home and attained Sambodhi.”

2. The blossom opens up the lotus is manifested; this illustrates opening up the manifestation and revealing the source. The text of The Lotus Sutra says:
“All the world reasons that I have just in this lifetime first attained enlightenment,
but I have attained enlightenment and come here for limitless boundless lifetimes (kalpas).”

3. The blossom falls away and the lotus is attained; this illustrates the discarding of the manifestation and the establishing of the source. The text of The Lotus Sutra says:
“All the teachings of the Buddhas are like this to save living beings,
all are true and none are false.”

Because of this we first indicate the Wonderful Dharma (C. Miao-Fa, J. Myoho) and then we illustrate the Lotus Blossom (C. Lien-Hoa, J. Renge).

Across the Universe

2008-02-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

2008-01-28T20:57:00.001-08:00

The Book of Endings

Some time while you read this page
or the next one, a species –
a species as vast as your life
and the lives of all your ancestors
chasing bison across Old Europe
or huddled around a fire – will disappear.
A species that has found its own
ways of eating, of moving, of hiding
from predators; a species
that meets itself and makes love
in the bark of a tree or on the leaves
of the canopy or in the humid dirt.
And it has come with us for millions
of years, for millions of years,
it has watched the night
and day follow each other, it has breathed
with the frogs, it has wrapped
the stars around it like a blanket,
a patterned music, a map.
At the beginning of this page
there may have been three or four left,
but now there is only one.
And if you read this page again,
it will be another one, another species,
another story of four billion years
telling itself for the last time.
Wherever life began – a word, a wish
breathed into water, a seed falling
through space – it was all of us
there – as it is now
in this unknown last one.
It has bored into wood, it has carried
water on its back, it has drunk
the dew from its back in the desert,
it has fed its young with strips of
leaves, it has built homes out of bark,
it has caged the sky into a song,
it has spoken in ways no man has heard.
it has emerald wings
it has sapphire wings
it has wings of night
you will never see it
it is already gone.

- Sam Taylor

Modern War

2008-01-28T00:05:00.000-08:00

Ludwig von Mises: "Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle. This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest. It is probable that scientists will discover some methods of defense against the atomic bomb. But this will not alter things, it will merely prolong for a short time the process of the complete destruction of civilization." - Human Action

Arturo Toscanini

2008-01-25T23:39:00.000-08:00

USA abortion statistics 1995-2006

2008-01-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

year	live births	live births, estimated	abortions, reported	abortions, estimated	abortions, residents, in country only	abortions, residents, obtained abroad	abortions, residents, total	abortions, occurrences by non-residents	miscarriages	fetal deaths	abortion ratio		abortion %		abortion rate, residents

1995	3899589		1211119	1359400	729749	29	729778	1860	982000		187.1	348.6	15.8	25.8	22.5
1996	3891494		1365700	1360160	743471	22	743493	1239	983000		191.1	349.5	16.0	25.9	22.4
1997	3880894		1186229	(1335000)	905607	19	905626	1336	982000		233.4	344.0	18.9	25.6	21.9
1998	3941553		996372	(1319000)	890668	17	890685	1397	999000		226.0	334.6	18.4	25.1	21.5
1999	3959417		949145	1314800	841063	19	841082	1496	1003000		212.4	332.1	17.5	24.9	21.4
2000	4058814		938972	1312990	826895	29	826924	1278	1029000	13948	203.7	323.5	16.9	24.4	21.3
2001	4025933		941402	(1291000)	832316	35	832351	1637		13704	206.7	320.7	17.1	24.3	20.9
2002	4021726		948712	(1269000)	839735	21	839756	1525		13285	208.8	315.5	17.3	24.0	20.5
2003	4089950		946137	(1250000)	932786	20	932806	1341			228.1	305.6	18.6	23.4	20.2
2004	4112052		934597	1222100	816802*	18	816820	1210			198.6	297.2	16.6	22.9	19.7
2005	4138349		756120*	1206200	654670*	26	654696*	1096			158.2*	291.5	13.7*	22.6	19.4
2006	4265996		517604*		359590*		359590*				84.3*		7.8*
year	live births	live births, estimated	abortions, reported	abortions, estimated	abortions, residents, in country only	abortions, residents, obtained abroad	abortions, residents, total	abortions, occurrences by non-residents	miscarriages	fetal deaths	residents, in/out of country	all in country	residents, in/out of country	all in country	abortion rate, residents

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html

another view of what may-or may not- have happened that day

2008-01-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

2008-01-20T23:01:00.000-08:00

Icarus Considers

Benjamin S. Grossberg

There is no death in the sun. I know it will look far otherwise

to whoever watches from shore, to whoever stands

at the blue Aegean, pointing up at a mythical bird soaring too close

to the light, or those milling in markets who catch what must seem

to be a stone falling, or rather, a stone pitching a moment
as the last of my feathers fly away from me like tiny birds themselves,

each discovering individual flight, and the wax spills out,
hardens to lace as it falls back toward the ocean. I know

it will look like an image of failure. How could it not
with Daedalus leagues below me screaming himself hoarse,

jerking his earth-heavy body like a moth in an attempt to stabilize
his flight, shouting up that the sun will kill me? But there is no death

in the sun. At that height my lungs will fill with purer air
and I will meet the brightness like a lover. I will open my wings

and my eyes, which will, in a manner, burn with his face.
What else can it look like from a distance but failure,

how can anyone expect to understand from solid earth?
What falls away, what burns, is mere husk thrown off,

and I will emerge lighter, able to continue rising into his arms
without the trappings of wax and feathers, without the shouting

of Daedalus or the blue Aegean, where men
who don't understand will look skyward, shield their eyes

and see, or think they see, something impossible
in the clear sky—a domain they have surrendered to mythology,

birds, clouds and the beautiful, unreachable, life-giving sun—
light meeting light.

The Total Number of Orphan Children Worldwide

2008-01-17T19:17:00.000-08:00

Here are two – very different – estimates for the number of orphans worldwide. UNICEF estimates the number of orphans at approximately 210 million. On the other hand, TheWeekly.com estimates approx. 13 million. As a compromise, let’s proceed with an estimate of 100 million orphans worldwide.
We have seen that the percentage of such children who are in orphanages varies greatly – from 25% in Russia, to about 17% in the US to as little as a fraction of a percent in Uganda. Since a weighted average approach would yield something that is much closer to third world standards (because the vast majority of orphans are found in the third world), we can safely assume the percentage we are seeking is in the low single digits.
This means that there are anywhere from two to five million orphans in orphanages worldwide, an estimate that is inline with the HRW world report. source: UNICEF and HRW.
The vast majority of orphans are found in the third world..

Other Statistics

USAID.GOV: The total number of orphans worldwide is projected to reach 44 million by 2010
An article from October 10 2002 in the Weekly provides the following statistics:
“...The number of orphans worldwide is estimated at more than 13 million...”
source: TheWeekly.com
In Russia, however, about 25% of children left without parental care are estimated to be living in institutions –“Official,stock-type information from Russia shows that the number of children left without parental care rose from
421,000 to 533,000 between 1989 and 1995 and to 637,000 by 1999. These figures suggest a huge 1.5-fold increase over the last 10 years. In each year, about a quarter of these children were living in institutions.” source: broken source link
According to McLaughlin writing in USA Today - “...the percentage of kids in institutions dropped from 57.8% in 1933 to 31% in 1962 and 17.1% in 1989...” (this is, of course, the percentage of kids not living with their organic family).
A report from the WorldBank provides some statistics for the percent of children in orphanages in 3rd world countries – Rwanda – 5,000 of 400,000 orphans living in orphanages.
Uganda – 1,300 of 1,700,000 orphans living in orphanages
This is because the cost to run an orphanage in the third world is an order of magnitude or two higher than the foster care option - “Cost comparisons conducted in Uganda show the ratio of operating costs for an orphanage to be 14 times higher than those for community care. A 1992 study by the World Bank found that institutional care at one facility in Tanzania cost $1,000 per year per child, a figure six times more expensive than the average cost of foster care in that
country. Other studies have found a ratio of 1:20, or even up to 1:100.” -source: UNICEF

Goldberg Variations

2008-01-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

If the God's gave me a choice to write poetry like Shakespeare or play Bach like Glenn Gould, I might very well go with Gould, humming and all.

AS YOU ARE

2008-01-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

AS YOU ARE

2008-01-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

Jean-Jacques Goldman

She had clear eyes and a velvet robe
Besides her mother and the family around her
She stood while she's a little distracted in the soft sunlight at the end of the day
The picture is not so good, but one can see
The happiness itself there and the evening's softness
She loved music, especially Schumann and then Mozart

As you do as you do as you do

She went to the school from the village below
She learned the books she learned the laws
She sang about frogs and princesses that sleep in the woods
She loved her doll she loved her friends
Especially Ruth and Anna but especially Jeremiah
Maybe they marry one day in Warsaw

As you are as you are as you are
As you are as you are as you are
As you are while I am looking down at you
As you are while sleeping and dreaming of whom?
As you are as you are as you are

Days passed by in the innocence time
In it was her sole love

Her name was Sarah she was not even eight years old
Her life was soft dreams and white clouds
But other people had decided otherwise

As you are as you are as you are
As you are as you are as you are
As you are while I am looking down at you
As you are while sleeping and dreaming of whom?
As you are as you are as you are

She had your clear eyes and she was your age
She was a little girl without history and very wise
But she was not born like you here and now ...

UNICEF children statistical table 2005

2008-01-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

Country Comparison | Indicator Comparison

	Infant mortality rate (under 1), 2005	Annual no. of births (thousands), 2005	Annual no. of under-5 deaths (thousands), 2005	GNI per capita (US$), 2005	Life expectancy at birth (years), 2005
United States	6	4165	29	43740	78
East Asia and Pacific	26	29820	984	2092	71
Least developed countries	97	28258	4323	383	53
South Asia	63	37077	3114	691	64
Sub-Saharan Africa	101	28715	4853	764	46
World	52	133449	10142	7002	68

A mote of dust suspended

2008-01-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

Dr. Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

and:
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.

Walking on Water

2008-01-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

Nurse's Song

2008-01-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

ВЕЧЕРНЯЯ ПЕСНЯ
Виллиам Блейк

Отголоски игры долетают с горы,
Оглашают темнеющий луг.
После трудного дня нет забот у меня
В сердце тихо, и тихо вокруг.

— Дети, дети, домой! Гаснет день за горой
Выступает ночная роса.
Погуляли — и спать. Завтра выйдем опять
Только луч озарит небеса.

— Нет, о нет, не сейчас! Светлый день не угас.
И привольно и весело нам.
Все равно не уснем — птицы реют кругом
И блуждают стада по холмам.

— Хорошо, подождем, но с последним лучом
На покой удалимся и мы.—
Снова топот и гам по лесам, по лугам
А вдали отвечают холмы.

No, No, Let Us Play

2008-01-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Nurse's Song
William Blake

When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
Till the morning appears in the skies."
"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all covered with sheep."
"Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed."
The little ones leaped, and shouted, and laughed,
And all the hills echoèd.

2008-01-11T19:22:00.000-08:00

The Power of the Dog
Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passsion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair--
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-term loan is as bad as a long--
So why in--Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Go Back to Sleep

2008-01-11T09:20:00.001-08:00

Go Back to Sleep

Rumi

Go back to sleep.
Yes, you are allowed.
You have no Love in your heart,
go back to sleep.
His Love and his sorrow
are exclusive to us,
you go back to sleep.

I have been burnt
by the fire of the sorrow of Love.
You have no such yearning in your heart,
go back to sleep.

The path of Love,
has seventy-two folds and countless facets.
Your love and religion
is all about deceit and hypocrisy,
go back to sleep.

We put ourselves in Love's hands,
and will wait for her bidding,
since you are in your own hands,
you can go back to sleep.

I consume nothing but pain and blood,
and you, the finest delicacies;
and of course after each feast,
you may want to take a nap.
So just go back to sleep.

I have torn to pieces my robe of speech,
and have let go of the desire to converse.
You who are not naked yet,
go back to sleep.

Sub- Saharan Africa. AIDS/HIV Statistics

2008-01-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

Estimated 24.5 million adults and children were living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2005.

During that year, an estimated 2 million people died from AIDS. The epidemic has left behind some 12 million orphaned African children.

The estimated number of adults and children living with HIV/AIDS, the number of deaths from AIDS, and the number of living orphans in individual countries in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2005 are shown below.

Country	People living with HIV/AIDS	Adult (15-49) rate %	Women with HIV/AIDS	Children with HIV/AIDS	AIDS deaths	Orphans due to AIDS
Angola	320,000	3.7	170,000	35,000	30,000	160,000
Benin	87,000	1.8	45,000	9,800	9,600	62,000
Botswana	270,000	24.1	140,000	14,000	18,000	120,000
Burkina Faso	150,000	2.0	80,000	17,000	12,000	120,000
Burundi	150,000	3.3	79,000	20,000	13,000	120,000
Cameroon	510,000	5.4	290,000	43,000	46,000	240,000
Central African Republic	250,000	10.7	130,000	24,000	24,000	140,000
Chad	180,000	3.5	90,000	16,000	11,000	57,000
Comoros	<500	<0.1	<100	<100	<100	-
Congo	120,000	5.3	61,000	15,000	11,000	110,000
Côte d'Ivoire	750,000	7.1	400,000	74,000	65,000	450,000
Dem. Republic of Congo	1,000,000	3.2	520,000	120,000	90,000	680,000
Djibouti	15,000	3.1	8,400	1,200	1,200	5,700
Equatorial Guinea	8,900	3.2	4,700	<1,000	<1,000	4,600
Eritrea	59,000	2.4	31,000	6,600	5,600	36,000
Ethiopia	420,000- 1,300,000	0.9- 3.5	190,000- 730,000	30,000- 220,000	38,000- 130,000	280,000- 870,000
Gabon	60,000	7.9	33,000	3,900	4,700	20,000
Gambia	20,000	2.4	11,000	1,200	1,300	3,800
Ghana	320,000	2.3	180,000	25,000	29,000	170,000
Guinea	85,000	1.5	53,000	7,000	7,100	28,000
Guinea-Bissau	32,000	3.8	17,000	3,200	2,700	11,000
Kenya	1,300,000	6.1	740,000	150,000	140,000	1,100,000
Lesotho	270,000	23.2	150,000	18,000	23,000	97,000
Liberia*	-	2.0-5.0	-	-	-	-
Madagascar	49,000	0.5	13,000	1,600	2,900	13,000
Malawi	940,000	14.1	500,000	91,000	78,000	550,000
Mali	130,000	1.7	66,000	16,000	11,000	94,000
Mauritania	12,000	0.7	6,300	1,100	<1,000	6,900
Mauritius	4,100	0.6	<1,000	-	<100	-
Mozambique	1,800,000	16.1	960,000	140,000	140,000	510,000
Namibia	230,000	19.6	130,000	17,000	17,000	85,000
Niger	79,000	1.1	42,000	8,900	7,600	46,000
Nigeria	2,900,000	3.9	1,600,000	240,000	220,000	930,000
Rwanda	190,000	3.1	91,000	27,000	21,000	210,000
Senegal	61,000	0.9	33,000	5,000	5,200	25,000
Sierra Leone	48,000	1.6	26,000	5,200	4,600	31,000
Somalia	44,000	0.9	23,000	4,500	4,100	23,000
South Africa	5,500,000	18.8	3,100,000	240,000	320,000	1,200,000
Swaziland	220,000	33.4	120,000	15,000	16,000	63,000
Togo	110,000	3.2	61,000	9,700	9,100	88,000
Uganda	1,000,000	6.7	520,000	110,000	91,000	1,000,000
United Rep. Of Tanzania	1,400,000	6.5	710,000	110,000	140,000	1,100,000
Zambia	1,100,000	17.0	570,000	130,000	98,000	710,000
Zimbabwe	1,700,000	20.1	890,000	160,000	180,000	1,100,000
Total sub-Saharan Africa	24,500,000	6.1	13,200,000	2,000,000	2,000,000	12,000,000

* Insufficient data available for Liberia

Notes

Adults in this page are defined as men and women aged over 15, unless specified otherwise.

Children are defined as people under the age of 15, whilst orphans are people aged under 18 who have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

Sourse UNAIDS/WHO 2006 Report on the global AIDS epidemic

It's time

2008-01-09T08:32:00.001-08:00

The Art Of Poetry

2008-01-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Asking the Hard Question

2008-01-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

Posted in memory of Andrew Olmsted, killed in Iraq and many more, Americans and Iraqis alike.

Andrew Olmsted

I have been reliably informed that my posting of late has been rather dark. That's probably true, in no small part because it seems that no matter where I turn, I end up reading things like this:

The goal of Democrats -- and their allies -- over the next two years should not and cannot be to stop the war cold turkey. The goal should be to politicize the issue in preparation for 2008.

I may not agree with the assessment of the far left, but at least they're honest. They think we've lost in Iraq and that we should get out now. Contrast that with those who see in Iraq a wonderful opportunity to win more seats for their party, like publius. It pleases me to no end that if I end up getting killed in Iraq, at least my wife can take comfort in knowing my death may help the Democrats win the White House in 2008. Really, that makes it all worthwhile.

Harsh? Absolutely. And I realize that publius' motives are sincere. But while the odds are pretty good I'll live through my trip to Iraq, the fact remains that too many of my comrades will die in Iraq between now and the day a new President takes office in January 2009. If people think that we have lost in Iraq, then they have a duty to say so and do what they can to get us out of Iraq, not position themselves to be in better shape to do so in two years. The idea that Congress cannot stop this war flies in the face of the facts. Congress can quite easily end the war within six months if they so choose. No money equals no war, and while the Democrats aren't strong enough to pass a resolution rescinding the Authorization to Use Military Force, they are certainly strong enough not to pass a budget funding further operations in Iraq. Yes, six months is a long time and more people will die, but that eighteen month window means perhaps 1,000 more dead soldiers and many times more soldiers whose lives will be forever changed by the wounds they receive there.

Of course, doing so would probably be politically devastating to the Democrats. The Republicans would use such a move as ammunition for scurrilous demagoguery, carefully avoiding the questions they've mostly been able to dodge over the past four years about their responsibility for the war. But the war would still end, and while it might hurt the Democrats initially, given that their actions would come roughly a year before the next election, who knows how they might look in the fall of 2008 when American soldiers are no longer coming home in caskets; President George H.W. Bush looked nigh-unbeatable a year before the 1992 election; I assume we all remember how that one turned out.

More to the point, it seems to me that it is the right thing to do, if you believe we should be getting out of Iraq. If you think the surge cannot work and that we've lost, I fail to see how you can justify waiting an additional 18 months because the politics aren't right. John Kerry once asked how you can ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake. It would appear that for a lot of Democrats, that question is easier to answer than Kerry thought.

Posted at February 19, 2007 02:37 PM

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer

2008-01-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

The Genius of the Crowd

2008-01-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

There is enough treachery, hatred,
violence,
Absurdity in the average human
being
To supply any given army on any given
day.
AND The Best At Murder Are Those
Who Preach Against It.
AND The Best At Hate Are Those
Who Preach LOVE
AND THE BEST AT WAR
-FINALLY-ARE THOSE WHO
PREACH
PEACE

Those Who Preach GOD
NEED God
Those Who Preach PEACE
Do Not Have Peace.
THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE
DO NOT HAVE LOVE
BEWARE THE PREACHERS
Beware The Knowers.

Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS

Beware Those Who Either Detest
Poverty Or Are Proud Of It

BEWARE Those Quick To Praise
For They Need PRAISE In Return

BEWARE Those Quick To Censure:
They Are Afraid Of What They Do
Not Know

Beware Those Who Seek Constant
Crowds; They Are Nothing
Alone

Beware
The Average Man
The Average Woman
BEWARE Their Love

Their Love Is Average, Seeks
Average
But There Is Genius In Their Hatred
There Is Enough Genius In Their
Hatred To Kill You, To Kill
Anybody.

Not Wanting Solitude
Not Understanding Solitude
They Will Attempt To Destroy
Anything
That Differs
From Their Own

Not Being Able
To Create Art
They Will Not
Understand Art

They Will Consider Their Failure
As Creators
Only As A Failure
Of The World

Not Being Able to Love Fully
They Will BELIEVE Your Love
Incomplete
AND THEN THEY WILL HATE
YOU

And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect
Like A Shining Diamond
Like a Knife
Like A Mountain
LIKE A TIGER
LIKE Hemlock

Their Finest
ART

Charles Bukowski

On Art

2008-01-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Cicely, 1992

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Edith Wharton

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
Elisabeth Bowen

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.: Piet Mondrian

be still

2008-01-02T22:31:00.000-08:00

Sunyata

2008-01-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

In Sunyata:
No Form, no Feeling, no Thought,
No Volition, no Consciousness.
No Eyes, no Ears, no Nose, no Tongue, no Body, no Mind.
No Seeing, no Hearing, no Smelling, no Tasting,
No Touching, no Thinking;
No world of Sight.
No world of Consciousness;
No Ignorance and no end to Ignorance;
No Old Age and Death and no end to Old Age and Death.
No Suffering, no Craving, no Extinction, no Path;
No Wisdom, no Attainment.

- Heart Sutra

White Mountains, California

2008-01-02T19:26:00.001-08:00

Cold Mountains

2008-01-02T19:04:00.000-08:00

HAN SHAN, THE COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS

Spring water in the green creek is clear

Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white

Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself

Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.

In my first thirty years of life

I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.

Walked by rivers through deep green grass

Entered cities of boiling red dust.

Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;

Read books and wrote poems on history.

Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:

I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders,

People who climb here are always getting scared.

When the moon shines, water sparkles clear

When the wind blows, grass swishes and rattles.

On the bare plum, flowers of snow

On the dead stump, leaves of mist.

At the touch of rain it all turns fresh and live

At the wrong season you can't ford the creeks.

Cold Mountain is a house

Without beans or walls.

The six doors left and right are open

The hall is sky blue.

The rooms all vacant and vague

The east wall beats on the west wall

At the center nothing.

Borrowers don't bother me

In the cold I build a little fire

When I'm hungry I boil up some greens.

I've got no use for the kulak

With hs big barn and pasture -

He just sets uo a prison for himself.

Once in he can't get out.

Think it over -

You know it might happen to you.

If I hide out at Cold Mountain

Living off mountain plants and berries -

All my lifetime, why worry?

One follows his karma through.

Days and months slip by like water,

Time is like sparks knocked off flint.

Go ahead and let the world change -

I'm happy to sit among these cliffs.

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease -

No more tangled, hung up mind.

I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,

Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.

I've lived at Cold Mountain - how many autumns.

Alone, I hum a song - utterly without regret.

Hungry, I eat one grain of Immortal medicine

Mind solid and sharp; leaning on a stone.

On top of Cold Mountain the lone round moon

Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.

Honor this priceless natural treasure

Concealed in five shadows, sunk deep in the flesh.

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,

Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.

Gone, and a million things leave no trace

Loosed, and it flows through galaxies

A fountain of light, into the very mind -

Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:

Now I know the pearl of the Buddha nature.

translated by Gary Snyder

Sunyata, greatest wisdom

2008-01-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

"That which is profound, has sunyata and non-attachment as its significance. No form nor deeds, no rising nor falling, are its implications."

"The greatest wisdom is the so-called sunyata."

Sunyata (Emptiness) in the Mahayana Context

For example, sunyata and the state of nirvana where there is no rising nor falling, are interpreted by most people as a state of non-existence and gloom. They fail to realise that quite the opposite, sunyata is of substantial and positive significance.

The sutras often use the word "great void" to explain the significance of sunyata. In general, we understand the "great void" as something that contains absolutely nothing. However, from a Buddhist perspective, the nature of the "great void" implies something which does not obstruct other things, in which all matters perform their own functions. Materials are form, which by their nature, imply obstruction. The special characteristic of the "great void" is non-obstruction. The "great void" therefore, does not serve as an obstacle to them. Since the "great void" exhibits no obstructive tendencies, it serves as the foundation for matter to function. In other words, if there was no "great void" nor characteristic of non-obstruction, it would be impossible for the material world to exist and function.

The "great void" is not separated from the material world. The latter depends on the former. We can state that the profound significance of sunyata and the nature of sunyata in Buddhism highlights the "great void’s" non-obstructive nature.

Sunyata does not imply the "great void". Instead, it is the foundation of all phenomena (form and mind). It is the true nature of all phenomena, and it is the basic principle of all existence. In other words, if the universe’s existence was not empty nor impermanent, then all resulting phenomena could not have arisen due to the co-existence of various causes and there would be no rising nor falling. The nature of sunyata is of positive significance!

Calmness and extinction are the opposite of rising and falling. They are another way to express that there is no rising and falling. Rising and falling are the common characteristics of worldly existence. All phenomena are always in the cycle of rising and falling. However, most people concentrate on living (rising). They think that the universe and life are the reality of a continuous existence.

Buddhism on the other hand, promotes the value of a continuous cessation (falling). This cessation does not imply that it ceases to exist altogether. Instead, it is just a state in the continuous process of phenomena. In this material world, or what we may call this "state of existence", everything eventually ceases to exist. Cessation is definitely the home of all existences. Since cessation is the calm state of existence and the eventual refuge of all phenomena, it is also the foundation for all activities and functions.

The Amitabha Buddha who was, and is, revered and praised by Buddhists around the world, radiates indefinite light and life from this "state of cessation". This state is a continuous process of calmness. It will be the eventual refuge for us all. If we think carefully about the definitions of calmness and extinction, then we can deduce that they are the true natural end-points of rising and falling. The true nature of the cycle of rising and falling is calmness and extinction. Because of this nature, all chaos and conflicts in the state of rising and falling will eventually cease. This is attainable by the realisation of prajna.

(Translated by Lim Yang & Shi Neng Rong, edited by Ke Rong, proofread by Shi Neng Rong (21-9-1996)

2008

2008-01-01T01:12:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to the children of tomorrow.

Teach your children well

2007-12-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

Shine over Babylon

2007-12-30T10:49:00.000-08:00

Metta, the loving kindness

2007-12-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

By the Late Venerable Ashin Thittila

In its outward appearance sentimental love seems to be very sweet but it is like fire - indeed far worse than fire. Once it is born it grows rapidly, flowers at one moment and then it scorches and burns the possessor in another moment leaving ugly wounds and scars. That is why in Burmese we say 'Achitkyi, amyetkyi'. The more sentimental love you have, the more hate you have and the more suffering you have; because it is like fire which burns very easily. But Metta has a cooling effect like the soft touch of a gentle hand - soft but firm - without changing its sympathy. So it only creates a calm, pleasant atmosphere.

Sorrow for loved ones is not a sign of this love - Metta. Love is strength, because it is pure and gives strength. It is not weakness.

I would like to recite, not Pali but a translation of a passage from the Metta Sutta - a very valuable Sutta. You hear Sayadaws( Sayadaw: Burmese for Mahatheras. A Thera is a fully ordained Bhikkhu of 10 years' standing. A Mahathera is a fully ordained Bhikkhu of 20 years' standing ) recite this Sutta in Pali on almost every occasion.

This passage gives an example of what love is. This is not a perfect example, but for want of a better example the Buddha has chosen the love of a mother. He says in the Metta Sutta: 'Just as a mother, even at the risk of her life loves and protects her child - the only child - so let a man cultivate this Universal Love - towards the whole universe; below, above, around, unstinted, unmixed with any feeling of opposing interest. Let him remain steadfastly in this state of mind, all the while from the time he awakes, whether he be standing, walking. sitting or lying down. This state of heart is the best in the world'.

This is the model held up by the Buddha to the world. This is the ideal of what man should be to man. This is the appeal to every heart. It is a service for all in the form of a mother's love. Does a mother merely radiate her love in the bringing up of her child? Can any one express this deathless love of a mother for her child that she has within her heart? If you consider a mother's love for her child you will find that it is boundless. Therefore it is called 'Appamana' in Pali. It has no limit.

The love of a mother who has only one child is the example chosen by the Buddha. Imagine a mother's love; when a child is hungry she is watching carefully to feed it before it asks her for it. When the child is in danger, she will risk her own life. Thus in every way she helps her child. Therefore the Buddha asks us to love all beings as a mother loves her only child. If we can do it even up to a certain extent, I think the world will be a different place - happier and more peaceful.

Greenland, melting ice

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close to tipping point?

Etna, from space

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Where the beauty dwells

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God, we need a miracle

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beːnɜziːr bʰʊʈʈoː
21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007)

Einstein speaks

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"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets."

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

"There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation."

Sons and daughters

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