Thursday, June 26, 2008
Living on the Ice Shelf -- Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis
1. Farewell to the Holocene
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.
This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.
The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the "golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry..........
Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.
[Note for TomDispatch readers: Those of you who are environmentally minded and interested in pursuing such matters further might consider spending some time at the superb website of Grist Magazine and visiting, as well, an interesting and provocative new online magazine/website, Environment 360. Tom]
Copyright 2008 Mike Davis
Friday, June 20, 2008
World Refugee Day @ Mehrva Gallery
at Mehrva Gallery
The Irony -- stunned me first. Is it possible? have I been a refugee all these years? Someone in here says: Yes. And still a refugee? yup. But many people feel like refugees in this country that has seen some of the largest movements of people in recent history. refugees coming from afghanistan and iraq -- and yes, refugees leaving iran.
So please go to Mehrva's Gallery, buy a painting, thank the artists, maybe kiss the owner, or just buy a T-shirt or something for the afghan taking care of your building. HT.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Rumi and Shams -- A History of Spiritual Love
By Osman Mir Do you love yourself more than you love me?
Beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you.
I've disappeared from myself and my attributes,
I am present only for you.
I've forgotten all my learnings,
but from knowing you I've become a scholar.
I've lost all my strength, but from your power I am able.
I love myself ... I love you.
I love you ... I love myself.
New York, April 2004
The Whirling Dervishes of Turkey finished their last gyration and the audience broke into applause. As we spilled out onto the New York City sidewalk, a feeling gnawed at me for failing to understand the understated magnificence of it all. The gap between my expectations of instant enlightenment and the reality of prolonged mystical deliberation stared back at me. Standing beneath a cold street light and gasping to understand over 700 years of thinking after a temporal visual whirl was futile. It eluded me and yet was one of those fleeting moments that leave an indelible ember behind. It was not the time for that specific cinder to combust but, nonetheless, the seeds of the thought had been planted. There was another encounter, one with an irresistible lure, that left at least one participant wondering of its purpose; a chance encounter took place several hundred years ago in present day Turkey.
Konya, Turkey, November 1244
Face to face stood two strangers, Maulana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Shams al-Din of Tabriz; Rumi, a young demure scholar and Shams, a spiritual wayfarer with a penchant for the uncertain. The repercussions of each word spoken at this encounter would reverberate through the fabric of spiritual and lyrical history forever. They met when both were ready --Shams to share; Rumi to seek; and both, to develop into a spiritual oneness. By the young age of forty, Rumi was a brilliant scholar. Shams, at sixty, was a free-spirited wanderer. The transformation was instant. The sheer opposition of their innate temperament may have been the flicker that caught the coal. The encounter, subsequent relationship and resulting consequences demonstrate the absolute unimaginability of fate in mythic proportions. Where does a chance encounter, a whispered conversation, a bold question to a stranger take someone on their quest of personal discovery? By some unverifiable accounts, Shams had initially noticed Rumi in Syria when the latter was 21 years old but had deemed the scholar not yet disposed for their partnership and that he chose to wait for 16 years before approaching him again.
On the streets of Konya that night, Rumi was on his path home with he came across the strange and hypnotic Shams. The latter, without any introduction, asked him pointed philosophical questions intended to fluster Rumi’s concepts of enlightenment. While Rumi responded, mustering the collective strength and wit of his years of devotion to religion and jurisprudence; the flicker in Shams’ words, his speech, mannerism and conduct compelled Rumi to explore further by inviting the wanderer along and into his home. The drifter’s words had heated dormant embers that Rumi may or may not have been aware of, and which certainly dictated his actions for time to come. From that day forward, Shams possessed him. Shams grasped Rumi’s understanding of religion and infused it with a love and devotion that elevated him from scholar to philosopher; He went into seclusion with the stranger, leaving aside all that composed his life – family, students, and disciples. This detachment lasted for three months and inspired him for a lifetime. His heart engulfed his systematic, controlled mind with the message of humanity and oneness with God, a result of his pointed discourses. Rumi’s professorial sermons were replaced with ecstatic soliloquies of God, love and humanity. Furthermore, the indelible mark of this change began filtering through; first in Rumi’s actions, evidenced in his seclusion and fanatic devotion, and secondly in his poetry which continues to enchant readers across a palette of backgrounds, cultures, and religions today.............
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Self-Replication in 3D
Global Guerrillas
Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures. By John Robb
"Wealth without money...""Think of RepRap as China on your Desktop"
Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc., 8 April 2008
In the mid to late 70's a small group of tinkerers in the "Homebrew Computer Club" created many of the foundational technologies, techniques and concepts required for personal computers (it also attracted the ire of a protean Bill Gates). The early efforts of the group seem extremely crude by modern standards, but within a decade, it was clear that the process that they had initiated was remaking the world.
A similar tinkering process is now underway in micro-manufacturing. An open source project called RepRap is working on micro machines that can produce (fabricate) products on your desktop. Further, it has achieved self-replication (actually, a very close approximation thereof), so each RepRap machine has the capacity to produce a copy of itself. Again, it's early days, but the implications of how efforts like these will enable DIY production (for everything from consumer products to weapons) are clear as day. Personal fabrication on a global basis is less than a decade away.Friday, June 13, 2008
'A village of solutions' in San Francisco June 21
by David Huck
On Saturday, June 21st, The Big One will kick off what may be the first of a new breed of conferences aimed at addressing local responses to climate change, peak oil and the ways in which we respond to the changing world around us.
The organizers are setting up tents in Golden Gate Park with the invitation to, "Come engage with fellow citizens, businesses, non-profits and municipal agencies in workshops and hands-on demonstrations designed to create beautiful communities focused on Sustainability, Health, Local Food and Green Economy, Music, Spirit, and Youth Engagement."
This "village of engagement" will be built of tents where organizations grouped under the above headings will present to interested citizens as well as learn from each other.
Unlike other events focused on sustainable community, there will be no talking heads and the event will be "100% commercial free." No selling of anything, including food. An eclectic mix of local music by local bands will be performed throughout the weekend.
The Big One
Saturday and Sunday
June 21st and 22nd
9am to 7pm
Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park (next to the Children's Playground)
Participating Organizatios
* Partners: Wiser Earth, SF Bike Coalition, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Slow Food Nation, Global Oneness Project, Café Gratitude, Alemany Farm, National Holistic Institute, SF Peak Oil Task Force, Network for Good, Dig Co-Operative, Global Exchange, Green Music Network, Urban Alliance for Sustainability and many more!
* Live Music: Alan Tower, Fontaine’s M.U.S.E, Land of the Blind, Amanda West, M.J. Greenmountain, Irina Rivkin, The Temple Bhajan Band and others to be announced.
* Food Donations: Acme Food Co., Guayaki Yerba Mate, Arizmendi Bakery, Pacific Coast Farmers, and Veritable Vegetables. Attendees are encouraged to bring food and drink to participate in the city’s largest potluck.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EB contributor David Huck submitted this before continuing his 2650-mile trek of the Pacific Coast Trail. As an Oberlin student, David created and taught a course on peak oil. -BA
Is Google making us stupid?
July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly
What the Internet is doing to our brains
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »
brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment ..................Read more
Thursday, June 12, 2008
CONSERVATIVES TRYING TO GET PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD TO MODERATE BEHAVIOR
Kamal Nazer Yasin 6/10/08
As US President George W. Bush lobbies European Union leaders for tighter economic sanction against Iran, conservative elements in Tehran are taking steps to moderate the behavior of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Bush was in Slovenia on June 10 for a summit meeting with EU leaders. A variety of media outlets reported that the United States and EU were in agreement that economic sanctions against Iran needed to be strengthened unless Tehran took verifiable action to halt its uranium enrichment activities. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, was expected to travel to Tehran later this week or early next week for another round of talks aimed at getting Iran to cooperate with the West on the nuclear issue.
While the nuclear program remains a priority concern for members of the governing elite in Iran, their attention is also focused on domestic politics, given that a presidential election is looming in 2009. Concern is mounting among various conservative factions in Tehran that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational approach to international politics, combined with his thorough mismanagement of the economy, is undermining the traditionalists’ hold on power. While many continue to view Ahmadinejad as the man who can best unite key conservative constituencies -- militant nationalists and Islamic pietists -- traditionalists want to place greater restraints on Ahmadinejad, hoping that he becomes a less divisive figure in Iranian politics.
In recent months, Ahmadinejad has exhibited a penchant for extreme partisanship in the domestic political arena, with his neo-conservative faction showing less and less interest in cooperating with other conservative factions on major policy decisions. Members of the government who have not remained in lock-step with his political agenda have been forced out. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
The leaders of other traditionalist factions fear that a continuation of Ahmadinejad’s intolerant political course could leave the conservative movement divided during an election year, thus increasing the odds that reformists could regain the presidency in 2009.
The clearest indicator of mounting conservative unease about Ahmadinejad was the election of Ali Larijani as the speaker of parliament. Larijani, who formerly served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, is a representative of what some experts in Tehran have dubbed the New Technocrat faction, which is philosophically conservative and pragmatic in its approach to politics. The New Technocrats -- as opposed to the Old Technocrats, who are now mostly allied to the reformists -- generally have a strong connection to the Revolutionary Guards, as do Ahmadinejad and his neo-conservative allies. In addition to Larijani, prominent New Technocrat leaders include the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rezaii, and the current Tehran mayor, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf.
Larijani and Ahmadinejad are believed to despise each other, .............Read More